While picking up happy meals for my girls one day (I know, I know, it’s poison, but it was a special treat), the McDonald's worker asked the gender of the child. Assumingly, the Star Wars toy inside would be more feminine, or whatever logic applies for why the gender of the fry eater would matter.
So, it made me think. It’s certainly not new to suggest that gender influenced messages shift our childrens’ perception of how they are supposed to act. However, how can a mom who would like to think of themselves as “woke” consistently keep up with the messages given by society?
Thirty-some years ago, after winning the sibling battle of who got to sit backwards in the station wagon trunk-seat, I remember making a similar trip to McDonald's. I felt like a queen riding in that coveted spot, drinking my orange chemical drink and just knowing I could rule the world, If I so chose.
Raising girls post #metoo, I wonder how to give them that feeling; how to remind them that their choices are theirs, and that they are are inheriting a fabulous yet imperfect, and unfair world. What will this new landscape look like for them?
Later that weekend, I looked outside my kitchen window to the driveway, where both girls sat attentively watching their dad teaching them how to change brake pads on a 1970 Chevelle. The irony of teaching little girls with shoes on the wrong feet and no real sense of what a brake pad actually was at first made me laugh, and then it made me Kool-Aid smile. It’s likely that they will know entirely more about cars by the time they hit Kindergarten than pretty much any of my high-school ex-boyfriends.
My girls will get all kinds of messages throughout their life, and maybe the greatest message I can give them is that I trust they’ll know which ones to believe.
Comentarios