By Jennifer Savage
Last week an audio clip was circulating the interwebs of a North Carolina Baptist preacher who advocated giving gender non-conforming children “a good punch.” Pastor Sean Harris of Fayetteville tells dads of their four-year old sons who may be wearing dresses for fun “…the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up.” He basically says that anyone who doesn’t toe the line of gender stereotypes as an adult is “acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed,” evidently at the violent hand of their parents.
I purposely didn’t listen it to his tirade at first. I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Baptist churches in North Carolina and I had a feeling I’d heard it all before. I chalked it up to another zealot spewing hate who didn’t deserve my time so I passed over the story. Then as I kept seeing it on blogs I read, my Facebook and Twitter feeds and the Huffington Post Queer Voices, to which I subscribe. By the end of the day I’d caught a few snippets of the transcript like this one:
“And when your daughter starts acting Butch you reign her in. And you say, ‘Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.”
That’s when the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Hey Buddy, I thought, that’s my kid you’re talking about.
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Tags: act, butch, daughter, fantasy, gender creative, gender non-conforming, girl, hate, identity, internet, life, love, mama, Mamalode, missoula, Montana, Mothering, north carolina, Parenting, savagemama, society, strong, tolerance
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Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
by Heather Best
He sings ridiculously sappy and “twangy” country songs to me and thinks it’s romantic. And it is, because he SINGS TO ME.
He wants me to go ice fishing and snowmobiling and camping and do all manner of manly activities with him that I generally couldn’t care less about—which is amazing because that means he WANTS ME AROUND.
When we’re sitting on the couch, or I’m cooking dinner, or I’m trying to fall asleep after a long day, he is constantly “up in my stuff,” and won’t leave me alone. How lucky am I that he GIVES ME HIS ATTENTION?
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Tags: attention, baby, camping, chores, country, daughter, hot air balloon, ice fishing, in common, jokes, life, light, love, mama, Mamalode, man, missoula, Montana, romantic, snowmobiling, song, want, work
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Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
By Elizabeth Jacobsen
I thought I would cry when she was handed to me—but all I could do was stare at her. I know you, I thought. It’s always been you. I’ve known you all along. I remember the other babies crying, but not her. She just stared back at me, and showed me how strong her tiny legs were. She smelled like a patchouli candle and peach perfume. She smiled at me as she used her two teeth to chew the blisters on her top lip. She was so tiny underneath three layers of clothes, but she wanted to show me she could stand with my help. When I laid her on the bus seat to put a diaper on her, she let me know her displeasure and kicked with all her might. But once held up and tight against me, the sights and sounds from out the window calmed her. She already knew to look back at me for encouragement. I talked with her about the trees, the birds and the beautiful women gazing in the window at us. She held onto my finger and wouldn’t let go.
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Tags: always, baby, cry, daughter, hold, learn, mama, Mamalode, missoula, Montana, newborn, Parenting, sleep, smile, tiny, toy
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Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
By Devon Barta
Two things occurred to me today on an early spring walk with my children. One, my boys walk very, very slowly. And, two, this is a really, really good thing.
If it weren’t for their snail-like pace, I would have missed them marveling at the logging truck barreling down Main Avenue. Or their amazement at the stunning spider web they spotted in the tree on Ninth Street. Instead, I would have been so focused on pushing their sister’s stroller up the hill—head down between my shoulders, huffing and puffing, barking orders to them in-between breaths while ticking off the to-do list in my head—that all of their excitement and wonder would have passed me by.
I wince a bit now as I think back on all of the walks we’ve taken so far this spring, and the only thing I can remember is saying, “Hustle.” Or “Let’s move.” Or, oddly enough, “Walk seriously.”
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Tags: boys, change, children, Kids, life, mama, Mamalode, missoula, mom, Montana, motherhood, Mothering, perspective, season, son, Spring, to-do list, walk, walks
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Monday, April 30th, 2012
By Laura Parvey-Connors
I am a geek. I am a mom. I am a mom geek. The geek title precedes the mom title by decades.
I have vivid memories of the big box at Christmas that housed our first family computer in the late ’80s – a 13” color monitor, 20MB of memory, a dot matrix printer and a big box of printer paper with the holes on the side. I spent hours playing games off of floppy discs like Oregon Trail and Double Dare. Now I spent most of my days plugged into my MacBook and iPhone.
At the first signs of labor last summer, I downloaded a contraction timer on my phone. Read the rest of this story »
Tags: app, Apple, Birth, christmas, computer, contraction, Double Dare, Family, floppy discs, games, geek, hug, mac, mama, Mamalode, midwife, missoula, moments, Montana, Oregon Trail, pain, technology, time, unplugged, wife
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Friday, April 27th, 2012
Last week an audio clip was circulating the interwebs of a North Carolina Baptist preacher who advocated giving gender non-conforming children “a good punch.” Pastor Sean Harris of Fayetteville tells dads of their four-year old sons who may be wearing dresses for fun “…the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up.” He basically says that anyone who doesn’t toe the line of gender stereotypes as an adult is “acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed,” evidently at the violent hand of their parents.
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