If you ever have boys I look forward to updates on their first erections and wet dreams.
Ok the hyperbole in this thread is ridiculous.
It was meant as a nice post… wow my little girl has grown up. At first all the mom’s and dads were going… “awwwwwww” and sharing similar stories. My first, last, and only son is now 8, I’m not allowed to hug him at the bus stop, and while he still sometimes likes to cuddle up next to me on the couch during story time, that is on his own terms and by no means a given. I was shedding a lot of tears reading this thread.
Yes, I would have been mortified if my mother had announced my period to the world. On the other hand, the intent wasn’t “speculate on what’s going on in my pubescent daughter’s underwear” it was… “oh wow, kids grow up fast, don’t they?”
I thought some of the posts were really cute, in that saccharin sweet way that I never understood until I became a mom.
We are moving across the country tomorrow. My son’s class all made him cards on the last day. One girl wrote him a card (sic) “you are owsome, hansome and smurt and I will love you forever” (The brazen hussy! Grade 3 and she is already chasing boys!)
I have been calling both my son and my partner “owsome hansome and smurt” (but I say it as written) all weekend. My son hates this already so it will remain in heavy rotation for a short time, then get trotted out often enough so it will become family legend.
Or did I require the permission of the girl, her parents, my son, waivers signed, non disclosure agreements drafted, etc?
I think the parents in question are astute enough to assess the appropriate levels of discussing periods in their own families. Intensely private teenage girls shouldn’t have their periods blared about even in the relative privacy of the family home. But my daughter? Remember my post at the beginning of the thread, where I talked about the side-trip past the Tampax factory? She was completely fine with that and it was fun for all. Similarly, my college roommate told me about her father, who, when all three of his college-age daughters abruptly moved out of the house all at the same time, humorously lamented, “what the hell am I going to do with that case of minipads in the basement?!” Different strokes, different folks. Haven’t you all realized that after reading SD all this time?
I thought you might have stepped in earlier about the threadshitting…but what do I know:rolleyes:.
Yeah, I agree - it’s not right to come down on him without saying something about the rampant threadshitting and the dirty implications:
“The first paragraph just made you sound controlling; the last was damn creepy. A step-father celebrates the first menstrual flow of “his girls” as a defining moment in their relationship?”
and
“Not quite what you said first time round, was it? How about you stop congratulating yourself on what a marvelous presence you are for them, and consider what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour for a step-father to two young girls.”
What the ever-lovin’ fuck? Amazing that even celebrating a girl’s passage to womanhood is somehow considered creepy and inappropriate - even if the girl wants to celebrate.
No wonder men don’t ever want to be near young women they aren’t related to. :rolleyes:
I totally agree, it’s just that, the first couple of posts saying “do you really think your daughter wants this news blared on the internet” were not met with “I know she wouldn’t mind” but rather “She’ll never find out” which is not at all the same thing. The OP’s responses suggest his daughter would mind if she knew, actually.
At any rate, I’m certain if a mother was in here rhapsodizing about what a special moment it was to find her son’s semen spattered sheets in the laundry, it would be considered quite bizarre. *My son of 153 months can ejaculate! What a special moment for us both! Oh they grow up so fast… *.
And finally, there’s a huge difference between sharing your own TMI and someone else’s - especially when you know or suspect the someone else would not appreciate it.
ETA: I agree the posts quoted by Aanamika were completely over the top. I would like for people to respect others’ desire for privacy though.
Seems more like you entered looking for congratulatory back slaps and when they didn’t rain down without exception, you got huffy.
Gaaah to this publicity. And I love how your name goes along with this post.
This is hilarious. Post bookmarked.
You should be popping out of a clock every hour if you honestly believe this.
My niece asked her mom not to tell my bro, her step-dad, when she got her first period. Too late. “Don’t say anything!”, begs SIL, but my bro is a lunkhead of extraordinary measure and makes a joke about it TO his friends IN FRONT of my niece.
Which is why **I **got to be the one to give her the sex talk a few months later; she didn’t dare risk being made fun of like that again. (I told her everything in graphic detail. She was horrified, but she’s better now and getting married in a few weeks.)
As I learned too late, the premenstrual hormonal insanity that accompanies onset of menses and the successive few years can be mitigated w/ a lean diet and Evening Primrose supplements. Also, she’ll stop growing taller in about 4 years.
Congrats, OP!
Noted and accepted.
Perhaps you might extend the same consideration to other transgressions in the thread? I don’t know if you realize how offensive, and yes, enraging, some of these posts are. I really did just want to share a personal anecdote. I was met with implications that I am a creep, a pervert, a molester, or worse. All because I wanted to share experience as a father. I don’t know if these “constitute personal attacks” in your estimation, but they come pretty goddamn close.
I do. I honestly believe that we’re all expert on our own experiences. I believe that we can claim some level of expertise about experiences we we’re involved in, if not our own.
I do not believe that any particular woman is an expert on women’s issues by dint of the fact that she is a woman. Or any man. Why should I accept that a woman from New Jersey is more an expert on the experiences of a woman in Zimbabwe than a man from Zimbabwe, simply because the two women share physiology and the man and woman from Zimbabwe only share culture, language, history, life experiences, etc.
I expected better from the Dope. The idea that any particular woman is more expert than any particular man on the general experiences of women is an example of essentializing at it’s worst and most ignorant. It’s as offensive as turning to the single African-American student in class and asking “what do black people think about X?”
It’s ridiculous. As if (hypothetical forthcoming) a man who is married with daughters, has many female friends, and spends his time administering a shelter for battered women should have his opinion discounted in favor of a nun cloistered since 17.
What the crazy fuck are you talking about? Your Zimbabwe answer is off the mark - a man from Zimbabwe may have more in common as far as being a citizen of Zimbabwe than a woman from New Jersey, but the New Jerseyite shares more of the experience of being a woman than the man. It’s like saying because you’ve been my shrink for decades and know my thought patterns and secrets that you know more about the experience of being me than I do. Sorry, your nun is still more an expert on the experience of being a woman than your hypothetical man, unless you change the rules to a strictly cultural interpretation and start loading up caveats, like “the experience of being an atheist married woman with a bunch of guy friends and daughters”. Studying something will never equal being that thing.
You could not be more wrong. Gender is grounded in time, place, culture, and myriad other factors. There is no essential “being a woman” experience beyond the most basic biology. “Being a woman in Zimbabwe” is not the same as “being a woman in upper-Amazonian Peru” is not the same as “being a woman in post-Stalinist Russia.” Are there universal aspects of being female? Of course. Do those aspects manifest in ways that allow extrapolation from the particular to the general? Absolutely not.
Really poor analogy. Rather, it’s like saying that I’ve been your shrink for decades and thereby have shared experiences with you. I therefore have better insight into your condition than a shrink you’ve never seen, but that you happen to share gender with.
“My nun” is an expert on her experiences as a woman. She is far from an expert on the experiences of women as a class. I was intentionally careful in my use of the terms “particular” and “general” in my last post. One can only speak to one’s own experiences, and beyond that one is essentializing. And essentializing is bad, m’kay?
I could not agree more. Studying a nun cloistered from 17 will never equal being a nun cloistered from 17. If we’re talking about the experience of this particular nun, cloistered since 17.
Is this really so difficult to understand? None of us gets to speak for a class or group of people. We can only speak as members of the said class or group.
“How do you feel as a man…” is a valid question. “How do men feel…”
is not a valid question.
Grok the difference?
EXACTLY. I think this is what so many here are failing to understand. And the whole, “well, this is an anonymous board, blah blah blah”, I think we’ve learned long ago that there’s NOTHING on the internet that’s truly anonymous.
And even if it is, it’s still about respect for her wishes.
So, my anonymous girl, who is anonymously menstruating, is anonymously upset that you anonymous people are anonymously talking about it.
I see.
Y’know, as soon as I hit enter, I realized I should’ve phrased that better.
I hadn’t checked on this thread in a while and am surprised - though I guess I shouldn’t be - at the turn some of these posts have taken. What started as an invitation to a maudlin party among parents - initially accepted - took a snarky and judgmental turn. Par for the course I suppose.
First: of course that’s the point of the post, “my girl’s grown up and it happened just like that”. I think it’s clear that the people who are the most offended identify with the child in this anecdote and not the parent, even when my OP is specifically from the POV of me as a parent. So to those responders - if you never realized your parent talked about your milestones as a child to other adults when you were growing up, well, surprise! And that those milestones of yours might have been discussed by them in the context not how it affected you, but of them themselves - surprise again!
This doesn’t make it a “I think my child is an extension of me” thing, in fact it is the opposite. I can’t talk about this at work or to relatives, but I felt the need to express my feeling to other adults who could empathize. I know I’m not unique in feeling this way, and it’s as much a milestone for ME as it is for her (she’s my first born). And I certainly would not want to talk like this to my daughter herself, lest I make her think somehow she’s done something wrong or something to make me love her less in the simple act of maturing. Far from it.
And I’m sorry, but just because she’s my child and her own person with her own feelings and her own life, does not mean I do not get to express myself and MY own feelings about her life. If she someday writes on a message board somewhere about how upsetting it is to see the man who once picked her up onto his shoulders so high that her head brushed the ceiling to be bent over a walker, well, I wouldn’t know and I wouldn’t begrudger her the forum to talk it out… And if I did somehow find out about it, I’d probably just nod and think “The Circle of Life” and start planning how to come back after I’m dead in the form of a talking Cumulus cloud. ('Cause that’s how I roll.)
Second: the analogies with boys and wet dreams is ridiculous. To me at least there’s nothing sexually “active” about a girl getting her period - it’s not like I found a vibrator in her bedroom or something, jeez. In fact I was impressed at how mature she took it, in case that wasn’t clear. She didn’t make a fuss about it or try to hide it, it just happened and she’d known it would happen for some time - my wife had given her and her sister (almost 2 years younger) a talking-to at least a year ago as to what it would be like and what to do when It Happened.
And yes, I do have a son (my youngest) and when his voice changes and I don’t recognize him when he answers the phone for the first time, and he starts to shave and whatnot, I will definitely have the same feelings. But probably not as deeply. Not because he’s a boy and she’s my little girl, but because she’s my first born.
Why don’t you ask her? THAT’S what I’m getting at. Did the OP ask his daughter how she felt about it? I want to know.