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I hide candy from my kids. I’m a grown-ass woman — taller, stronger, and presumably wiser than the three little people who live in my house — but I resort to subterfuge, avoidance, and misdirection to end their relentless post-Halloween demands for Skittles and Easter-season clamoring for jelly beans. Yes, I tell them no. (Of course I tell them no!)  And then they ask again, and again and again, so I just hide the shit because patience is exhausting and brute force is a manifestation of desperation that I intentionally reject.

Baby Boomers tsk and say that my kids aren’t disciplined. That this dynamic is my fault because I have failed to establish adequate authority over them, emboldening them to question my word and continue pressing their case. True, Gen Xers have adopted an approach to parenting that attempts to hear our children out (likely a backlash to the absolute absence of input we had in our own rearing: #BecauseISaidSo). Does this make me an ineffective parent? Time will tell. I/We think of it as The Long Game.

Why attempt to reason with those whose frontal lobes are not yet developed? Why aim for their buy-in for limits on sugar and screen time? Because I am/we are interested in overcoming a legacy of slavery and oppression, and intrinsic motivation is a welcome structural adjustment to obedience enforced by a punitive system.

Clearly, Baby Boomers are also interested in structural change. They marched, and sat in, and went on Freedom Rides, and bled, and died for it. With thanks and great appreciation for this, I humbly submit that the outcomes of their great sacrifice may have adjusted who can have authority, but not how authority works. Which is why I’m arguing with my kids over candy. The relationship I have toiled to cultivate with my kids makes me a safe space to push back, whereas the knowledge that violence will soon descend snaps petulance to attention, engendering conformity.

* * * * *

When I first became a mother, I went to a church that didn’t allow men to volunteer in the nursery. All of the moms would take turns missing service to play with blocks, give out snacks, and usher toddlers too young to sit for an hour back and forth to the bathroom. There were only eight or so kids who spent their Sunday mornings in our raisin-laden anteroom and a few of them were siblings. About every third Sunday, it was time to pay the piper. 

After being up for hours nursing each night, making meals every evening, folding clothes most days, and navigating pumping at work, I definitely needed Jesus. The last thing I wanted to do was take care of extra kids and miss the opportunity to have someone feed into me in a way that was designed to carry me through the week. But there I would be, again and again, as the dads sat in church and the moms learned to live on bread alone. 

I asked why fathers were not taking turns in the nursery. The answer: men cannot be trusted around children. They are more prone to sexual violence and assault, and families are just not comfortable with men taking their kids to the bathroom in the way they are comfortable with women doing it. 

This church only ordained men. 

Let me get this straight: Men are the only ones who can safely steward this community due to their divinely-ordained chosenness for leadership, but we can’t trust them around the babies because they might molest them? …Aiight, then.

* * * * *

I have put down the childish thing of needing my father’s approval (mostly) and am no longer actively attempting to fit the square peg of my integrity into the round hole of his/male dominance. But I am still struggling to maintain relationships with my community while refusing to abuse or be abused, and it is fucking draining. 

I am blamed and labeled inferior for not “controlling” my children. I hide the candy. At the same time, the rules of power say that no authority can tame male desire. That like those pastors who cannot work in the nursery, some intrinsic nature makes maleness so dominant (unbridled, unquestionable, dangerous) that I must hide from it. I must dress modestly, covering my shoulders and my knees and my curves lest I become a stumbling block to a man, causing him to sin.

In the church of my youth, women were to be covered. Clad “with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array,” because the lust of the flesh would otherwise lead to the downfall of males. Men need not control themselves. Women must be controlled. Women must not be allowed to choose, because men can’t. Children, the church says, should be beaten into submission. Instead, EYE choose to hide their candy, at least until they grow up enough to understand their choices. (Are men children?) Will talking with my children about cavities and diabetes and ADHD help them to choose to control themselves as adults in a manner that enhances their kindness and humanity in a way that spankings wouldn’t? I guess we’ll see.

What is this concept of the helplessness of those to whom we assign ultimate power?  Why the absolution from emotional management and sexual discipline? We both pathologize men as incapable of self-control, and revere them as most fit for headship. We categorize women as caretakers and moral compasses, but don’t trust their leadership. 

How do we return to a state of harmony where we might, again, be naked and unashamed? No downcast eyes, skirts to the floor, or suffocating attempts to control the other through force or coercion? Self-control will disrupt the Nuclear Options of violence and abuse. We all have a choice. Instead of taking mine, try exercising yours.