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I’m walking through the mall, with Ess riding in the Björn, and her little left hand is holding mine. I realize she’s been holding my hand for five minutes straight. Her whale spout pony tail on the top of her head swishes back and forth as she looks around.

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I’m lying on the kitchen floor when Ess walks over and, uncharacteristically, lies down next to me, resting her head in the crook of my elbow, and just stares into my eyes for thirty seconds. Satisfied with what she saw, or what she communicated, she gets up and toddles away.

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It’s bedtime and dark. Ess finds her stuffed monkey as I pick her up and carry her to her room. She rests her head in the crook of my neck, and her tiny little cheek feels cool as she snuggles in. I pause in front of her crib, holding her, willing myself to somehow remember everything about this moment. I lay her down to sleep.

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Dante Fiero the dragon loves Yule Logs, televised or otherwise.

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I like everything in this video except the “Young Living” on the side of the box. I hate Young Living. I do love Essie, though.

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So, Emily and Nick very kindly got us tickets to the Blenders’ holiday show. We went there on a couples date, and stopped at Hen House for brunch beforehand. I was waiting at the table while Mykala waited at the door for Emily and Nick to park their car in the downtown Minneapolis maze. While sitting there, I noticed the nice logo of the restaurant, and being a very new iPhone owner, I thought it was super cool to be able to attach this picture to a text message and send it along. I clearly did not think this through all the way, because Mykala later pointed out how incredibly rude it was to send a picture of nice hot coffee while our friends froze in the outdoors trying to park. I regret the error.

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I just received my first text message ever from Essie. It read:

Aripop
Cfunbi cb blllpv. Y bhg j

I’m optimistic that future messages from her will make more sense. You know, after she learns to talk.

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This post marks the beginning of a new theme here, one to which I’ve given little attention in the past, and one that, shamefully, I’ve only really begun to understand with the birth of Essie. It begins with a story…

We took Ess along to see Out on a Limb’s Nutcracker show at the Rosedale Mall. Mykala was occupied running the music, so Ess was my charge for the evening. Just the sight of her mama, without the ability to run over and get a hug was a challenge for Essie, so after feeding her, she and I began doing circuitous laps around the first level of the mall, biding our time, on each lap showing Ess the dancers while avoiding sightings of Mykala.

It was on one of these laps that Ess began going “booba booba booba” which I thought was a bit odd since (1) Ess only says that around Mykala and (2) Mykala was behind many storefronts about 300 yards away. Why was my 16-month-old daughter saying booba? I knew it wasn’t anybody in the area, so I began scanning shop fronts. You’ve probably guessed it already: mannequins. At Gap. Wearing sweaters. That’s how obnoxiously out of proportion these lady mannequins were: Ess perceived obvious, beat-you-over-the-head breasts on them through winter sweaters. As the father of a young daughter, this grated. What was worse was the men mannequins: you’re probably thinking they were overgrown steroid-adled gladiators, right? Wrong! They were, for all practical purposes, slim, humanly-proportioned individuals.

Sexism is awful. Double standards dump salt in the wound.

I’ve always been respectful of women to the point of obsequiousness, though that has been more an outgrowth of my personality than any true understanding of what it is like to be a woman. Recently, with the help of the Twitter stream of John Siracusa and, in turn, his following of Everyday Sexism, has the concept of what it is like to be a woman in the world begun to sink slowly into my thick head.

It probably began in earnest with my viewing of a video of a woman wearing a bog standard black t-shirt on the streets of New York, surreptitiously filming the amount of harassment a woman endures in public. Then a few more anecdotes expressing similar experiences. Slowly, slowly, these anecdotes strung together in my mind into a theme, a theme of outright and implicit verbal and physical abuse. Then, under the overwhelming weight of countless recollections and summaries of double standards, tacit gender norms, molestation by the male gaze, more double standards, violence, parking lots at night, walking in the city, walking anywhere, interviewing for jobs, keeping jobs, makeup, subtle sexism, overt sexism, snide comments, rude implications, the heartbreaking stereotypes endured by women bosses, OFFENSES DISMISSED AS JOKES, minimization, accusations deflected as overreaction, more parking lots, more city streets… well, this theme then became generalized into universal experience. It is not one type of woman that endures this hell: it is all women.

It was upon finally arriving at, and trying hard to empathize with, this shared female experience, that I felt like I finally began to understand being a woman in this world.

And it enrages me.

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