![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Today, I found a caterpillar in the yard, munching on the kale.
So I brought it in the house to show the girls. Mostly it was freaked out and curled in a ball, but after Evangeline left it started to explore my palm in classic inchworm fashion, making a lowercase n and then stretching out. So I pointed this out to Ana - "Look, it moves in a really funny way".
Ana had more sympathy than I did (I was all for putting it on the windowsill for the birds, I mean, it was EATING the KALE, but I eventually agreed she could bring it out to the weeds in the front of the house instead) and said very carefully "No, Connie, it doesn't. That's just the way caterpillars are supposed to move".
And of course she's right, although that's so word-for-word my views on neurodiversity and related topics that I spent several minutes afterwards wondering if I'd ever explicitly stated this to her. I feel as though I must have, but for the life of me I can't imagine where it's come up except, maybe, in talking about her hair and skin as compared to "Princesses",who of course have long, straight blond hair and the skin that matches. I watched in consternation and dismay the day she went on Starfall to design a story about a girl who looks like "her" and picked the palest skin and lightest, longest, straightest hair she could. I just didn't know how to react! Still, clearly something about the message is sticking, no matter how she's heard it, if she can apply it to caterpillars.
Ana had more sympathy than I did (I was all for putting it on the windowsill for the birds, I mean, it was EATING the KALE, but I eventually agreed she could bring it out to the weeds in the front of the house instead) and said very carefully "No, Connie, it doesn't. That's just the way caterpillars are supposed to move".
And of course she's right, although that's so word-for-word my views on neurodiversity and related topics that I spent several minutes afterwards wondering if I'd ever explicitly stated this to her. I feel as though I must have, but for the life of me I can't imagine where it's come up except, maybe, in talking about her hair and skin as compared to "Princesses",who of course have long, straight blond hair and the skin that matches. I watched in consternation and dismay the day she went on Starfall to design a story about a girl who looks like "her" and picked the palest skin and lightest, longest, straightest hair she could. I just didn't know how to react! Still, clearly something about the message is sticking, no matter how she's heard it, if she can apply it to caterpillars.
no subject
no subject
You do understand the difference, yes?
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
What I say is, don't make an 'issue' of it, or take it as a sign that your girlies are disowning themselves. It's just human nature - and more especially, child nature - to want whatever one doesn't happen to have.
no subject
As if princesses don't.... Take her to Aida.
no subject
That's why I'm so in love with The Apple-Pip Princess. It's a great story besides that, but I can't say that wasn't a big part of why I bought it at nearly full price.
no subject
I'm not sure this is a good answer, but I'd be inclined to say, "No, your hair is prettier than that. Pick the pretty one." and point to the hair more like hers.
Of course, if someone had done that to me at her age, I might have bit them. OTOH, I wasn't picking straight long pale hair as "mine".
no subject
no subject
When I was her age, I reacted poorly (q.v. "biting") to people being "complimentary" when they insisted on evaluating me in terms of values that I repudiated, most especially "prettiness" and "cuteness". I was tolerably OK with "beautiful", but nobody ever says to a small girl child that she is beautiful, and in any event, my attractiveness, as if I were an object existing to please the aesthetic tastes of others around me and affirm their cultural norms of what a female should look like, is not and has never been an acceptable topic of discussion to initiate with me. Not from a construction worker hooting, "HEEEY BAAABEEEE", and not from a matron cooing, "OH HOW CUTE".
Yeah, at 3.5yo I was the world's shortest feminist.
no subject