Expecting Birdie

2024-06-26

Dear reader,

“Hands off my daughter,” I yell through the dark. I rest my hand on my weapon, hoping the creep making a move on my teenage daughter gets the message.

He does. “I’m sorry, Mister Roberts. This is the last you’ll ever see of me.”

“Thanks, Dad,” my daughter says, running inside our house. “You and Mom were right about him. I’m going to listen to you from now on.”

Cut!

I devoted my last column to how I parent my son to grow up feeling secure, capable, and independent. Should I be any different as a dad to a daughter? In preparation for our August due-date, I’ve been trying on societal archetypes—roles we’re taught to play. One is dad as “heroic protector.”

I’ll lay down my life for my son or daughter—of course. But outside of hypotheticals, how are fathers out there raising daughters to be calm, confident, and self-reliant yet healthily inter-dependent?

Backing up, we are in fact letting the gender be a surprise. But early on, I predicted our future would be female, and I nicknamed the fetus “Henrietta.” That didn’t stick—Alison named it “Birdie,” and I fell more in love with them both that instant. I refer to Birdie as “she/her.” Alison uses the full pronoun grab-bag.

I’m excited to welcome whomever. And also worried. The pitfalls facing girls are many, and many of them are man-made. One I’ve been contemplating is how often I hear girls and women described as “cute.” The word once meant “clever,” but has always had a shadow side. “Too cute” has often been used to describe a woman who’s speaking the truth, perhaps too directly for someone’s comfort.

“Cute” also means something “appealing in a pretty or endearing way.” I have no issue screaming “How cute” at the top of my lungs when Alison shows me the baby’s sock drawer.

I feel things become questionable when society layers on an additional definition—cute as “sexually attractive.” Based on how often I hear this compliment in professional environments, it’s generally regarded as harmless. Is it?

My overall read on “cute” applied to attractiveness is that it describes that meeting-place where dress, hair, or makeup recalls youthful innocence while also accentuating sexuality. Why is it that pigtails and a flared skirt is “cute” on a baby girl or teen cheerleader, and that same “girlish” look is sold to adult women as “sexy” by Halloween retailers? It gives me the creeps.

What’s your experience? I’ve also been knee-deep in this from a criminological perspective. From visiting Vermont’s correctional facilities over the last two years as a legislator and poring over crime statistics, I can report the obvious—domestic violence is one of the most common offenses for men. Just because it’s obvious, we should not be complacent about this, particularly when we see how many adult, female offenders started off as underage victims. It’s estimated that one in three women experience sexual assault in their lifetime. May this circle be broken.

How do you count the daily, non-criminal indignities? My friend Isabel, 25, and I caught up on the phone yesterday. She was still reeling from a customer comment. Explaining that he’d been watching from inside as she felled a huge cedar tree between his garage and house, the customer came out to offer the following “compliment.” He said, “I have to be honest, I had absolutely no faith in you.” He had no such comment for Isabel’s male arborist co-workers. She felt icky.

I described my concern about “cuteness” to her.  “As a woman I feel both infantilized and objectified at the same time,” she agreed. She noted the customer has a daughter, but that didn’t make him immune from casual, unaware sexism. It made me recall other instances I’ve heard from Isabel and other women where men fall back on personal attacks. Instead of simply admitting that they might be wrong, or that they might have an honest disagreement, or simply that they’re perplexed, the fall-back is to attack her and her intelligence, often in belittling, girlish terms.

It’s not helping that our media disappears actresses over a certain age and tabloids obsess over how quickly mothers can erase from their bodies that they have given life.

It’s a free country—act and dress “cute” in any way you want. But I bet it would both reduce sex crime and improve our mental health if we could get our media to break the constant idolizing of youthful bodies. What if we leave kids to be “cute,” and see women (and men) as intelligent, insightful, and beautiful on whatever terms they choose? For ideas on how to dad like that, I went to the vegetable garden, and came back with this—cuddle cotyledons, but don’t coddle them.

Cotyledons are those very first leaves to emerge from a germinating seed—picture a bean sprout and those first two bean-shaped leaves. Like the seed itself, cotyledons are small, smooth, round and longish. They’re cute!

Pumpkin cotyledons, and the hands of the father and son who planted them, are seen in this photo of our pumpkin patch. The first “true leaves” of the plant are barely visible in the plant on the left.

The cotyledons take the seed’s endosperm—its caloric inheritance—and turn it into an engine of photosynthesis. The very next leaf the plant grows, and every leaf thereafter, takes the form of a “true leaf,” one not constrained by the seed. The “true leaves” of a pumpkin are beautiful—toothed, hairy, and huge—but not cute.

Before long, the cotyledons senesce. Their chlorophyll is reallocated. The leaves yellow and fall off. All that remains is the axil, the leaf-stem connection point. Then, this too fades.

My 12-year-old is crossing thresholds that separate men from boys, like going into seventh grade, weeding the pumpkin patch, and, well—ask him. It’s his life.

I often miss the one-year-old with whom I’d play on the brook ice in the gathering dark of January, feeling like we could never run out of laughter. “I love you,” I would say to him. He would look me back full in the eyes, smile, and say “Ime.” It sounded much like “I’m,” but with a more drawn-out “I.” What I heard, unmistakably, was, “I love you.”

That’s one toddlerism I remember, of many already forgotten. I’m both celebrating and grieving these memories. I’ve saved some of his baby clothes, but to put them on him would be as unthinkable as squeezing a pumpkin vine back into a seed. 

Expecting Birdie, one thing I’m sure of is that she’ll be too cute for words in these onesies we’re stockpiling. But parenting isn’t about always being sure. I’ll need to keep growing, too, as I learn what she needs to grow up and express her true self.