David Minerva Clover

I stand at the ready to remind these adults what ought to be common sense: mind your own plate. Stop policing how kids eat!

People might raise their eyebrows when they hear me say “snowperson” for the first time. But it makes perfect sense. A man is just a kind of person.

Something had clicked in my head. Suddenly I didn't give a shit when life began or whether or not a fetus counts as a “baby.” I was overwhelmed by the new-found knowledge that pregnancy is unfairly invasive in every single way.

If you believe in bodily autonomy and consent, folks should get to consent (or not) to the process of gestation. Full stop. No caveats.

My kid, who turned three the day after Mary the duckling died, wasn’t old enough to get any of it. Yet talking to toddlers about death is part of life.

Straight people, it isn’t that you aren’t awesome; so many of you are! It’s just that, while you enjoy the numerous advantages that your straight privilege allows you, I’d like to celebrate the little things that make being queer totally rad.

I’m not scared on the street very often, but y’all, this time I was scared. But if there’s one thing I know, it is that you do not answer these guys, because that only makes it worse. So I held my breath and hoped that if I didn’t engage, he’d drive off eventually. I felt for my cell phone in my pocket, wondering how quickly I could get ahold of someone if I needed to.

There’s just no getting around it, and other than one half-hour spell where he sat with a good friend of ours while both of his moms took a swim, one of us had to be with him the entire weekend. And let’s be honest, because I’m “boob mom” and he was nursing even more than normal, it could never really be divided 50/50. All of that was fine, but it was often just fine, and there’s just no denying that it was a very different trip than it would have been without a kid.

Faced by the extreme pressure to conform to impossible beauty ideals, I followed my instincts (and my budding feminism) and rejected them wholesale. I wasn’t going to play like that; I wasn’t going to let my gender require that I wear makeup or perform a certain way.

I mess up and do things very differently than I want to sometimes. When that happens, I have one rule for myself: I stop and apologize to my kid.

Yes, we should be criticizing these straight, cisgender dads. We’ve been far too easy on them for too long. It’s straight out of the patriarchy playbook.