If there aren’t any kiddos in your life, you may not have realized this, but kiddos love pressing buttons. You know that visceral satisfaction you feel when you get to pop some good bubble wrap? For the little beans, every button, no matter how mundane it may seem to us, is like bubble wrap.
The other day I got on the elevator and a mom rushed on behind me, pushing her stroller with one hand and carrying her little bean in the other. I had my finger on the “door open” button to ensure they could get on, and I saw the kiddo’s wide, curious eyes trained on my hand at the button pad.
“Could you press the button for me?” I asked her, indicating with my finger which button I needed her to press. She nodded and squirmed excitedly in her mom’s arms until her mom brought her over. I stepped out of the way so she could press my floor button. She squealed with delight, giggling and beaming at me behind her tiny teddy-bear print mask. Her mother chuckled and showed her which button to press next for their destination, and she very excitedly mashed that button too.
The little peanut was just so happy by her opportunity to press buttons (and come to think of it, a lot of kiddos also just enjoy elevators for some reason) that she couldn’t stop grinning and wiggling in her mom’s arms. When we arrived at my floor I waved at her as I stepped out of the elevator, and she chirped, “Byeee!!!” and continued to wave at me until the elevator doors closed.
Children experience life and joy in a different way than adults; we are simply privileged that their experience is so willingly and enthusiastically shared.
When people ask me if I will be taking my fiance’s last name after we get married, they usually assume that when I say, “No”, that it’s some girlbossification thing because “he didn’t go to med school” or whatever.
It’s really not…
For me, my partner has been with me through every struggle of my medical education and career from the very beginning. As far as I’m concerned, he’s earned part of this MD with me. He’s the reason I was able to earn it in the first place.
No… I won’t be changing my last name because of the systemic misogyny that makes it so freaking hard to do so! It takes so much paperwork and so many fees for my national and provincial licensing bodies, my professional associations, and so on and so forth… the massive number of barriers just means it’s not worth it. This system caters to cisgendered, heterosexual Eurocentric white men, who are never expected to change their names.
My last name carries a lot of my family’s history and it means a lot to me; being a doctor is only one part of who I am and if I chose to change my last name, being a doctor should not be an active barrier… but it is.
(As a side note: my fiance has considered changing his last name to mine… but because of the same red tape… we will probably not be doing that.)
you know how people always make it seem like the person who knows how you take your coffee or gets one “exactly the way you like it” is your soulmate in life? i mean, come on. most people take their coffee the same way every day.
i’m marrying the person who knows my bubble tea order after asking, “fruity or milky?” and can somehow predict what my ADHD-decision-paralysis ass would’ve landed on after like 30 minutes of scrolling through the menu, getting distracted, then having to be reminded to pick something, etc., etc.
