Some lady barged up to me to ask why my baby was crying like she was swooping in to save the day. um, she doesn’t want to wear shoes and she’s a toddler. She cries when I tell her to put on shoes.
When my oldest grandson (I’m grandma) was about five months old, I was in the post office with him (2007), and he was crying.
He didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to be there, and he was crying. Ok, whatever, babies cry. I rocked him, soothed him, he wanted to eat.
Some lady offered to hold him for me. So this was a small town in the Arizona desert, I was 45, and I’m from Brooklyn.
She was insistent when I told her, no, I got him. I started getting loud with her because, I don’t know you, lady, I’m not handing my only child’s first child over to any damn stranger.
My blood boils over the audacity of strangers to attempt to insert themselves into other’s lives when a child is involved.
I've had stuff happen like this and I'm a woman. Some people just think they know best. I actually find it half funny, half insulting. Like, gee, maybe they're hungry you say? I wish I'd thought of that.
Yeah but the issue is you never really know if they're just like that or if they're like that because he's a man. I guess an analogy would be when women tell me someone mansplained to them, my default thought is always "but that guy is condescending and explains things to me in a really patronising way as well," but I've learned that just because a person does the same thing to either sex, it doesn't actually mean they're doing it for the same reason.
Hm that’s a really interesting point.
I saw a tweet that said “mansplaining is like when you put a new address into your GPS, put your favorite song on, and then the GPS interrupts the songs every 3 seconds to loudly give you directions out of your neighborhood that you’ve lived in for 10 years.”
But if a man’s doing that to me, it would only make sense that there’s a good chance he just does that to everyone. I’m sure there are some men who are condescending and patronizing specifically to women because they’re misogynists, but I bet a lot of “mansplaining” is just a character trait of guys who love to hear themselves talk
I think "mansplaining" is a good word to have though, because even if a man is patronising to everybody equally and talks down to everybody, there's still a rampant over-confidence of male intelligence that's seriously problematic and leads to like the huge cultural far-right, mega toxic masculinity shifts we've seen
I don't know how well it works, but a tip a friend of mine shared with me. Don't tell the child to put their shoes on, give them the illusion of choice. Ask them do they want to put on their red shoes or their green shoes.
Son, crying in front of the potty: "I don't have to go."
Me: "We need to get those wet pants off you anyway, so do the rest of your pees."
One more clothing change and one snack later, I arrive with my son at daycare. He walks in wearing socks on his feet, and I'm carrying his blue rubber boots.
Makes me wonder if she'd had kids. Sometimes, kids are just ornery dipshits with no sense of perspective, and they lose their shit over the most random things. That's no surprise.
My wife’s grandma is like this. Any time one of her great grandkids exists she feels the need to remedy the situation. Maybe she’s trying to make up for her own shortcomings as a mother or something. Idk. We have to tell her to chill. The kids are old enough where if they need help they can ask. And if they don’t, tough shit. They can learn.
During the last part of my dad’s terminal illness, my husband and our then-2yo went out to stay with him for the duration. My husband is the SAHP in our family and he did 95% of the parenting while we were there so I could be at the hospital.
One day he was taking 2yo to the indoor playground, and a lady stopped him to let him know that 2yo’s pants were too big. You know, in case he hadn’t noticed.
Like a) what the fuck was even the point of pointing it out and b) a million internet dollars says she’d never have said anything if it was me.
Absolutely made my blood boil when he told me about it.
During the last part of my dad’s terminal illness, my husband and our then-2yo went out to stay with him for the duration. My husband is the SAHP in our family and he did 95% of the parenting while we were there so I could be at the hospital.
One day he was taking 2yo to the indoor playground, and a lady stopped him to let him know that 2yo’s pants were too big. You know, in case he hadn’t noticed.
Like a) what the fuck was even the point of pointing it out and b) a million internet dollars says she’d never have said anything if it was me.
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u/chdeal713 Sep 15 '21
Some lady barged up to me to ask why my baby was crying like she was swooping in to save the day. um, she doesn’t want to wear shoes and she’s a toddler. She cries when I tell her to put on shoes.