Manic Monday

It's only Monday morning and I've already been working on an excessive amount of stressing. I went to physical therapy this morning for my shoulder. For the ridiculous accident of slipping in the kitchen. You know if you are lying flat and you want to look up at something, you'll sit up a little and bend your arms so you're resting on your elbows? Well, that's how I landed when I slipped in my little one's spilled milk (no crying over it) nearly six months ago -- but I didn't land on both shoulders, just the left one. If I'd landed evenly, I don't think it would have hurt so much.

Anyway, it didn't get better. Well, it seemed to for a week or two, then it started getting worse. Now I'm going to physical therapy, finally starting back after our vacation, and remembering how expensive this is. Ok, today was only $25, but they want me to come in twice a week, which is $50/week and $200/month. I don't want to spend $200 a month to make my arm work again. I want to spend $200 a month to pay off the credit card after our vacation. Even when you stay with friends, those things aren't cheap.


Then, to celebrate the loss of that money -- and because my arm hurts so much after physical therapy that I'm considering strapping it to my body and trying to live one-armed anyway -- I picked up McDonalds for little boy on the way home. Despite putting their mascot on a skateboard and sending him out to play basketball, they do seem to be stuck in the 50s, don't they?

For the girl side, we have shopping and pink. For boys, cars. Go Nascar. It's a serious pink/blue divide. (I don't know if you can tell, but the purple-y thing next to Ronald is a shopping invitation the girls are supposed to hand off to their friends, because that's us girls. We shop. Go Barbie.)

Maybe I'm the only mom to get annoyed when I order a happy meal and they ask, boy or girl instead of doll or car?

See, my excessive stress? I don't want to divide what toys they get based on sex discrimination that was out of date twenty years ago. Admittedly, my little girl does like pink and barbies (a state of affairs I blame on the grandmother who'd had two boys and had wanted a girl so badly). I'm not going to tell her she can't have them, but I don't want her shoved into the girl-mold every time we leave the house or see a commercial. Girls can do anything!

And so can boys. Can I help him break out of his traditionally standardized place too?

Or maybe I'm overly sensitive. I've chosen the stereotypical women's role of home-mommy while they're children, and I'm terrified of dooming them to continue living the unnecessarily strict gender divide of our grandparents. Hopefully, they'll be able to do as we did and weigh the options. Maybe my husband's friend really will become a home-Daddy when they have children and we'll be able to have that alternate lifestyle for an example. Maybe talking about it will be enough.

We can always hope. And stress. That's the one I'm really good at. I can stress with the best of them.