Three quick clicks

I recommend:

Tots in Genderland: a pinterest board run by a few of my friends collecting photos of young children breaking and upholding gender norms.

Feminist graffiti art in Egypt at Muslima.

A fascinating discussion between Wesley Morris and Rembert Browne at Grantland on rolling with racism. The conversation includes everything from being ‘rescued’ by well-meaning white people to Baz Lurhman’s The Great Gatsby.

 

Sticks

My friend has banned toy weapons for her sons. I kind of haven’t but I still feel uneasy about it.

The other evening we are at the beach and my son finds a stick shaped exactly like a bow and her son finds a stick shaped exactly like a rifle… and that’s how that weapon ban is going.

Difficult babies turn into heavenly eight year olds

Lauca was a really difficult baby.

Really

fucking

difficult,

like

that

first

year

of

motherhood

about

killed

me.

But fast forward on oooh, say seven years in the future.. that difficult baby turns eight years old and you are dragging your tired self home from work one evening and you ring ahead to ask if you need to stop at the shops to buy something to cook everyone for dinner:

Lauca: “No, I have already cooked dinner”.

Me: “What on earth did you cook?”

Lauca: “Pie”.

Me: “What did you put in it?”

Lauca: “Whatever I could find in the kitchen”.

When I walked in the door that evening I found her lying on my bed reading a novel while the pie finished baking. So wonderful. And then on the weekend she woke me up with breakfast in bed. She had found a recipe for Greek yoghurt pancakes in her cookbook. Finally, that evening she asked me to show her how to cook a roast. My god.

Exactly like this

You must. Watch this.

If you take the words of a 2-year-old and put them in the mouth of a grown man, suddenly the malevolence and intimidation really shine through.

Matthew Clarke has launched a new series called “Convos With My 2-Year-Old” where he takes actual conversations he’s had with his daughter and reenacts them with an adult man standing in for her. The result is hilariously creepy. Watch episode one above.

I think this is why when you have very small children it is difficult to be excited about art .. because you feel like you now live in art. And it’s exhausting.

Isabella Rossellini on maternal instinct

Yeah.

You can’t afford to lose your temper when you’re poor

A few things about the extraordinary vulnerability of being a parent who is poor:

• You can’t afford to lose your temper. (You could lose everything).
• You can’t afford to unwind by sharing your problems with someone.
• You can’t afford to be tired and stressed and making less than perfect decisions.
• You can’t afford to cobble together solutions; for your own protection cobbled together solutions are illegal.
• You can’t afford to take time off work to deal with your kid, who is now stressed and tired and making not so great decisions, too.
• You can’t afford to pay fines, even ‘reasonable’ ones – so you end up being imprisoned.

No prizes for guessing the race of this mother who is now in jail in New Jersey.

 

Electronic parenting

Photo credit: Aboriginal performers on Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu’s Facebook website.