Eggsclusion

Sometimes the reminders of invisibility leap up in unexpected places.

My partner and I were dyeing Easter eggs the other day. We’d bought a kit with dye tablets, stickers, and shrink-on decorated wrappers. Yes, regular food coloring works, too, but we thought our two-year-old son would have fun putting stickers on the eggs.

I pulled the sticker sheet out of the package, and there, amongst the bunnies and flowers, were two stickers labeled “Mom” and “Dad.” This threw me. Not that I mind having “Dad” there—it’s appropriate for some families, and easy enough to remove if we don’t want to use it. But as Abigail Garner noted about the Firefly phone, there’s an implicit message of exclusion here: a child is only “supposed” to have one mom and one dad.

I don’t like to complain without proposing a solution, though: The company should put at least two “Mom” and two “Dad” stickers on the sheet in the future, so each family can choose what’s right for it. Families with one mom and one dad simply get an extra pair of stickers.

Is that so hard?