This is a child-free zone
This has become something of a discussion within my family. I am the weird one, the one who is 32 with no children to show for it, the one who held off until it seems unlikely anyone will ever call her anything but auntie. I’ve told them and told them: I might one day adopt a child… preferably one that has finished college and is currently looking for a job.
I’d like to say first that I love children. I really do. I have fourteen nieces and nephews at last count… which could be wrong because they don’t much like holding still long enough to be counted. That said… I am never fucking having kids. This is a simple enough philosophy. I helped out with some of my nieces and nephews – read ‘played mommy while mommy was off doing her military crap or when mommy was just too damned stressed to deal’ – I enjoyed being a part of their childhoods. Once, not so long ago, I even looked forward to the day when I had my own little ball of brat to thrust upon my unsuspecting and oldest nephew (payback is a bitch). Then, one day, that urge simply died.
Okay, well, I know it wasn’t a simple or quick thing. In fact, it must have been coming on for quite some time. Quietly, in grocery stores and Best Buy, in the local Petsmart, at the BX… You see, you can only get hit so many times by a toddler who, for some reason, has been given a shopping cart to play with or see so many children throwing jars of spaghetti sauce in the aisle while having a screaming fit for that sugary cereal with the vampire on the front before you start to question if you ever want a child at all. In my day, driving a shopping cart intentionally into a stranger hard enough to leave giant welts on their sides and legs while screaming ‘OUT OF THE WAY!’ would have been answered instantly and without remorse by my mother.
I watch these parents and think ‘What the fuck?’ all too often. They do not discipline their children. They talk to them in soft, calm voices about ‘proper choices’ and ‘please don’t do that; it’s not polite’. As if they are having a discussion with another adult. And it is fucking contagious. That is what I fear the most. Looking in the mirror after having the damned kid and realizing I’ve become one of those twats who stares at their children with soft, doe eyes while the kid grabs a stranger’s ass and say ‘isn’t he cute?’(this also happened to me and I almost kicked a field goal with the little shit-head. Five seconds later, it would have been his mother). No. It is NOT FUCKING CUTE! It is creepy and uncomfortable because I don’t WANT a goddamned five-year old goosing me. You should not be fucking laughing because your damn child doesn’t even have a damned dick yet and he is already practicing for rapist’s school.
These incidences routinely lead me to ask that same question over and over in the course of a day if I have more than one errand to run… or even if I just spend more than an hour on base. What the fuck are they doing? Seriously? I really want an answer to that question. You do realize that this idiot child of yours is going to turn into an idiot adult and this is YOUR FAULT? You are the damn parent. You are expected to turn this little pile of playdoh into something resembling a human being with limits and disciplines. We have enough drug addicts and thieves and rapists and little Britney Spears wannabes. Grow the fuck up and do something about your kids because the next time I feel that hand on my ass in the middle of the video store, I’m gonna shove a Sponge Bob Squarepants DVD down the little fucker’s throat.
Further more, do not let your idiot child walk out in front of my car because you are in the house sucking off your husband’s best friend while he is deployed. I am sick to death of slamming on the breaks because some five-year old has just tottered out in front of my fucking car. If I hit him, would you even notice?
Chances are, I am no-one’s idea of a good mother, although my dogs and horse are sure a hell of a lot better trained than some of these kids (my dog only sticks his nose in your ass if you happen to be naked and my husband). I didn’t turn out perfect. What the fuck fun would that be? I am violent, sometimes to the point of scaring random people into choosing different routes to work or home when they meet me on the highways and have the bad taste to A) get in front of me and do 30 in a 60 mph zone while talking on their cell phones and randomly leaning back to scream at their kids or B) make an even worse decision and tailgate me while flashing your lights because you are too pussy to pass and I am doing the speed limit. If anyone you have done that to has ever slammed on their brakes, stuck their head out the window and begun a long and detailed account of why you are going to have something – preferably their car – slammed up your ass, then you have probably met me. Congratulations. I am so protective of my nieces and nephews that, in my home town, I am the bitch that will hunt you down and eat out your heart for fucking with them. I have a deviant sexual appetite – which my husband happily keeps in check. I am, in fact, both a noxious hell-bitch and, at the same time, a sweetheart with more self controversies than Micheal Jackson. Still. Even I have enough damned sense to know when a kid is being cute or when they need a good ass kicking (chill out, an ass kicking can simply be taking away the Wii or 360… that might actually hurt MORE than a backhand and is far more effective, I’m sure).
I am (usually) a responsable adult. Because my parents made me that way through multiple years of discipline. Never once was there a whispered conversation in the middle of McDonalds about how I would get an ice cream if I would just, please, this once, not throw a tantrum. Hell, I didn’t even get to go to McDonalds. I was fed at home and I damn well liked it. I have witnessed this, as well as the spaghetti sauce incident, by the way. It was the most disturbing thing I think I have ever seen. Remember that movie ‘Children of the Corn’? This was worse, perhaps because the mother in question looked as though she would gladly beat the crap out of her daughter if someone would just come take the little brat.
This incident took place at the BX, standard entertainment for any of us overseas with little or no money for actually going someplace good. You go, even if you don’t need anything, because you don’t have anything better to do. My husband was in Afghanistan and I went to the BX in the desperate hope that this would stave off a few more hours of the sentence without the usual blank look at T.V. and computer while wondering what the hell I was supposed to do without him. This was the very first time I ever suffered in his absence, because I’m not like that. I’m okay on my own because I have a terribly vivid imagination and enjoy listening to music so loud the windows shake… and it is rare I need anyone besides the voices in my head. Anyway, here I am, minding my own business, when this mother sits down beside me with her devil child (we’ll call her Becky) and her devil child in training (an infant in a stroller). The little girl proceeds to inform her mother that she wants ice cream, not the pizza she had. This was pretty much the conversation.
Becky: I want ice cream.
Mother: After you eat your pizza.
Becky: I want it now (cue the chubby little hand slam on cheap, wobbly table)
Mother: Well you need to eat that first.
At this point, little Becky threw herself on the filthy floor of the food court in a screaming rage, kicking everything, including the baby stroller with her sibling in it, as hard as she could. The infant, of course, starts screaming.
Mother (in very tired, strained, helpless tone): We had this talk in the car, Becky. If you don’t stop that right now, I’m taking you back to the car and we are going home without any ice cream at all.
This affects dear little Becky not at all. I think, in fact, this was a common, well known play. Her screaming does, in fact, get louder. Her face turns a peculiar and interesting shade of puce. Now she is not only kicking and screaming, but trying to spread herself out enough to hit the surrounding tables where people sat, gallantly trying to ignore this charade. I think if I would have offered her mother a knife at that point, she would have gladly slit her own throat and I couldn’t blame her. I wanted to have ear plugs. I wanted to grab her child up off the ground and proceed to give her ass a little of my mother’s logic. But I refrained. Because prison orange does not go with red hair.
Mother: I swear I will take you back to the car.
Becky’s screams have hit that note that only a particularly nasty and spoiled brat can hit – doesn’t matter what age they are, they can hit it every time – at which people nearby go into spastic seizures, heads explode, and other children look around to see if there is anyway they can use this to their advantage by joining in. She may be screaming ice cream, but any words are lost in the high pitch, there is only that endless shrieking.
Mother: Fine, I’ll get your damn ice cream, but you are never coming to the BX again.
Becky got her ice cream and I saw them a week later having this same episode at pretty much the same table. My first response was to jump verbally up and down on the mother, flaming her to anyone who would listen as a spineless sack of shit who ought to have her hole sewn up so that the demons of hell crawling out of it would be unable to escape. Now I still am verbally abusing of this lady, but mostly because she was listening to one of those idiots with a doctorate in child care… yet no children. I never once hit or otherwise touched my nieces and nephews in anger. Yet, at the age of sixteen, I understood how children work. I understood, in short, the theory of manipulation. Every fucking book you can get on raising a child in this day and age is so saccharine sweet it makes me want to puke and not one of them works half as well as giving a child a good reason to fear that his video console is about to become mulch when it gets fed to the lawnmower (never did it. Never HAD to; my nephew just saw that I most definitely would and was very quick to change the attitude). As if there is anything sweet or angelic about children. Anyone who knows them knows they are all little demons or capable of being such. That is not to say I don’t love them (like loves like) just that they have to learn to grow up and NOT be demons. At least, not all of the time.
Several mothers I know employ the time out as a way of pretending they are actually doing something with their kids, as if this is proof enough that they did not just have the baby so they could dress it, feed it, play with it like little girls and their cabbage patch dolls which they then toss aside when it stops being cute enough to draw ooooohhhhss and aaaaawwwwwssss. Time out? Seriously, if my mother had tried that crap, I would have been the boss of our house before I could walk or talk in full sentences. See, time out would not have made me more compliant, it would have given me much needed quiet time to figure out just how to make things go my way. I was a genius among brats, just so you know.
My point – if I have any, and I so rarely do – is that I shall not be having any form of mini me in the near future, which should, if you have read this whole blog, give you the warm fuzzies inside. Because I might raise a demon child of my own, but I might do it on purpose just so I can watch my nasty little viper stomp all over yours. Given that I routinely punched boys and made them cry as a child, and that my sisters are very much like me – there is one even meaner – I would say that this wouldn’t even have to be something I worked toward, but something that was as genetic as the green eyes and red hair every female in my family has inherited except one (she’s a blond, my niece, but she is also the meanest of the lot. She’s like a little pit bull, and OH, how I love her… she is my kindred spirit). On the off chance you got lucky and my child picked up some of its daddy’s softness… well, I’m sure I could still manage to fuck it up somehow. So I’ll stick to that dream of finding a college graduate to adopt so I can have the pleasure of telling it right off the bat “go get your own digs; mommy wants to give daddy a tongue bath”:D
