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back to my december prompts
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jenna_thorne: The House of Boys – Thoughts on being a woman with sons.
The short version? I love it until I don’t.
I mean, partially it’s that I’ve never been a particularly girly girl. I wasn’t exactly a tomboy (that implies much more athleticism and love of the outdoors than I had) but I didn’t get into the stuff that’s deemed ‘feminine’ by our particular culture. And I’ve also really been around boys/men disproportionately all my life. My undergrad degree is in electrical engineering, which, yeah, if women are under-represented in technical fields now, I invite you to contemplate the ratios in the 80s.
It also helps that I truly always have been into comic books and sci fi, and am conversant enough in several sports for all of that to not be totally boring dinner table talk.
Though I have to say that Oldest was home with his girlfriend today and we (she and I) got into this in-depth discussion of ballet, which was glorious and something I usually don’t get to indulge in while running kids around to the dentist and Costco and Target.
I think the hardest part is how that cultural expectation of the wife being super-supportive of her man gets amplified with the boy children, too. I’m definitely talking external expectations, not from the guys in my actual house. I do live in the South and while we’re in the big city, the rest of D’s family definitely isn’t and I think they’re a little taken aback when I don’t go to watch the games he coaches or anything. That, plus the idea that boys should grow apart from their mother—it’s okay for girls to be ‘best friends’ with their mothers, but if that happens with boys, they’re ‘Mama’s boys’, aka a fate worse than death. I’m ‘ruining’ them if I want to talk to them more than once a week. Ugh. Have I mentioned how much I hate cultural expectations?
I do think one of my proudest moments as a geek woman was when they independently turned to me and said, ‘Seriously? Padme died from a broken heart? Way to trash that character, George.’ You have to take your teachable moments wherever you find them, right? (Also, at some point #2Son linked me to this bit of fan theory which I have now accepted as canon and lalala, can’t hearrrr your counter-arguments.)
So I do love it most of the time, but I really fight hard against how things are 'supposed' to be, which is really tiresome but worth it.
jenna_thorne: The House of Boys – Thoughts on being a woman with sons.The short version? I love it until I don’t.
I mean, partially it’s that I’ve never been a particularly girly girl. I wasn’t exactly a tomboy (that implies much more athleticism and love of the outdoors than I had) but I didn’t get into the stuff that’s deemed ‘feminine’ by our particular culture. And I’ve also really been around boys/men disproportionately all my life. My undergrad degree is in electrical engineering, which, yeah, if women are under-represented in technical fields now, I invite you to contemplate the ratios in the 80s.
It also helps that I truly always have been into comic books and sci fi, and am conversant enough in several sports for all of that to not be totally boring dinner table talk.
Though I have to say that Oldest was home with his girlfriend today and we (she and I) got into this in-depth discussion of ballet, which was glorious and something I usually don’t get to indulge in while running kids around to the dentist and Costco and Target.
I think the hardest part is how that cultural expectation of the wife being super-supportive of her man gets amplified with the boy children, too. I’m definitely talking external expectations, not from the guys in my actual house. I do live in the South and while we’re in the big city, the rest of D’s family definitely isn’t and I think they’re a little taken aback when I don’t go to watch the games he coaches or anything. That, plus the idea that boys should grow apart from their mother—it’s okay for girls to be ‘best friends’ with their mothers, but if that happens with boys, they’re ‘Mama’s boys’, aka a fate worse than death. I’m ‘ruining’ them if I want to talk to them more than once a week. Ugh. Have I mentioned how much I hate cultural expectations?
I do think one of my proudest moments as a geek woman was when they independently turned to me and said, ‘Seriously? Padme died from a broken heart? Way to trash that character, George.’ You have to take your teachable moments wherever you find them, right? (Also, at some point #2Son linked me to this bit of fan theory which I have now accepted as canon and lalala, can’t hearrrr your counter-arguments.)
So I do love it most of the time, but I really fight hard against how things are 'supposed' to be, which is really tiresome but worth it.
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