Not a Potted Plant

Friday a week ago, I’d had an unusually long day with Lain and she was unusually fussy. So when Clancy got home from work, I asked if she could take care of the little lady. She could, and I was off to the supply store just to get out of the house.

Around closing time, a conversation was struck up with one of the cashiers, who was off for the evening. She asked how my daughter was. I’d only then been able to place her as one of the counter girls who had gooed and gahed over the cute little bundle that is our daughter. I told her that Lain was good and that her mother was looking after her while I got a break. We talked a little bit about babies. She mentioned that she is still a little daddy’s girl.

This got me talking about how Clancy and I felt when we didn’t know whether Lain was going to be a boy or a girl. I’d said that though we officially had no preference but a healthy baby, I had leaned slightly towards wanting a boy while Clancy had leaned slightly in the other direction. I come from a family of boys, she comes from a family of girls, it was a matter of familiarity as much as anything else. On the whole, I explained, there were advantages either way. With a boy, there’d be someone to carry on the family name. Since I come from a family of boys, I’d have a better idea what to do with a son. Though boys and girls both play sports, one is conditioned to be more enthusiastic about sports and the other about other things.

On the other hand, I would go on, as with the counter girl herself, while a son is more likely to be a son until he marries, a daughter is more likely to be a daughter for life. Having a girl is, for me, more adventurous. Without thinking about it, I also commented that if Lain turned out to be a lesbian, it’d be easier for her to have children than for a gay son. I say “without thinking about it” because I’m in a red county of a red state. A western state, sure, but even so. Beyond that, despite the cigarette in her hand and the fact that she was 25 and unmarried, she was wearing a BYU jacket and gave off Mormon airs. I don’t typically like to so forcefully bring contentious politics into family chatter.

But… “Right on,” she replied. She grinned and added, “Plus, if she’s a lesbian, her kids might get your last name.”

Which I hadn’t even thought of!

One of the “gotchas” I’ve known critics of homosexuality to pull is “Would you want your child to be gay?” Because, after all, if there’s nothing wrong with being gay, there should be no problem there. Now, the perfectly correct answer to that is “I will love him or her no matter what she is.” But that’s sort of an evasion. As with the Boy vs. Girl, is there a preference? At all? And I could deny that there was, but historically I’ve had a little hope of straightness due to (if it’s a boy) reproduction and discrimination. Ultimately, for the same reason I hope that any son I have is over six feet tall, and any daughter I have is under six feet. I will love the child no matter what, but I do hope certain things for their sake. They’ll have a social deck stacked against them anyway by virtue of being the spawn of Clancy and myself.

One of the most amazing things over the last couple of years is how much that has changed. How much more accepted homosexuality is, and how much anti-gay sentiment is censured. I figured that this would happen, and BYU Girl didn’t surprise me as much as she might have in part because of her age and how young people see it differently. Generational waves, a compelling argument, and I did think this change would happen. But seeing it happen has made for a whole new experience. And I find, the confirmation of it makes me more genuinely less averse to the possibility that Lain, or her future younger siblings, might swing in the other direction. That the two really are tied together, and it’s not just the excuse that the asker of the question of the previous paragraph assumes it to be.

I’m not arguing that it has ceased to be an issue. Or even that it will when Lain comes of age. Being a lesbian would mean that large parts of the country would be infertile ground for her to set down roots. It’s unlikely that a lot of the religions preaching against homosexuality now will completely change their tune on the subject. But there will be a lot of places, even in the south and even in the west, where she would be able to live peaceably. Plenty of places for her own place to be.

And, if she has a son, he will be able to carry on the William Truman name.

Last weekend, my Facebook feed depicted a synchronized outpouring of appreciation for mothers on Mother’s Day.

These stood out though:

Awww.

This is worth inspecting, and not just because it speaks to the increasing use of mobile devices to post to Facebook. The exaggerations in these cartoons parallel how parents praise their children. “You’re *such* a big boy. You can use the potty all by yourself!” The kid might feel good, but everyone knows this is condescension.

But we become blind to the condescension when it reads to “You’re *such* a good mother. You must have superpowers!”

The cartoon drawers and sharers are not trying to condescend any more than the parents of the kid using the potty correctly are. They represent authentic feeling.

It’s just that the feelings are authentically condescending.

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Why aren’t moms in arms over this treatment? There are a few reasons.

1. Mom doesn’t get paid.

Both of these cartoons seek to put the reader in awe of what mothers do. This superficially makes sense since caring for kids is supposed to be difficult.

It is not, however, the only difficult thing. You know who else works hard on difficult things? Investment bankers. And lawyers.

Find me the cartoon featuring investment bankers and a cape (that isn’t a villain’s). You can’t.

Why can’t you? Well, investment bankers don’t do work that really matters to all of us in society and blah… No, that’s not it. Aid relief workers do stuff that matters, and many probably work very hard, but there are no cartoons about caped UNICEF workers.

What’s different about moms is that they don’t get paid.

Cartoons like these and Mothers Day in general is a way for the System to get moms to work for free. That’s why we can’t help but overcompensate in non financial means. The lawyer is happy when his boss grunts “good work on the Stevenson account”. That’s because the lawyer gets a paycheck to buoy his self-esteem.

Mom doesn’t get paid. She can’t go on strike, so if a day’s worth of condescending Facebook posts is what she’s offered, that’s what she’ll take.

2. Mom is insecure.

It’s “mother’s” day, not “the-top-10%-of-mothers day” or even “the-top-99%-of-mothers day”. You qualify by being a mom and breathing.

And any attempts at making being a mom seem intrinsically difficult runs into the problem of the fact that most parents keep most of their kids alive, which makes them by default pretty good. That includes the low-IQ ones who vote for the wrong party. Maybe part of the appeal of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was the promise that one could be distinguished as a tiger mother in a society where all mothers are definitionally assumed to be great. (That explains why it wasn’t titled “Raising Tiger Cubs”.)

—–

The irony of all this is that however genuine the appreciation of mothers is, the cartoonists above are helping to perpetuate a system that leaves Moms with nothing to feel good about the work they do. Moms are paid in participation trophies, and there is no way to win real fulfillment for doing the job well because participation trophies are the only kind being handed out.

The NTSB wants to lower the legal driving blood alcohol content to .05 from .08. This hasn’t proved to be as popular as I would have guessed, though it appears most commenters at OTB approve.

No surprise, but I’m not a huge fan of the idea. But, as a compromise, I’ll sign on to this if we were to start making a legal distinction between driving impaired/intoxicated (say, .05 to .12) and driving while blasted (higher than .12). There’s an argument to be made for pushing more people off the road, but current law relies a great deal on treating milder offenders like the truly dangerous save for prosecutorial discretion.

My drinking days are mostly behind me. I was the inheritor of the leftover liquor content of Leaguefest 2012 and despite there having been maybe 10oz left over, I still haven’t finished it. My weekend trips to the music bars where my regular consumption was seven beers over four hours or so are likewise done. So the Fish-You-I-Done-Mine part of me says “Sure, lower it.” Safer roads and all.

But at least a part of me remains a little exasperated by the contradictions of society. We pose drunk driving as a unique evil, and then proceed to use drunk driving as a metric to prove that other things are just as bad. Drunk driving is uniquely bad, but using a phone while driving is as bad as drunk driving.

By which they mean, it’s as bad as driving with a BAC of .08. If we lower the BAC to .05, then we open the door for more things that are “just as bad as drunk driving.” Fortunately, Ray LaHood’s proposal to disable cell phones while driving didn’t go anywhere, and probably won’t.

And even though sports radio may be just as dangerous as drunk driving, it probably won’t be banned any time soon. Cops in California are pulling people over for eating behind the wheel.

I expect smoking-while-driving to become expressly illegal (the food thing is discretionary enforcement rather than express law)at some point. I stopped smoking and driving years ago, but trust me when I tell you the danger of it does not come close to matching that of eating behind the wheel. But smokers, as always, are an easy target.

It all relates back to our society’s inability to accept risk. I fear that, ultimately, what gets legislated and enforced and what doesn’t will depend on which things we want to do because freedom, and which things others should not be allowed to do because safety.