Two separate times in the past week someone at the grocery store has referred to Leta as “a little fellow.” I normally wouldn’t find this disturbing as most three month old babies aren’t readily identifiable as boys or girls, just as lumpy babies who could pass for either, and what does it matter, they’re all edible anyway. But the first time it happened she was covered HEAD TO TOE in pink and the second time it happened I had just referred to her as my daughter. She either really looks like a boy or the people who shop at my local grocery store are profoundly stupid.
I haven’t gone out of my way to make Leta look like a girl because she knows and I know that she is a girl, and I find it wickedly pleasurable to watch strangers squirm as they try to figure it out. A profoundly stupid person will come up to me in the grocery store and say, “What a cute baby! How old is . . . mmmphff.” And that mmmphff represents a plea for me to identify her sex because they really weren’t sure and instead of taking a risk they just combined HE with SHE and in the panic of the moment it got garbled and came out sounding like they were eating their tongue.
If I were a good person I would say that SHE is three months old. But no one ever accused me of being a good person, and I’ll usually just say MY BABY is three months old, leaving the embarrassed stranger to ponder the intricacies of sexual identity and to curse that bitch with the cute baby. However, this is Utah, so they probably weren’t actually thinking the word bitch. It would probably go more like, “Oh my heck, I was just trying to be nice. She obviously doesn’t have the gospel of Jesus Christ in her life.” Which is really just the Mormon way of saying “you are a total fucking bitch.”
Anyway, my baby is not a fellow. She is a lovely pink princess who just happened to poop so violently in the middle of the night that it soiled a three foot area of the mattress, and that three foot area happened to be the part that I was sleeping on. So I’m a little grumpy this morning. Grumpy enough that if I have to go to the grocery store today I am going to take a black permanent marker and write GIRL on Leta’s forehead.