Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of January 6, 2019
You don’t need balloons or cupcakes to be excited about learning your baby’s sex. And yes, it’s a sex. It’s never gender. Gender is a social construct, and for even the most pro-life pro-lifers out there, an unborn child/fetus/uterine turd cannot, by the laws of science, be socialized. Talk to it, play music for it, fine. You can’t make it like pink or blue in the womb. If you need to be surprised about your baby’s sex, listen to what your OB or midwife tells you during pregnancy, or at the time of birth. Getting all geared up over the sex of a child is exactly why we have sexism. So, please, for the sake of our future, knock it the fuck off.
I think my dad had a hard time with retirement. In the five months since stepping away he’d grown increasingly interested in me. I couldn’t tell if it was out of boredom or guilt for not having been more involved in my life up to that point. And though I never felt abandoned by him, it was nice—albeit strange—to get to spend some time with him.