Brigid Daull Brockway is technically a writer

Brigid Daull Brockway is technically a writer

A blog about words, wordplay, and etymology, with slightly more than occasional political rants.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Comparative equine dental hygiene

Today I read a blog post subtitled "The 'sibling gift' trend is turning our kids into spoiled brats," in which the author complains about people giving gifts to her children. The author was having a shower for her second child, you see, and objected to the fact that one of the guests bought a gift for her first child, then a toddler.
Now I know exactly two things about the rules of etiquette - one involves forks, and I've never been at a party fancy enough to use it. The other is that you do not get a shower for your second kid. I don't give a crap from etiquette, but I do think that if you're getting showered with gifts when etiquette dictates you shouldn't, you've got no business complaining when some of those gifts splash onto the wrong kid. A beef I'd probably not consider blog-worthy had it not been for this sentence.
Still, the perpetrators of this offense typically don’t have kids of their own and I can’t possibly expect them to see things from my perspective if I am not going to explain it to them.
You have no idea how insulting it is to tell an intelligent, well-meaning person that they are deficient, incomplete just because of her reproductive choices. As if shoving a human being from your nethers gives you some special magical wisdom that those of us without children can never have.  
This woman isn't just looking a gift horse in the mouth, she's sharing pictures of her free horse's teeth on the internet so she can flaunt how much more special and wise she is compared to her poor kid-free friends. She could quite easily say "please don't give my kids gifts because I think it spoils them," but instead she chose to make examples of them online. 
I don't think the children are the spoiled ones in this scenario. The woman's blessed with a bunch of friends and family members who want to do nice stuff for her kids, and she's bitching about how terrible it is.
And here's a little bit of etiquette I do care about: never, ever tell a person that they can't understand something because they're not parents. Recently someone tried to justify her casual bigotry to me using the old "you'd understand if you had kids." And all I could think was that this lady didn't know me. I'm kid-free by choice, but she didn't know that. She didn't know if I was struggling with infertility or if I'd had miscarriages. She spat those words out without knowing a single thing about my story.
Look, gift horse lady, maybe your friends are spoiling your kids because they don't have kids of their own to spoil. Or because they found something they knew your kid would love and couldn't wait to give it to them. Or because they had some beloved aunt who did sibling gifts and they want to carry on the tradition. You're free to ask them not to do it, but don't assume that their decision to buy your kid a gift is the result of some fundamental foolishness or inadequacy. It is rude and insulting.

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