David Minerva Clover

No, I’m not a heartless evil mother who never wants her child to have any fun. But he will not be going. Not for a school field trip. Not with grandma. Not for a playdate with a friend. My child is not going to the zoo. Full stop. End of discussion.

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.

I don’t want to deprive my child of these magical Halloween memories, I just also want to light candles and talk about our ancestors.

Babies, while awesome in so many wonderful ways, do not give a single shit if you really need another hour of sleep. If the baby is up, you’re up. So we were up.

One of the most insidious things that patriarchy does is the complete and utter devaluation of anything that is considered “women’s work.” Not only does patriarchy limit what women (and all trans and nonbinary folk) can do in the world, it also takes what we do manage to do and tells us it isn’t worth anything.

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.