To feel at times that I live on an entirely different planet to other MNers?

[RozDoyle]

I'm not criticising. This place is great. I have had some amazingly advice and support from people here and it's brilliant. But sometimes i feel like I live in a completely different world to a lot of posters here. I probably won't articulate this very well but I'm going to have a bash.

Examples:

• little boys in dresses/the whole "gender neutral" thing. Literally all the parents I know irl just dress their kids in clothes typical to their sex i.e. Boys wear "boys clothes" and girls wear "girls clothes" and nothing is ever said about it. I have never seen a little boy in a dress, for example, because they'd likely be told not to wear a dress in case they were teased. Sad, but true..

• parents who cook every single meal from scratch. Always mega healthy and nutritious, and talk about it like it's the norm. In my world, most parents work and are simply too busy to cook from scratch every night (or too tired). No one "batch cooks" at the weekend. Its just whatever they can chuck in the oven after a hard day.

• how quick people are to shout "LTB". Now I should emphasise that I am not talking about cases of violence, cheating etc. But things like, a husband not pulling his weight around the house. In my experience, most people can't, and don't want to, leave their husbands, to whom they have children, for issues such as that. It's an extreme solution and it makes me wonder if these same people would really walk out of their marriage over such trivial matters.

I'm sure I have loads more examples but I can't think of them right now. Just wondered if anyone else feels this way?

Does anyone remember the poster who owned an Island? Was it Xenia? She had a £250,000 a year job too.

She is still about under a different name. I don't know her personally but from a shared industry etc I can confirm that she is broadly who she portrays online.

...and afaik she has since sold the island.

@StevieNicksMirage -

I'm amazed at how few people cook from scratch most days. Dinner yesterday was a stir fry. Chopping veg took max 10 minutes as things like sugar snaps, baby corn, bean sprouts don't need chopping. On the table in 20 minutes

See, I wouldn't call that "cooking from scratch". I'd call that DH making the tea. To actually cook from scratch (hate the phrase), I'd expect you to be making your own sauces or boning a chicken. Homemade soup and baking your own bread etc. i suspect there is widespread confusion on MN about this!

I did make my own sauce for the stirfry. The only type of soup I eat is homemade. I sometimes make my own bread to go with it but often don't. I most definitely don;t bone chickens as I 'm a vegetarian.

To my mind, cooking from scratch means not using packets/jars/frozen stuff. Sometimes it's elaborate and takes ages. Other times it's quick and easy.

Dinner this evening is a feta and spinach pie served with salad. I draw the line at making filo pastry but would still consider it as cooking from scratch (although I would never use that term in real life as it's completely naff). Funnily enough, I wouldn't consider it cooking from scratch if I made a pie using frozen puff or shortcrust pastry. I think the difference is that it's possible to make both without specialist equipment but I would think filo requires some serious roller type thingy to get it that thin.

I'm kind of with you on the cooking. If I worked full time, I'd cook from scratch a lot less.

The other things in the O.P. though.... Most people who defend things like boys' right to wear a dress etc are not saying that because they actually know any boys who wear dresses. So their actual life experience of such things is probably no different from yours. It's just that they think there is no actual reason to stop a boy from wearing a dress (quite rightly so).

And as for the LTB thing. I think that about 99% of the women advised on MN to LTB really should LTB. There seem to be a quite astonishing amount of lazy arseholes, abusive wankers and feckless losers about. Who on earth would want to be or stay married to one?

I think that when a lot of people post on MN they are posting what they would do on their best day, not what they are doing today.
So when asked about food they will tell you what they would cook if they had the stuff and the energy rather than the much simpler meal they are about to fling together.
They will tell you they wouldn't put up with their OH doing something but are already putting up with something else.
They will tell you their parenting stratagies but they may be fantasy ones or one they know they should do and did once but is not really part of their daily routine.

Its not the same as lying exactly and lots don't realise they are doing it.

The only thing Il say to your Op is please, please, PLEASE watch 'no more boys and girls' on BBC iPlayer.
That 'harmless' drip drip gendered stuff we feed our kids is damaging. In a nutshell it harms girls self esteem and turns them off 'boy job' (pilot, engineer, etc), and makes them believe they're terrible at maths and science.
We turn our little boys into emotionless beings who can't express themselves, look at the suicide rate in this country for men vs women, and the rate of male vs female prisoners.

@MorrisZapp oh god, so much this! I sometimes feel quite sorry for any woman who is pregnant with her first baby and reading here. I think I would have felt even more inadequate than I already did!

I know plenty of boys who wore dresses as preschoolers. DS wore dresses from time to time until he was 5 or so. It wasn't a big deal in the slightest.

Re the SAHM / WOHM threads, I think a lot of people speak more freely on the internet than they would in real life

Generally, I find MN an interesting insight into how other people live

I think i would leave most of the husbands I hear about on here. In a heartbeat. But then my tolerance for stupid lazy arrogant men is very, very low...and a lot of the shit women think they have to put up with because they are married is horrendous.
The spa thing is something that I don't understand though. "Have a spa day" as a riposte to aforementioned lazy husband. I'm not even completely sure what a spa is. I think of it as a place where they beat you with birch twigs and feed you lettuce.
I don't fancy it.

I think i would leave most of the husbands I hear about on here. In a heartbeat. But then my tolerance for stupid lazy arrogant men is very, very low...and a lot of the shit women think they have to put up with because they are married is horrendous.

This X 100

@mogulfield

We turn our little boys into emotionless beings who can't express themselves, look at the suicide rate in this country for men vs women

Not quite that simple, women are more likely to attempt suicide. Men and women tend to pick different methods, the methods women use often leave more time for them to be found and treated and there has also been more success at reducing access to/eliminating the methods women have tended to use - changes to the gas supply and selling paracetamol in smaller packs.

I find MN amazing. I think what's cool about it is that we tend to live in a bit of a bubble in our RL most of the time, but MN is such a melting pot - even if it seems a bit as if there's a party line.

I live in a very lefty progressive bubble, so I find the MN line on gender agonising - it feels as shocking to me as hearing white people use the 'n' word some days. I do know parents raising gender neutral kids (although not the whole 'hiding which gender they are' thing - just gender neutral clothes, long hair etc). Being super careful with food is definitely a thing around my way - I don't cook with any kind of artificial additives or pre packaged food (although that's because I like cooking).

I think it's good for all of us to step out of the bubble and remember that other people live their lives differently.

I do find the cries of LTB pretty surprising at times. I guess maybe it's that we all have different dealbreakers and on a site like MN I'm sure you'll always hit someone's dealbreaker with any tale of relationship woe.

VioletHaze why though is "gender neutral" always about long hair on boys and mud colours on girls. If people are raising truly gender neutral children, then nothing would have an inherent gender to neutralise anyway.

MN is just a window into other people's lives.

Normally we live and socialise with like-minded people - that is blown apart when you come on MN and see how vastly different many people live, compared with you, and your friends and family.

It's such an eye-opener.

I think i would leave most of the husbands I hear about on here. In a heartbeat. But then my tolerance for stupid lazy arrogant men is very, very low...and a lot of the shit women think they have to put up with because they are married is horrendous.

Completely.

LTB is one of the best things about MN.

It's the only place on the internet - probably in the world - where women are routinely told that they don't have to put up with shit if they don't want to.

They don't have to LTB, but they can if they want to.

Nowhere else are women told that. I think that's pretty amazing.

WomblingThree - well, some do different things, of course, depending on the child. I guess I just see long hair on boys more often, probably because a lot of parents find baby curls cute, and mud colours are what's easiest to find without heavily gendered iconography.

I dunno. I am probably a bit more eclectic than that - I am find with DD wearing girl clothes, boy clothes, neutral clothes, whatever. As long as they're comfy and let her run around. She has a spiderman costume and a princess dress. I think balance is key.

I am interested how many people who start threads with complicated stories can't drive.

I don't know if they can't drive because their lives are a long string of complications or if their lives are a long string of complications because they can't drive, but either way, learn to drive!

I do cook from
Scratch daily and so do most people I know

The other thing I find odd is the lack of or inability to communicate.

Most situations could be easily solved by people using the very basic technique of opening their mouths and speaking either face to face or over the telephone. It seems the more ways and tools there are to communicate with, the worse the ability to actually communicate becomes.

The thing I am always surprised about ok here is the number of SAHMs, especially of school age kids. I only know of 3 women around my age who gave up work and all of them went back once their kids were school age. On here, there's almost an assumption that you need a SAHMon.

We cook from scratch virtually every day. Seems normal to me

We batch cook too.

I'd like to know what you're feeding the kids every night if you don't cook from scratch and don't batch cook? Is there a way out if this relentless chore?!!!

Tell me now please

@wiltingfast I eat ready meals and frozen food. There you go.