No one’s a wholly pink butterfly or a blue car. We are all, to varying degrees, purple spaceship onesies
It was my twin boys’ birthday recently, and beforehand I was struck with a by-now-familiar anxiety. No, not the one about how the sands of time pass through the hourglass a thousand times quicker once you have kids due to a combination of daily monotony and mind-melting busyness, and how all my ambitions and dreams will soon be sucked down the plughole of life, and next time I look in the mirror, my own grandmother will be looking back at me. But thanks for asking. Rather, I had to ask how macho, exactly, are my two-year-olds?This started when I went shopping for presents and all the toys on the “recommended for boys” shelf were so macho, they verged on camp. Toolkits, fireman hats, plastic weapons: was I shopping for my toddlers or the Village People? But I’d been in this situation before. One day, when the babies were three months old, I managed somehow to leave the house and go to a shop to stock up on onesies. There, I had the firmly binary choice of either pink playsuits covered in butterfly patterns or blue ones bedecked with images of cars. This made me wonder two things: first, why are cars masculine, given that they all have bonnets? Second, would my boys really object to wearing onesies with butterflies? They didn’t seem to mind wearing ones covered in their own bodily waste. Or was that in itself an expression of their machoness?
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