It made me laugh

This is the best song lyric I've heard in a long time:

"Here's another song about a gender I'll never understand"

-the Wombats, Kill the Director

Day care

Theo has passed several milestones recently: he’s walking (running), survived his first year in tact, and started day care.

The beginning involved all of the usual worries and fears – will he be social enough? will he sleep enough? eat enough? How long will he cry after we leave? etc. Mercifully, it went like clockwork. Kiddo shed a few tears the first time we left him for the whole day, but otherwise he loves it. He is thrilled to be around kids his own age and I see changes in him almost immediately. It's small things like finally holding the sippy cup or bottle by himself. I knew he could do it for quite some time, though he preferred to sit in someone’s lap to take a bottle.

A niggling feeling popped up that was a bit unexpected. I realized that when Theo started day care, he also officially started down the long road of becoming Norwegian. He won’t take my American identity with him to school, which is strange for me to think about. (I was equally unhinged when I learned that, for example, any traces of my green/brown eyes are lost since Theo has blue eyes. There’s a long genetic explanation that I will leave out, but suffice to say Theo carries only the blue-eyed gene and none of my eye color genes.) My identity as an American is ipso facto, but not Theo’s.

It puts a new perspective on the parents of my friends who grew up in another country. I met people whose parents came from Russia, India, Korea, Ireland, Greece, Argentina, etc. As kids, the struggle was always for the immediate action – wanting to eat this food, see this movie, wear these clothes, play with these toys – that may or may not have been culturally appropriate for the parents. Later on, as we became adults, my friends could describe the struggles/regrets/perks of having parent(s) from a culture other than the one they grew up in – we always danced like this at home, I wish my mom/dad would have taught me Korean, I’m glad I learned French growing up, I wish my folks would’ve let me go on dates.

I can’t, nor do I want to, forget the places, people and experiences that made me who I am. For what it's worth, I’ll pass that bit on to him and he'll become exactly whatever he becomes.