Not only does this help me with my inner woman, it also helps me with my inner geek. This post at a crafters’ forum features a cross-stitch sampler anyone can make that includes a bit of modernity that actually can come in handy: displaying your home wireless network’s SSID and WEP encryption key. Now your houseguests who arrive with their laptops will feel right at home logging onto your network. This is actually useful enough that I would consider suggesting it to some of my LOL’s as a way to help them keep this information at hand. Just one carp, dearie: everybody should be using WPA2 instad of WEP for their encryption.
Tina Fey’s new book, Bossypants, is out and getting good reviews. Blogger Melody Godfred took a few minutes to transcribe part of the book, “A Mother’s Prayer For Her Child”, which speaks to the existential dread felt by mothers (and fathers) about their daughters’ futures:
May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.
While we’re talking books, Salon’s Laura Miller reviewed a new book by author Wendy McClure called “The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of ‘Little House on the Prairie’”. McClure set out to “let her calico sunbonnet freak flag fly” by visiting some of the real-life places where Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family lived. As you know, we hold Laura close to our hearts in this home, so I can empathize with her fandom, even if I was not a sunbonnet-wearing little girl in the 1970s. The book sounds like fun for anyone who is a “Little House” aficionado.
This video of comedian Julia Sweeney telling the tale of finding herself unexpectedly having to explain sex to her eight-year-old daughter made the rounds online a couple of weeks ago. It’s longish (about 10 minutes), but sweet and funny and exactly as uncomfortable as one might expect:
This is a conversation that won’t have to happen this way for us, because Bridget and I have always been pretty straight with Charlotte about the anatomical elements of her own body. She’s known about her own uterus and eggs and stuff like that for a long time. She’s also had at least a vague idea of “sex” (in the sense of “this is how two people make a baby”) for several years, though without some of the embellishments. And a steady diet of tween TV has given her enough of the boyfriend-girlfriend story. Now that the three of us stand on the cliff’s edge of beginning puberty, there will be the need to expand the conversation a little, but it shouldn’t ever have to play out like Julia Sweeney and the frogs.
Even though I like to think of myself as being far less unwilling to engage with aspects of femininity than most of the men I know, the hard reality for me is that this next phase of Charlotte’s growing up involves a cleaving between us as father and daughter. I can sympathize but I don’t have any real insight or perspective into the details of becoming a woman. It is simply part of her life I cannot share. I very sincerely wish that the trust and openness we’ve always had about everything else will help to minimize the separation, but it will always be there. The Tina Fey poem wishes for “a rough patch between twelve and seventeen” for a daughter to find that path deliberately but slowly, instead of the torment of teenager-hood; I can’t even begin to guess at the depth of the angst that those years might deliver upon a girl child, I can only start trying to find a way to watch from a distance.
