From birth I've always been the tomboyish type, always hated wearing dresses, wanted toy guns for probably the first 10 or so birthdays, wore cowboy boots with shorts, etc. I am still carry vestiges of this persuasion in my preference for pants (see Low-Rider Jeans post), and it takes something on the magnitude of a dear friend's wedding in order for me to (1) wear a dress or (2) wear makeup.

I am not at all interested in home decor, except that I like spare and lots of wood, and my husband, who shares my Shaker-ish taste--is the one who peruses the catalogs and asks me whether I prefer the Roman or the balloon shades, as if I would possibly be able to parse the difference. Again, I dislike ornate, overly girly, and find our house's naturalistic atmosphere (grass cloth on the walls, bamboo stuff, natural wool rugs) to be soothing.

Less soothing is the recent arrival of unintended irony of my life: being surrounded by flowers.

Here is a book that was recommended to me, looks great, I intend to read it through fully and review it:

And here is a fertility yoga DVD, the program of which I love and find supremely relaxing:



Look at those stamens! Those pistils! I understand flowers are a paradigm of fertility, and what woman doesn't like flowers, even virtual ones? Well, we are forgetting something here: my husband, the man, is intricately involved in this family making journey. Having flowers as a symbolic stand-in for fertility issues only reinforces the stereotype that children are the purview of the woman, and by feminizing it, however prettily,it trivializes this issue.

To wit: how about this, something as serious as Harvard's Mass General Hospital? Here's what I found smack dab on their page about their Reproductive services:



Somehow, I doubt their page for the Endocrinology services has flowers on it. To me this is as annoying as when I went in for a prenatal visit when pregnant with my son and having the nurse coo at me, "Is Mommy here for her tummy check?"

To which I replied, "If you mean measuring the height of the fundus, then yes."

Just because to many this is the woman's deal, the woman's problem, let's not flower it up and trivialize it, please...