Choosing your battles

I have a relative, let's call this relative Mr/Mrs Racist, who is quite relaxed about saying things at social functions that aren't normally contemplated in our milieu, much less spoken aloud.
You may have guessed that this relative's bent is making fairly racist comments. But his/her musings aren't limited to race. Mostly anything s/he finds different or unknown is fair game (hairy legged feminist lesbos, for example).
Clearly I have a major beef - Porterhouse steak sized - with this kind of view. However, I also believe in his/her right to say it. I am of the firm belief that enlightenment comes from a robust exchange of ideas and experience.
But I also believe I have a moral obligation to challenge a view which I believe is destructive and dangerous and not supported by fact.
I have made gentle comments to this effect. Such as pointing out the use of certain phrases is considered offensive by the people to whom those terms refer. But my comments appear to have fallen on deaf ears (it seems at 33 I'm not in possession of enough life experience to make any kind of political or philosophical judgement for myself - those things are probably best left for my husband to decide for me).
So my quandary today is what to do? Make a bigger fuss and risk complete alienation and familial discord without changing anyone's mind, or keep chipping away slowly but surely on my one-woman campaign of enlightening this relative, or at least offering another point of view to consider?
I am thinking of making a donation (as a Christmas present) to a charity organisation for the group of people about whom this relative was recently spouting, in a bid to gently, but firmly reaffirm my dislike of the views expressed.
I'll post on what happens (if anything!).

Paying for the privilege of being female

Today's news cycle contains a story about how most people (read: men) won't have enough superannuation in retirement to keep them in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.
The academic report also found that women have roughly half of what men have in superannuation at their time of their retirement (this part isn't news by the way, I can only assume because men have been found not to have as much super as they thought, this latest study is considered news).
I can't help but relate to this story because for the past four years, I have been the primary carer of our two kids, and haven't made any super contributions in that time. Why? Because I am self employed and I need to spend the money I make on our immediate needs. I accept fully that this is my decision. I have decided to forgo working full time, being stuck in traffic, being an absent parent - physically and emotionally, for a lifestyle which means our family earns less, but which I feel happier with for the time being.
It really sticks in my craw, though, when I read stories like this in which we're on the one hand expected to do our duty (thanks Peter fucktard Costello) to the country by having kids (which entails at least some time out of the work force, if only for the period of the labour), and yet we're also expected to pay our way in retirement.
Oh, and by the way, when you are lazing on your fat arses having those nation-saving kids, ladies, how could you possibly be expected to be paid for that time so that you maintain your financial status while you're lying back and thinking of Australia?
And if you are working anyway, don't even think about getting equal pay for equal work. I don't understand why more of a fuss isn't made of these insidious inequalities in our society. There was a Productivity Commission into paid maternity leave which found that there ought to be a paid parental leave scheme but then the GFC happened and now women's human rights don't seem to matter anymore. Again. When will the legislators in this stupid country realise this is not a gender issue, it's an issue for the whole of society and everyone benefits from the security and stability of a woman's livelihood whether or not she bears children?

Baby Chocolate's a doll

I was really surprised after my relatively short and bearable labour with my second child to deliver a baby girl.
I don't know why I was surprised, really. I guess having had a boy already, she was an unknown quantity. When the midwife proclaimed, "it's a girl" I didn't know what to expect.
Obviously when babies are immobile blobs, sex doesn't really make that much difference in their lives.
But when they start to get mobile, and specifically, play with toys, it has become more of an issue for me, at least.
To begin with Baby Chocolate* played with her brother's infant toys which are all gender neutral. Now she's reached an age where she has soft toys she favours.
We've had a couple of little baby dollies around the house among the soft toys (one of which was a hilarious joke gift for my husband when he expressed a desire to have children) and Baby Chocolate has taken to one dolly especially, cuddling her at night. But am I doing the right thing giving her the doll at all? Or am I, by worrying about it at all, a neurotic middle-class feminist who takes her amateur psychology hobby far too seriously?
Baby Chocolate's brother was mildly interested in the doll when I was pregnant and I was preparing him for a new baby in the house, but soon began looking on any doll with the pinched-lipped disdain he reserves for Dora the Explorer and the colour pink.
Baby Chocolate is in every other respect more of a what you might consider a stereotypical "boy" than her brother. She climbs like a mountain goat, loves cars and Lego, and lacks the caution and reserve characteristic of her brother.
Is her attraction to the doll predetermined, following the hypothesis that female humans are more nurturing? Or have I subconsciously foisted it on her because that's the way I was programmed?
Should I encourage or discourage this behaviour? Should it matter at all?
I confess to putting hair clips in her wispy baby locks, so I wonder if it's not just a contradiction** to even worry about a doll?
It's one to add to my list of quandaries.

* Not her real name.
** I reserve the right to behave in a contradictory manner whenever I like.

Don't walk on my clean floor!

For my status update on Facebook the other day, I wrote: By up-ending all the chairs on the dining table in order to clean "properly" underneath, I have proved irrefutably that I have in fact, turned into my mother.
The response from my friends was amusing and showed that I'm not the only one who is house proud.
It got me thinking why we get annoyed at our kids (and partners) for messing up our freshly mopped lino or leaving clothes all over the floordrobe.
These are, in the scheme of things, unimportant. We all work - both paid and caregiving - and these tasks are menial and they'd be jobs we'd pay someone else to do if it was practical and affordable.
And it finally dawned on me that the reason I and my peers take these things seriously is because it's the only validation we get sometimes.
Having kids requires, for most working women, the inevitable compromise of leaving a fulfilling career for the less cerebral tasks of cleaning up spew and poo and being the primary carer.
These are tasks which society doesn't place much value on - as evidenced by the lack of statutory paid maternity leave - and often goes unnoticed by those we're caring for, so if we don't place any importance in it either, then why bother.
If we don't take it seriously, then we're reinforcing the view that being a carer isn't real work and doesn't have value in the same way as paid work does.
And that's today's amateur psychology lesson.

Racism begins at home

I ran into a neighbour at the shops today. Lovely bloke, very chatty. Told me the guy a couple of doors down from us died suddenly last week. He was only young and apparently had a heart attack. He has/had a relatively young family, and I feel so awful for them. So my neighbour was telling me the story - at this point, it should be pointed out that these neighbours are clearly practising Muslims, as the bloke's wife wears a hijab - and he says, "they really keep to themselves, don't really talk to the Aussies." and then he went on to say that "she talks just like us" with an element of real surprise in his voice. Of course she does, she's a bloody Aussie too!

It was this incident and a number of conversations I've had with people recently which has jolted me out of my idea that Australia isn't a terribly racist country. It pretends it isn't, but scratch the surface, and people's prejudices aren't buried particularly deeply.

Someone relatively enlightened mentioned the other day that there were a lot of Asian people in Australia. Well derr... Asia is our closest neighbour geographically, if not culturally, and the statistics actually show that Brits and Kiwis are still the most numerous immigrants to Australia. It's just that they look like "us" and "Asians" don't, apparently, so you notice "them" more.

When you really start to think about it, it's quite confronting to start to think about your own in built prejudices. Are you more likely to lock your doors in the car if a swarthy man walks by? Or do you make assumptions about a woman because she wears a hijab?

We have such a long way to go.

Don't be a hater, be a celebrator... in a sec

So, I posted a little while ago about people who have hurt me in the past. I've been very good and been quite creative with my writing. Not today.
I had lost contact with a friend who was very close and with whom I always picked up from where we left off, no matter how much time had passed.
After probably two years of not much contact, I found her blog which I was mentioned in. Not only was I mentioned, but I was a thinly veiled character in a story about her turning 30 crisis - how I was a rebel, but now I had the "perfect" life, married, child, good job, so somehow I had turned my back on all the values she associated with me. That, by my life having taken this particular path, it was a personal slight against her.
Perhaps she always thought that she would be the one to "succeed" (and I use the term loosely, because I don't define my life as particularly successful or otherwise, it just is). That I would always be the chubby one, intellectually challenging, but perennially awkward. And she could always perceive herself as the superior one.
It's interesting, because I didn't peg her for someone who would think like that. But her blog was telling.
I put it to her directly to see if I had done something to offend her, but she claimed no.
However, she has since not taken up many passive opportunities to get back in contact with me. So I guess that's it. I spent a long, long time grieving for that friendship. And actually spent some time (in a very Woody Allen-esque way) talking to my therapist about it, until I finally realised it wasn't my problem. It's her problem.
So at the risk of devolving, I'd like to say to this person: Fuck you. Fuck you for thinking it's OK to be so pass agg to blog about me. And fuck you for lacking the courage to talk to me about it instead of talking to the world about it. And fuck you for using me and my life story to assuage your insecurities about your perceived inadequacies. I didn't make you choose what you chose, so don't blame me and don't use me and my life as psychological fodder for your narcissistic psychobabble. In short: fuck you.
Aaah, I feel better. Now back to my perfect life.

Excuse me, would you like a seat?

During both my pregnancies (and god and some pretty effective contraception, there won't be any more), I caught public transport pretty almost daily.
I can count, on one hand, how many times I was offered a seat on a bus or a train.
Admittedly, I am of the festively plump persuasion, so I can understand people's hesitancy in leaping to their feet lest I just be retaining chips, rather than a foetus.
But when I was eight months along and had 10kg of baby and amniotic fluid and guts and black stuff sticking out the front of me, it was kind of hard to miss.
And I'm not complaining (well, maybe a little bit). Pregnancy isn't an illness and I was still pretty fit and well, so perfectly able to stand for 20 minutes or so.
But it got me to thinking about people offering anyone seats, or opening doors or showing any other common courtesy.
People of my father-in-law's ilk use this as the reductionist argument against those crazy feminists who "won't let blokes hold the door open for them". The thing is BLOKES DON'T OPEN DOORS for anyone. Actually, NO ONE OPENS DOORS FOR ANYONE ANYMORE.
Besides which, since when are good manners sexist?
I was taught to think of people in a more difficult situation than you, and to do what was practical in order make their lot a little easier. Get up for the old lady on the bus, help the guy with the crutches off the train, whatever.
I can report though that the pursuit of shitty manners is an equal opportunity concern. I will always remember the day when I was on the bus about eight months pregnant, and two fat bitches (see the festively plump comment from before, so I can say that), watched, from the reserved-for-less-mobile-passengers seats (being fat doesn't qualify you, molls), as I helped a woman with her small child off the bus with her pram and they didn't lift a goddamed obese digit to help.

Good manners don't demean the "fairer" sex, they show respect for your fellow humans. And as far as I can see that isn't a gender politics issue.