Watching my toddler figure out how to language is fascinating. Yesterday we were stumped when he kept insisting there was a “Lego winner” behind his bookshelf - it turned out to be a little Lego trophy cup. Not knowing the word for “trophy”, he’d extrapolated a word for “thing you can win”. And then, just now, he held up his empty milk container and said, “Mummy? It’s not rubbish. It’s allowed to be a bottle.” - meaning, effectively, “I want this. Don’t throw it away.” But to an adult ear, there’s something quite lovely about “it’s allowed to be a bottle,” as if we’re acknowledging that the object is entitled to keep its title even in the absence of the original function.
Another good post to read for those writing small human characters.
My son was about three when he came to me in the middle of the day and said, “Mommy, there’s a knight behind the bush.” I thought he meant a toy knight or something. So I follow him outside and he goes, “Listen. Do you hear it? It’s night behind the bush.” It was a cricket. A cricket was standing in the little patch of shade under the bush, chirping. So, my son saw this dark area with accompanying nighttime sounds and decided, okay, well, that is a night right there. Their brains are incredible.
My little bean knows she’s two, constantly saying proudly ‘I’m two!’ And the other day she saw this very frail old lady who looked one foot in the grave, pulled a face and said ‘oh shiiiit. She’s three.’ I almost screamed.
I live in Korea and have a lot of international friends, and the same is true with language barriers in adults.
*Looking at a bowl of pears* “Can you please pass me the… apple’s friend?”
being gay is a constant battle between “i wish to sit on a window bench with my lover, our legs tangling as we listen to the birds” and “hey let’s go throw rocks at fascists” and i think that’s very sexy of us
if the window’s open and you time it right you can do both
Me: *walks*
My anxious ass: am I doing this right? Are my arms swinging the right amount? Am I walking at a decent speed? How many people are watching me? What if I trip over a pebble and people start laughing?
The worst thing my ex-boyfriend ever did to me wasn’t the stalking, or the violent threats, or any of the times he burned me.
It was the lists.
My ex kept a notebook where he used to write careful lists of girls we knew - my friends, his friends, random classmates and girls from school. And me. He used to sit quietly at a desk in spare period and painstakingly rank us from top to bottom, on every attribute he could think of. Who was the smartest. Who was the prettiest. Who was the kindest. Who had the best voice, the best body, the best hair. When a new girl came into our social circles, he would sit down and start from scratch, making his lists all over again.
And when he was done, he would show me the lists. And except for his list on “kindness”, I was always near the bottom.
I was getting high grades in all my advanced classes, and I wanted to go to university away from home, away from him. He didn’t like that idea at all. So he made a list of all the smartest girls, and put me near the bottom, beneath girls who were struggling to pass remedial classes and wouldn’t finish high school. “Your grades just mean that you can memorize, they don’t actually mean you’re smart,” he explained, “These other girls just know a lot more about life than you do.”
I was always on the heavier side, and I felt self-conscious about being a size 12 in what I perceived as a world of size 2s and 4s. This, he liked very much. I was always dead last on his list of pretty girls, or of girls with the best bodies. “It’s not your fault,” he would say, as if to reassure me. “It’s just that guys like skinny girls. That’s just how we are.”
I’m an accomplished guitar player now, but back then I was still starting out, and I was embarrassed about being the only girl in guitar classes filled with more experienced players. He didn’t like that I had hobbies outside of him, much less hobbies dominated by men, and I went down to the bottom of his list of talented girls, beneath girls who sung like crows and girls who never made any attempt at musicianship at all. “You can’t play very many songs,” he would say. He’d never picked up an instrument in his life. “You really should be better at this for how long you’ve been playing, so you lost points.”
And on and on the lists went.
I think I would have been able to tell him to get lost if he’d presented his lists as an insult, but he showed them to me as a twisted compliment. “Look,” he’d say, pointing to names that were above me on the lists. “I probably could have had a shot with her, or her, or her. But I love you instead. You don’t have to be smart or pretty or talented, I love you just for who you are.” To my naive, 17-year-old ears, it sounded like a compliment, like something straight out of a Nicholas Sparks novel. But it wasn’t. And it’s taken me a long time to realize this, but he never really meant it to be.
When I left him and moved across the country, my fears of his threats and violence and obsessive stalking faded with each mile I put between us, but the lists seemed to board the airplane with me and follow me to my destination. For years, I had been shown conclusively all the ways that I didn’t stack up, and it was hard for me to stop viewing the world as a competition that I was desperately losing. I didn’t think I was worthy of romantic attention. I saw the girls around me as people to compare myself to, not people to befriend. I looked at all the new people I’d met, and I saw lists and rankings and standings, with myself always near last place. For years, I felt like I owed people gratitude just for being in my presence.
We measure a lot of abuse by physical violence, but all the physical wounds my ex gave me healed much faster than the wounds he ripped into my self-esteem. The burn scars he gave me have faded, but eight years later, I’m still trying to stomp down the instinct to see other women as people I will never measure up to. Psychological abuse can be creative, and the effects can take years to recognize, let alone overcome. It’s real abuse. And it matters.
do men have resting bitch faces as well or do they not have negative characteristics ascribed to them for putting on a neutral rather than a deliriously happy facial expression
Yes, Black men in majority white spaces do. If I don’t smile every single second of the day my coworkers become in intimidated and start asking me what’s wrong, telling me to smile, make jokes about how I’m trying to be a thug/act hard, why am I angry, etc. And it’s not just white men at my job God FORBID I my large Black ass makes a white girl feel threaten because I’m sitting down with a neutral expression.
I’m not trying to take this post away from women and make it about Black men but I want to point out that wether it’s patriarchy or white supremacy; those who feel as if they have power over you HATE to see you not smile. They are so used to people like you smiling to gain their approval that when you don’t there’s a cognitive dissonance that makes them extremely uncomfortable.
That’s why “angry Black women” is a thing. They have to put on a smile for everyone (yes even feminist white women) or we all get uncomfortable.
This is such an amazing response.
www-wlw