The Untitled Blog Post (Raquel)
Does anyone else have trouble coming up with titles for their blog posts?I just discovered that I posted this without a title and it’s been up for…well, for minutes! Shocking, isn’t it…
A few months ago we tore the house apart. In the process the girls got their own room and I got the room that used to be the study. Since I was moving all my stuff it seemed the ideal time to organize and arrange it properly.
A few days after I moved into the new room the Ben-Ezras came over to help move bunkbeds. I was showing Gabrielle all my books–finally unpacked and in one place. Seth stuck his head in and announced, “It’s a cute room.” What? You don’t understand, cute is next-door to girly, and I don’t go there. Excuse me, there’s even a sword hanging on the wall. When I pointed this out he declared the sword ‘cute’ as well, and thereafter when he was annoying Gabrielle I freely offered her the loan of my ‘cute sword’ to chase him around with.
Later I looked around my room and realized it is kind of girly. Not in a flowers and pink hearts kind of way–perhaps I should say it’s feminine. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s there from the tea bag wrapper I saved just because it’s pretty, to the origami cranes (or swans?) Gabrielle made out of bulletins, to the pictures stuck on my closet door, even to the sword hanging above my shelf made of wooden crates.
I find this intriguing because Gabrielle and I have discussions about what it means to be feminine, and we’ve never come up with a good definition. We can say what it’s not, but it’s really hard to hammer out details in way we could communicate to anyone else. But it seems that I am feminine even when I’m not trying. This doesn’t surprise me very much, but it does seem that if I can do it I should be able to explain it. But it doesn’t work that way. Some things are very hard to explain without demonstrating.