#GamerGate Manifesto Translated into English

Women used to strap their babies on and go to work dragging the coal out of the mines back in the day. Not healthy for either of them. But the problem wasn’t the attachment.

grumpyoldnurse – that better be fair trade moonlight and shade-grown mother’s love, or else your kids are going to grow up with poor self-actualization skills and end up at Central University.

On a more serious note, I can’t stand the alpha mom thing either. My pinterest feed is full of utterly preposterous crafts – “Stuck inside with toddlers on a rainy day? Make a marble run out of toilet paper tubes glued to cardboard!” Great, except by the time I round up 25 toilet paper tubes, paint them, apply glitter, and glue them to cardboard in an interesting arrangement that allows a marble to roll all the way through, it’s no longer raining and the toddlers have graduated from middle school.

Another time, lured by a blog full of enticing photos, I tried making homemade finger paint. The project consisted of an hour of stirring all-natural ingredients in a pot, five minutes of gleeful chaos, then an hour and a half of cleanup (including full-body baths and scrubbing the walls, the floor, and the cat). Who has the time for that? Why is homemade more virtuous than storebought? Why is perfection and sacrifice being demanded of women, but not of men?

PolicyofMadness had some great points. I think, too, a lot of alpha mom anxiety has to do with class insecurity and growing economic inequality. As the 1% pull farther and farther ahead, there’s more pressure on parents to produce superachieving kids who can keep up. With the middle class becoming extinct, the alternative is a lifetime of wage slavery at Taco Bell. There’s a huge industry devoted to persuading parents that with just the right inputs, the right Baby Einstein tapes and probiotic diet and Ferberization, the output will be a perfect kid capable of Olympian achievements. It’s really hard not to get caught up in the madness.

Even more than alpha moms, I can’t stand “mama bears”. All the time, I see moms talking smack on Facebook about retail clerks or waitresses who weren’t sufficiently adoring of little Czneauphlaque. They say stuff like “I’LL CUT YOU BITCH HOW DARE YOU SPEAK LIKE THAT TO MY KID!” when all that happened was someone asked their child politely to please get off their foot. If there weren’t kids involved, these moms would sound murderously psychotic, but because they’re “doing it for their children”, they get a free pass. Basically, “mama bear” is code for “I get to be rude and threaten other people with violence, and feel sanctimonious about it!”

I mean, come on. It’s a given that mamas love their kids and would walk through fire for them. Being willing to go the extra mile and stab someone does not mean you love your kid more than everybody else.

@Kim: that’s great there was a happy ending, but I feel sorry for him never having a childhood, where he was loved.

@kitteh: that looks nice. I would have assumed it was fair isle if you hadn’t mentioned the yarn dye effect. I have sock yarn that does that, and it certainly doesn’t look as real as yours.

@Buttercup:

There’s a huge industry devoted to persuading parents that with just the right inputs, the right Baby Einstein tapes and probiotic diet and Ferberization…

I misread the last word as Furbyisation initially. The world needs more furbies!

This must be the day for misread brainfarts. I read probiotic diet as patriotic diet!

I’m okay knitting when Fribs is on my lap, ‘cos she’s quite happy to have the knitting or yarn on her. It’s getting her to stay put on the lap that’s the tricky bit, because when I sit down to knit, she swarms up so she’s lying on top of my boobs with her head tucked under my chin. This means I have to drop the knitting and support her back legs.

Mr Studmuffin is obviously versed in the feline arts of selective language skills, selective deafness, and inconveniencing humans at every opportunity.

There are a million ways to rear children well and which method is right has more to do with who the parent is and what their kid’s like than anything else.

QFT!!!

Yeah, having a plan that cannot be changed in place for how your kid will be raised sounds like a recipe for disaster, because you may end up with a kid whose needs the plan doesn’t address at all.

Oooh, boy howdy! I am living that! I think I may go into improv, because I do it every damned day!

grumpyoldnurse – that better be fair trade moonlight and shade-grown mother’s love, or else your kids are going to grow up with poor self-actualization skills and end up at Central University.

Oh, no! I is fail! ::hangs head in shame:: OTOH, neither of my parents graduated high school, so I’m already a super over acheiver!! My kids should do better than me, quite easily.

I mean, come on. It’s a given that mamas love their kids and would walk through fire for them. Being willing to go the extra mile and stab someone does not mean you love your kid more than everybody else.

What it does mean, IMHO, is that mama bear is raising a future bully, just like her.

@ kittehserf – That’s very pretty! I wish I was crafty like you (but not enough to actually learn to do it – anything I’ve ever tried to knit looks like a spider was on hallucinogens and got lost in its own web!).

Perhaps a cloth or blanket of some sort over Mr Studmuffin to protect him from the evils of yarn.

Maybe not – my granny tried to teach me to knit socks. Somehow, I wound up knitting them inside out. I don’t think even pretentious yuppies could be tricked into buying my wares!

You have seen Etsy, right?

Bwahahahahaha!

And that’s why Regretsy exists.

LOL!!!

Regretsy doesn’t exist anymore though.