nmg: (Default)
[personal profile] nmg

Scene: I was taking the [livejournal.com profile] garklet for a haircut, and we happened to pass a church that was ringing for matins. He asked why the bell was ringing, and misheard 'matins' as the name of one of his friends who moved to Cambridge last year (who I shall refer to as M). The important thing to note is that M is the child of a lesbian couple.

[livejournal.com profile] garklet:
Where M?
[livejournal.com profile] nmg:
M's in Cambridge.
[livejournal.com profile] garklet:
Why M in Cambridge?
[livejournal.com profile] nmg:
Because his mummies got jobs in Cambridge.
[livejournal.com profile] garklet:
What about him daddy?
[livejournal.com profile] nmg:
I don't know - M lives with his two mummies.
[livejournal.com profile] garklet:
No, M not got two mummies. M got a mummy and a daddy.
[livejournal.com profile] nmg:
No, M has two mummies. Remember, you saw them both at G's house earlier in the year. And you saw them when you went to M's birthday party. And you saw them almost every day when they picked M up from nursery.
[livejournal.com profile] garklet:
*upset* No, M got a mummy and a daddy. M not got two mummies. You pooey!
[livejournal.com profile] nmg:
I'm not pooey! Not all little boys and girls have a mummy and a daddy; some have two mummies, like M, and some have two daddies.
[livejournal.com profile] garklet:
*very upset* NO! YOU WRONG! YOU POOEY! M GOT A MUMMY AND A DADDY! pthpthpthpt!
[livejournal.com profile] nmg:
On that we'll have to disagree.

I mean, what else can you do in this situation?

Date: 2010-07-08 09:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] valkyriekaren.livejournal.com
I think once you've been called pooey it's wisest to concede that you've lost the argument.

Date: 2010-07-08 09:43 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] oreouk.livejournal.com
I'd probably have gone on to a discussion about the difference between a Mummy or a Daddy and the fact that it took a seed from a man and a seed from a woman to make M but that giving his Mummies the seed didn't make that man a Daddy as such, and so on and so on, but then I'm known for giving my children more complicated answers than they are necessarily ready for!

Date: 2010-07-08 09:49 am (UTC)
andrewducker: (Default)
From: [personal profile] andrewducker
Yeah, if he's got it into his head that children are made by a mummy and a daddy then he won't believe you if you say otherwise. You'd have to differentiate between physical parents and social parents, and that's going to be an interesting conversation the first time you have it :->

Date: 2010-07-08 09:54 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] steer.livejournal.com
I guess convincingly establishing the existence of lesbians using videos from the internet would be the wrong approach to take.

Date: 2010-07-08 09:55 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com
Quite possibly.

Date: 2010-07-08 10:34 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] moral-vacuum.livejournal.com
But if it were, you'd be the man to source them.

Date: 2010-07-08 09:58 am (UTC)
andrewducker: (Default)
From: [personal profile] andrewducker
I've just remembered a similar tale from my past.

My father's a doctor, and I apparently had a stand-up argument, aged 4-ish with him and a female doctor, in the hospital, about whether it was possible for a woman to be a doctor. They were maintaining that women could be doctors, I was convinced that a female doctor was a _nurse_.

Needless to say it took a while for my Dad to live that one down :->

Date: 2010-07-08 10:12 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com
Oddly enough, that was to be the subject of my next post. I had quite a long conversation with him (in which he got really quite upset) in which he was maintaining that women couldn't be doctors, fire fighters, bus drivers, lorry drivers, soldiers (etc, etc - and despite evidence to the contrary), and that men couldn't be nursery workers (the sole male nursery worker at his place left last year), nurses, teachers (!) and so on.

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From: [personal profile] andrewducker - Date: 2010-07-08 10:26 am (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] bohemiancoast.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 11:07 am (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 11:10 am (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] bohemiancoast.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 02:25 pm (UTC) - Expand

Date: 2010-07-08 10:23 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pinguthegreek.livejournal.com
You know, that is absolutely fascinating. I can't imagine that he lives in an environment where he picks up the message that there are male and female jobs. So, I just wonder where he gets that idea from.

Date: 2010-07-08 10:29 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com
Well, quite.

Two days later, he was in nursery with a bunch of his male friends who were pretending to be nurses, complete with caps.

Hmmm. On the other hand, it could be that they were pretending to be female nurses (because all nurses are female, obv).

*Developmental psychology hat on*

From: [identity profile] sushidog.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 10:47 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: *Developmental psychology hat on*

From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 11:05 am (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] easterbunny.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 02:19 pm (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] damerell.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 02:32 pm (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] del-c.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 06:34 pm (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 06:38 pm (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-09 10:21 pm (UTC) - Expand

Date: 2010-07-08 11:41 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] alexmc.livejournal.com
I'd have given up sometime earlier and said...

"Let's ask M or M's mum next time we see them"

Date: 2010-07-08 02:28 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com
Giving up is not an option. He can keep up the 'why' questions for a good half hour.

Date: 2010-07-08 11:52 am (UTC)
ext_15862: (Default)
From: [identity profile] watervole.livejournal.com
I love it when you post these conversations! They make fabulous reading.

Date: 2010-07-08 02:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com
I'll make an effort to post more - there are certainly enough to choose from.

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From: [identity profile] watervole.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 02:16 pm (UTC) - Expand

Date: 2010-07-08 01:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] zornhau.livejournal.com
One we've not encountered yet...

I'm the primary child carer, and Mrs Hau is a senior manager, so Kurtzhau has a good range sense of sex equality as the norm. I once told him that in the Middle Ages, nice ladies were supposed to shut up and agree with the knights - he was horrified!

Date: 2010-07-08 01:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ias.livejournal.com
To be fair, a couple of days later he did ask me why M had two mummies and my off the cuff reply was because M was lucky!

We then had a discussion (while I was driving - why does he always ask this stuff when in the car?) about how some people ahve two mummies, some two daddies and some, like him, a mummy and a daddy.

Date: 2010-07-08 02:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tlrmx.org (from livejournal.com)
But that leaves out such a rich variety of possibilities. Even "X has at least one person who loves and cares for them" which is basically your lowest common denominator, is a bit risky. Are you sure?

And when kids understand completely what's going on, the resulting feelings and their understanding of them can still be... confusing

http://otoh.org/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/TomorrowIWillLikeYou

Date: 2010-07-08 02:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] opadit.livejournal.com
No! You wrong! You pooey!

I think this is going to be my verbal reaction from now on whenever I get hit with some cognitive dissonance.

Date: 2010-07-08 02:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nmg.livejournal.com
I'm wondering whether it would be a suitable response to critical reviews of the papers I write.

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From: [identity profile] opadit.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-08 03:01 pm (UTC) - Expand

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From: [identity profile] surliminal.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-07-09 10:03 pm (UTC) - Expand

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Date: 2010-07-08 07:26 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] del-c.livejournal.com
When I was a kid I noticed that the children at school who lived in council flats, when asked to draw a house, drew a two-storey fully-detached with all the trimmings of an early twentieth century house-- sash windows, chimney with smoke coming out, path from street to door, etc. I, who lived in a semi-detached (because the 70s was, and still is, the best decade ever for the working class) thought that was funny. I expected myself to draw a house, and them to draw flats.

Date: 2010-07-09 10:05 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] surliminal.livejournal.com
Oh that that one's a classic. Myself I think it's odd that we still teach early language with things like "the sheep go baa and the cows go moo" to kids on council estates in Easterhouse who are unlikely to ever see either.. v strange.

Date: 2010-07-09 12:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ruthj.livejournal.com
Thanks for reporting on this one. Fun and very interesting.

We're just starting to have short conversations with Aled.

Funniest recent one was when sister Alice came to babysit and Aled called her 'Hannah' (the name of my youngest sister). I said, 'That's not Hannah, it's Alice' and Aled called her 'Not-Hannah' for the rest of the weekend.

R x

Date: 2010-07-09 07:38 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] words-on-a-page.livejournal.com
I love hearing about conversations with kids; they're so interesting!

Date: 2010-07-11 10:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ngma.livejournal.com
Hmm, might try that response on J:-)

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