Howdy, and thanks for the latte!
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This one is a litte bit of an 'educational rant,' which is not yet a category of literature one can browse in their local bookstore, but is one of the more popular flavors of my writing... hope it makes you laugh, or smile, or think.

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Ask Better Questions
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​I've been thinking about the questions we normally ask when someone is born.
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​“Boy or girl? How big? Ten fingers, ten toes? How long was the labor?”​
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Right here is the recipe for a culture that disproportionately asks us to categorize people into two genders (and place value on that distinction). A culture that is obsessed with size.
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Abelist.
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We continue the conversation throughout life - with growth charts and percentiles, IQ points and credit scores.
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If it is critical to you that a potential mate has ten (and only ten) fingers and toes, bless you and your foot fetish. It’s so terribly common to have ten and ten at birth, that I’ll encourage you to consider different standards for congratulations and a much more unique formula for value judgements of other humans.
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I’m encouraging you to ask better questions throughout life, and show the others how stuck in their adorable cultural ruts they really are.
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​“What does your baby smell like?”
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“What was the first song you sang to your baby?”
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“I wonder what name your baby would choose?”​
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Can you even imagine?
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I often wonder what people with little familiarity with new babies do with the results of their questions. Why are we asking these things? I think it’s because we’re misogynist, and size-ist, and able-ist. But I’m also sometimes a little glass-half-empty. I think they’re trying to generally assess health, just like we continue to try to assess health later in life with credit scores, as though they are anything other than half of the game that was started by… lenders. While I have no idea, I imagine that Brad Pitt actually has a terrible credit score, because he’s a multi-millionaire and probably pays for everything with cash. Does he even have a credit score? Come to think if it… does he have ten toes???
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​ARE YOU SURE?!​
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I wonder what is possible when we ask better questions.
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Parent/child bonding is strongly olfactory. So are other forms of bonding, which is why we go bonkers for pheromones and get weepy when our person or our puppy is out of town and we accidentally smell their pillow. We are such adorable, verbal animals. But. We’re just mammals, and smell is secret sauce. When we ask new parents what their baby smells like, we acknowledge the importance of the bond. We invite them to be curious. We are asking them to smell their baby, which lets their baby smell them, and wow does that have greater influence than a tape measure.
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Singing and humming are universally human, even among those hard of hearing or without a sense of hearing. Singing can also facilitate bonding, and familiarizes baby with the sound of their parents’ voice(s). It is soothing to baby. You know this. But it is also soothing to parents, as it slows their exhalation and stimulates their sweet little vagus nerves, the light switch between stress and relaxation.
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What would your baby name themself? What a weird question to ask, but also, don’t you ever wonder? Some of us accidentally change our names in seventh grade** (sorry, ma), but even before that, remembering that the baby is an actual human, not a doll, and might have their very own set of distinct wishes and preferences and desires is a lesson we’re gonna get at some point. Why not start early, and not make the baby work really hard through acts of heroic stubbornness to earn their autonomy?
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Just curious.
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Cultural conditioning is not a curse, nor is it evil, and nor is it unchangeable. Surely, we get strange responses when we ask questions outside of what is expected of us, but if we desire to leave the world better than we found it, asking better questions is a beautiful place to start.
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​<3
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How I got into this ranty-rabbit hole:
I’m working on a self-paced version of my Yoga & Pregnancy course, which is a semester long invitation to change the world (it’s not ready yet, but you can get the mini-perspective shifting bits here).
My acupuncturist just started a podcast about Traditional Chinese Medicine + fertility + essence/gender, which has been blowing my mind.
I’m taking a course with Kelly Diels, whose thought provoking emails get into my inbox on the weekly.
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Onward,
K
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PS: Next week I’ll probably talk about My Next Book, unless something more timely supersedes it.
**PPS: I did, in fact, rename myself in seventh grade. I went from a private, utopian elementary school named Rivendell (seriously... as in... the home of the Elves {the superior & graceful & immortal} in The Lord of the Rings) to Boltz Junior High School where the first thing we did after sitting in weird desk things was take attendance.
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Because the teachers did not know their students.
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The other kids corrected the teachers by sharing their nicknames "Michael?" "No, it's Mike." "Elizabeth?" "No, it's Liz."
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So I followed along.
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"Karen?" "No, it's Kari."
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And that was it.
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I had changed my name.
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(Humans are weird)
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Know someone who would enjoy reading? Please invite them along.
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