Cross

I love the word “cross.” Not the object, but the feeling. As in, “I’m feeling cross today.” Feeling cross implies that your brows are knit and that you, while not looking for a fight, will happily get in one if one should cross my… I mean your path.

I’m feeling cross today, mostly because I have a doctor’s appointment on Thursday and managed to lose my insurance card but BCBS’s website is down, so I can’t print out something to take with me. Even though I will be able to do so long before Thursday. It just set a tone for the day. Because it took twenty minutes to navigate the website and then the phone tree to finally get to someone who could help me. Ugh.

Also, I feel like I write the same story over and over again.

Which ugh.

Also, this morning I read some bullshit about how women just naturally love their children more than men do and it irks me. Not just because “naturally” is such a bullshit word, but because there are two things hidden in it.

One is the idea that if a man doesn’t show his love for his children exactly how a woman would, she then feels free to diagnose him as not having the same strong feelings for their children. No, actually, all we can tell is not that you love the kids more, but that you have this weird expectation that love and concern must look just like what you do in order to count.

The other is this idea that there’s always been mothers and children in one pile and men out in the world in a separate pile and men were just never a part of the household the same way women were, so there’s something more tragic–if necessary–about women’s lives changing so that we have to work outside the home and can’t be with our kids. But having the majority of men working outside the home is less than 150 years old. And even when men had careers that kept them away from home for long periods of time–like say fishing or whaling–they often brought a kid or two in order to teach them the trade.

I mean, my god, what the fuck do people think this ongoing nostalgia for rural life is rooted in? It’s not that the country is that great in reality–we all do drugs and get pregnant and cheat welfare and beat our kids and carry on like life is short, brutal, and stupid. But farming used to involve the whole family. Fathers spent a tremendous amount of time with their children because they all worked together to have enough to eat and to sell.

I mean, hell yes, being a mom is important. But it’s weird how often it gets framed as a matter of men just naturally not really being that into being parents.