Happy Families

"My Family" stick figure stickers decorate the windows of people movers all over the country. Perfect little happy families, the family inside the car mirrored in the stickers without. 

Here's mine:

By definition, jokes are funnier if they're not explained. But this isn't a joke, not exactly.

"Cat lady" is insulting and dismissive. It means a woman (there are no "cat men"), who is so repulsive she can garner love and affection only from kitties and thus, has them in abundance. To take the label and apply it to oneself is hardly subversive, but it's still unexpected, a little startling.

That's not the joke. The joke is I have precisely zero kitties. Buttons, who I love outrageously, really belongs to next door; the Burrow is a rental, so Flatmate and I can't have a kitteh of our own, as much as we'd like to.

So my sticker is a lie. All except for the "me" figure, right? She has glasses! It's exactly right!

Sort of. The stickers, at least at the shops where I bought them (yes, I visited multiple stores) only come in pet, baby, young boy, young girl, older boy, older girl, father, mother, grandparent. There's no lifestage between adolescence and parenthood, no generic woman or man. Family is defined as nuclear and breeding.

So, I have a Mother Laptop sticker to represent me. Motherhood aside, the laptop and the phone do show a side of my personality (the side which is writing this on a laptop and who'd require a surgical procedure to separate her from her phone).

I like to think I'm more multifaceted than that. I could have chosen a female figure with a ukulele or knitting needles and felt it just as accurate. I could have picked a figure in a foofy 50s style dress or jeans, instead of generic femmey officewear. But there weren't these options: I didn't pick a figure that represented every side of me, but the one which represented me at all.That big-dress wearing, knitting, ukulele playing stick figure? She doesn't exist. Women, in sticker-land, are mothers with a single, easily drawn, interest.

We can extrapolate this. People movers across the country don't just carry Fishing Dad/Shopping Mum/Soccer Boy/Ballet Girl/Baby but three dimensional figures, as nuanced and as real as I am. The difference is, they're not turning to their personal blogs to explain to no one in a thousand words how interesting they are. Maybe their creative outlet should be widened beyond the back of their minivans. Maybe our idea of a family's role in society should be widened beyond has children and a stupid car and accept that families are people too.

Categories: Issues, Minutiae, Pictures or it didn't happen