Emily Cunningham

The thing with parenting is it’s just so f-ing tender and rendering to know and love a child, a human, as they grow older.

Parenting is often framed as a pedestrian choice. Heteronormative performance. Boy Howdy is it NOT.

But man is the whole culture built to facilitate a two parent, stay at home mom, heteronormative paradigm.

I remember a while back, I co-wrote a OpEd about the child separation crisis on the border. And was criticized for using that frame “childhood is sacred”, bc of it’s implied erasure of black and brown childhood in this hyper violent supremacist police state.

I have puzzled and sat on that critique for a while. It was critique from folks who weren’t parents. It was from really amazing feminists and scholars.