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Why I'm Not a Joiner
New York Magazine this week runs a little squib of a piece that means to illustrate how insane certain types of New York City parents are. Certainly the proffered example would yield little argument. A Brooklyn community has an email forum in which parents typically trade the sort of obvious information that people with children toss around, but recently one Simple Soul made the critical error of posting one of those Good Samaritan notices that could only be punished. The person's post was called "Found: boy's hat" and went on to describe that a hat had been found, and I presume detailed how the hat's owner's parents could retrieve it.
The post sparked a fabulous protest. People felt it was not only unfair but also hurtful to place some sort of gender description on a hat. Obviously, a child of any or all genders could wear the hat. Others felt obliged to project a kind of blind narcissism onto the hat issue feeling defensive about how their own children were mistaken for boys because of their lack of hair and this sort of email is just another example of how these painful mistakes get made (that particular brand of sniveling bruisedness always makes me angry- my toddler occasionally gets mistaken for a girl and the only person who seems to mind is the stranger who I correct). Some folks seem to have become impatient with the aggressive language policing and a few retained their senses of humor.
Now if I had been the person who unwittingly started that ball rolling, I think I would have written: "Oh forget it, there was no hat, and the dog ate it anyway."
Of late I have been struggling a bit with the fact that I hate community. My modus operandi has always been to enjoy the people I like and waste as little time as possible on the ones who make me angry and impatient. But one of my most savage fears about having a child is that I am too misanthropic to be a good parent, that my skepticism and lack of interest in team activities will somehow hurt my child. I'm a very good friend and neighbor, but Community, of the sort that this Park Slope email club exemplifies makes my skin crawl: nosy judgmental people, humorlessness, obscure rules and codes of behavior (in this case gender-neutral preferred language) and an inability to look beyond them to address the matter at hand (someone's hat is lost). I hate this crap and it crops up everywhere making even the simplest questions impossible and boring and contentious.
I hope that as my kid gets older and grows more and more social, I am able to negotiate these groups, because maternity hasn't mellowed me, and my time is shorter than ever.
And the secondary tragedy (the first being that there are thousands of children in Brooklyn whose parents have no sense of humor at all) is that no one claimed the hat. There is something very sad about spotting a discarded hat in the street. Or a sock. Even now there is a tiny white (now surely once-white) sock lying in a gutter somewhere in Chinatown where my kid flung it last night in a fit of despair that there were no more dumplings.
posted by Elise at 9:06 AM
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Elise -
Thank you for helping me figure out exactly why I am a "new moms group" delinquent.
The idea of gearing up the kid and myself for awkward chatting while squished up in the tea lounge exhausts me before I can get out the door. But once I've decided not to go, I'm consumed by the fear that ditching the group means I'm cutting Will out of the playdate cartel and he'll enter toddlerhood as an outcast. Of course, he's only 12 weeks old and has just made friends with his hands so I might be getting a little ahead of myself.
4/11/2006 12:33 PM
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