I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband

I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband themomoftheyear.substack.com

You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night.

604 points•minimaxir•4 days ago•241 comments•

#let #viral #clip #giants #mom #husband #giants clip #viral giants

241 comments

Very well written both in prose and tone. I'm glad she decided to tell this story. If the author isn't a professional writer I think she could be.

This is a great "behind the scenes" style look at the actual people behind a viral clip. Luckily they have an extremely strong relationship to help soften the blows here, I'm not sure an average (not even bad!) relationship could come out of something like this unscathed.

There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time, especially online from the safety of our screens. I found the announcers within the range of good fun but when it gets to people reaching out to break up their marriage or telling him to kill himself it becomes really sobering.

I think this is part of what people are calling the lonlieness epidemic - despite thousands of screaming voices the whole thing makes me feel hollow and hopeless.

st-keller4 days ago

„There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time“? You write this, as if this is just human and inevitable. But in my experience it’s a matter of character. People can train their body and they can work on self control. I really wish more people would try to become a better person.

itishappy4 days ago

Many instincts require self control to override, and character is your ability to to so.

Snap judgements are human and inevitable, but acting on them isn't.

I'm agreeing with you!

dividefuel4 days ago

I had my first kid a couple years ago and found myself spending a ton of time holding my kid while he slept, since it's the only way he'd reliably sleep. I spent a good amount of that time browsing various parenting and new baby subreddits.

One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.

I feel for moms, who in addition to giving birth and having their lives upended to raise a baby, are now told that not only are most men garbage, but their man is garbage too. I feel for the dads, who even if they work hard are told how useless they are, and have to combat a stream of negativity fed to their spouse. It's a divisive wedge thrown into a new family, one that social media algorithms are only happy to encourage for engagement.

When I see instances like the one in this topic, I can see how the default narrative has been applied here. The radio announcers surely aren't aware of the storm they're creating, but it suddenly thrusts two average people into the social media spotlight, where people are happy to assume any missing details to fit their narrative. Everyone is going to apply the default story without taking any time to consider the possibility of other context.

EDIT TO ADD: I know there are manosphere spaces that are toxic too. As a man I've had no problem avoiding them, so this is one of my first extended exposures to this type of content, which is why it stuck with me. Probably also because I felt personally unwelcome as a dad.

qnleigh3 days ago

I'm imagining someone who actually did have a deadbeat father growing up then seeing messaging on social media about deadbeat men. Probably their social media feeds create a vicious cycle that only solidifies their distrust of men. It is just showing them things that they saw to be true since they were young children.

throw0101a4 days ago

> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.

You can find quite a lot of data showing that the burden of managing domestic matters falls primarily on women. I would recommend people check out the book Fair Play which examines the problem and puts forward a system where people are assigned various personal tasks that need to be done (there are 100 in total, not all of which may apply to your life/household):

> The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner.

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44071899-fair-play

* Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FfxfRMQkw

darknavi4 days ago

I really enjoyed Fair Play. While we didn't really prescribe to playing the game rigorously or really start keeping track of cards, it was a great read for our relationship and really made both of us look at how we lived our lives and acted in our relationship. We immediately made some small but lasting pivots that removed unneeded friction and now have new-found respect for each others daily "grind".

I've recommended it to a few friends and they have had similar stories. Nothing life changing, but some small, nice changes to the dynamic and how they think about it.

treis4 days ago

Eh, my marriage fell into this but it was because my ex refused to get a job, didn't think men were equally capable of parenting, and frankly invented a lot of work. It doesn't help that doctors, teachers, nurses, other parents, schools, and so talked to her by default. To be a truly equal parent or a primary parent as a father is swimming against the current.

CMay4 days ago

People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.

Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.

You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.

It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.

If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.

the_gipsy4 days ago

> It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US

It's the USA eating itself and trying to attack Europe, if anything. It's American fascist billionaires who own, buy, and steer these social networks.

joinHNtheysaid4 days ago

A family is a autonomous unit, in theory capable of survival without society for a while. For those who marry the state to receive alimony from the taxpayer this independent union is a blatant declaration of war.

1potato4 days ago

Giants fan here. Watched the game. Even when it was happening and before knowing any of this, I could tell that Kruk and Kuip were going too far. It was starting to get super uncomfortable.

For those who aren't Giants/baseball fans, Mike Krukow (the Giants' color commentator) is retiring at the end of this season. He and Duane Kuiper have been the Giants' primary TV broadcast team for something like 37 years and have been best friends since they were teammates in the early '80s.

Krukow's mind is still sharp, but he has inclusion body myositis, and it's becoming unsafe for him to be anywhere other than at home.

It's just an emotional situation all around. They both thought that they would probably continue broadcasting together for at least a few more years, and now they're not.

So they're pulling out all of their usual schticks -- including poking fun at the fans -- and taking them really, really far because they know it's the last time.

I'm sure they would agree they went a little too far with that one.

snovymgodym4 days ago

A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them.

tsol4 days ago

Telling women they're being abused even when the woman herself disagrees is a very ironic pattern I see often. Somehow it's seen as anti-sexist and yet it puts the onus on the woman to justify herself like the case here where she wrote an entire article. What happened to letting women make their own choices? I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned, but I think a lot of people just want to spread their preferred narratives about the world.

jrm44 days ago

As a black man, I can't help but think of the whole Chris Brown thing here. Yes, I personally found what he did disgusting, and if everyone else obviously felt that way, I would keep that up.

But no -- I know too many Black women who have -- I suppose -- chosen forgiveness. Too many intelligent humans that I know or know of, are good with this for me to say "No, ladies, you are wrong."

pfortuny4 days ago

The father-mother-child-donkey conundrum. Its only solution is: to hell with anyone's thoughts, we'll act as we prefer.

alexjplant4 days ago

I had to look this up [1]:

> C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: "Remember the miller's donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, 'Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.' So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, 'What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.' Then both father and son rode, and people then said, 'Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.' So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, 'Here are two asses carrying another ass.' Then all three walked and people said, 'What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.' So let's go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say."

Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we've charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.

[1] https://www.actsweb.org/articles/article.php?i=295&d=2&c=6

darth_avocado4 days ago

It’s not only online. Just last weekend, someone heckled me at Costco because my wife was pushing a heavy ass cart while I was walking freely next to her. She chose to do it, I offered to take it and she refused. But somehow a random stranger had something to say about it.

Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.

IAmBroom4 days ago

I admired a man tending to his partner at a restaurant, and my then-girlfriend told me that she could tell from observing them that he was controlling, and his deference was purely performative.

Because "of similar situations she'd seen".

She had magically deep telepathic abilities, it seems.

hattmall4 days ago

Ok, but like were you offended, I feel like it's mostly a harmless slightly funny observation. I wasn't there but like were they really trying to be mean spirited with it? I live in the south and there's a pretty much constant running stream of public commentary on any and everything going on and 99.9% of it is friendly intentioned even if on the surface it's deriding. So really the idea of thinking someone is making a meaningful judgement is strange. And of course, even if they really were, why care?

geerlingguy4 days ago

Or speculation grows and a few hours later it's suddenly historical fact, like a modern version of telephone... just with a more harmful outcome.

everyone4 days ago

Is there any benefit to social media? Just seems like a new form of cancer we have to deal with now along with everything else.

pipes4 days ago

A place for those who would be marginalised by their own community, gay, religious apostates etc etc.

Communicating with relatives on the other side of the world.

Maintaining old friendships that would have died due to distance.

Somewhere to find like minded people.

Somewhere like hacker news (I count it as social media top) where I discovered great books, expanded my horizons and learnt that there were other ways at looking at the world.

Anyway, it's not all bad :)

gambiting4 days ago

I think it's not even that there's a benefit to it, it's that a lot of traditional communities that had their own forums are now exclusively on Facebook groups. I'm in several groups for mountain biking, for cars, for 3D printing, and those communities just don't exist anywhere else online other than small pockets with very little activity. Discord is the other one that has captured a bunch, but it's mostly centered around gaming, memes and tech.

readthenotes14 days ago

Homemade Dog videos. Not sure of anything else

ls6124 days ago

You can’t have the internet and the first amendment and not have social media, and I’d suggest both of the above are beneficial.

IAmBroom4 days ago

I live alone, and have friends throughout the US.

Social media kept me from attempting suicide during COVID. It helps me feel loved and connected.

Yeah, there are faults, but condemning it wholeheartedly is like suggesting we should abolish ICE cars immediately.

And suggesting we abandon it as a comment on a social media platform is ironically self-unaware.

hefner14564 days ago

If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.

Kinda off topic, but as a single Father I cant help but notice how much less of a support system Fathers get. When shit hits the fan its always people assuming the worst. A Fathers major support system is their Wives and Family. Good for him for having such a great Woman by his side... Im not complaining, just an observation

pixelatedindex4 days ago

> If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.

I’m not so sure, I’m convinced people would not bat an eye. Or at least I don’t expect any positive compliments, only neutral or negative.

hefner14564 days ago

That actually sounds more like it. It probably would have went unnoticed.

tegiddrone4 days ago

Yeah, it is complicated because we do live in a very misogynistic civilization with patriarchal privileges. It’s just often difficult not to overcompensate to counterbalance and resist these circumstances. Treat people as individuals instead of the archetypes.

As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern

tsol4 days ago

I'd argue making women do more labor by forcing them to write articles justifying their marriage is misogynistic as well. Its just in that case people see it as acceptable because they think it's fighting the patriarchy. But really the patriarchy is not disappearing because of this comments, it's just insulting a random woman based on nothing of substance. If someone tells a women to wear more clothing to protect herself from abuse that's considered sexist, I don't see how this is different. Everyone thinks it's for the best

anon2914 days ago

We consider it 'misogynistic' because women have more difficulty engaging in certain pursuits (career and enterprise) while more easy engaging in others (child-rearing, family life). It's because of our own bias that career and enterprise is worth more than family life that we say the world as a whole is 'misogynistic' instead of the truth, which is that some areas of life, it's easier to be a woman and in others a man.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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