defining silence

I posted this on a horse forum (of all places to post a CF type rant…) in a topic that was discussing why people can’t seem to understand the lack of desire to have children. These are my thoughts on that lovely subject..

Society reveres having kids. Pregnancy and childbirth is seen as the ultimate..and sometimes *only* right of passage for women. If you don’t have kids or subscribe to the idea that having children is the most wonderful thing on the planet; you’re weird, selfish, sick, immature and any number of things that people can come up with.

The baby/child worship and centricity in this world is sickening and very disturbing. I saw a commercial about cervical cancer the other day, and the first thing mentioned was how “she may not be able to have kids”. That’s devastating? How about the fact that she may DIE. That it could KILL HER. Media/doctors/etc tell people to quit smoking for your children, lose weight for your children, fight the cancer for you children. What about yourself? What about wanting to live a long and healthy life for YOURSELF?

I recently went to the local Women’s Health Clinic to get a low cost IUD. I saw close to 40-50 women in that their EACH time I was there. And every.single.one had at least one child with them, was pregnant, or was talking about their children. ALL of these women were in their late teens/early twenties. One of the nurses told me I was the most intelligent young women she had ever seen working there – and she’d been working there for YEARS. How sad is that? 40 women per day, 5 days a week is 200 women a week. 200 women is roughly 800 women per month. 9600 women a year. Out of almost 10,000 women. I was the most intelligent young women she’d come across in that clinic. That’s sad. That’s heartbreaking.

If society didn’t worship babies and motherhood, if choosing to not have children was seen as a valid choice was actually portrayed in the media; I bet more women would wait. Wait until they had finished school, were financially stable and in loving, long term relationships (and that doesn’t mean they HAVE to be married). I bet there would be less children in this world being beaten, abused and killed by parents that believed the lie that it’s different when their your own. It’s NOT always different, sometimes, most of the time, it’s the same.

Lest anyone think I hate children and motherhood; I don’t. I think kids can be awesome. I can’t wait to share my passion and love for horses with a child (not my own, someone else’s!) I think mothers; the ones that give of themselves selflessly and don’t except praise and congratulations and worship everywhere they turn; are wonderful. I think they make the world a better place by raising productive members of society.

I stumbled across a topic on a mommy board last night about strollers. The poster that started the topic couldn’t really believe how unhelpful people are when you have a stroller (not opening doors, not moving out of the way).

1. I don’t open doors for strollers. Why? I’ve been run over by them more times then I care to count. Having a stroller loaded with kids, coats, shopping and any other manner of things rammed into your knee HURTS damnit. Not opening doors for them ensures that I stay far away from them.

2. I can’t move out of the way if I don’t know you’re there. Really, I can’t. A woman in mall a couple of years back got quite indigent with me when I wouldn’t move out of her way. Apparently she’d been standing behind me for “FIVE WHOLE MINUTES” waiting for me to magically move out of the way. The problem with her standing there for “FIVE WHOLE MINUTES” was that – I didn’t know she was there. She never said a single word to me. Trust me, if I KNOW you’re there, I will move, as quick as I can. I don’t want to be near a stroller anymore then I want to be next to a poisonous snake.

Some of the other posters on this thread had a complaint to make about the absolutely gigantic “SUV” strollers. I agree with them. Whole heartedly. Unless your traversing over rough terrain (and lets face it, how many parents are actually going to do that?), there’s no need to have strollers that are built like an off road vehicle. Other posters countered that the umbrella strollers were “too small” “couldn’t fit all their stuff” and “were more cost effective” (HOW?!)

The third thing that jumped out at me as I read on in sordid fascination, was a complain from a few women about how stores are not “stroller accessible”, that their preciouses could easily reach out and grab things off the shelves. One woman said that she regularly found clothing tags in the seat of her son’s stroller when she got done shopping. K, so, YOU can’t control your kid? And you want the store to change their layout (thereby making the amount of merchandise they can fit in the store less) so that you don’t have to do your JOB; which is parent your kid? Another woman pointed out that if a store was not stroller accessible then it wasn’t wheelchair accessible either. I beg to differ. Wheelchairs have great maneuverability then the mammoth size strollers that are so popular. They also don’t contain toddler brats with lazy parents that grab at anything and everything.

I understand that strollers are great to keep tired and cranky kids contained. But really, buy the smaller ones. They do exist; even if you have two kids! My mom had a two seater for my brothers that was no more wider then a one seater, just longer. And it worked perfectly! And if you have more then two kids that need to be in a stroller at a time? Maybe you should slow down a bit. The human species IS supposed to be smarter then rabbits.

Something I’ve noticed that’s becoming prevalent across the interwebs and the world is the changing of word definitions. The unrelenting attacks that come when you dare to use a word that parents have deemed to mean something else, the way it’s supposed to be used is quite frankly, ridiculous.

When I post on forums and blogs and I don’t know the gender of a kid I use “it” in place of “he” or “she”. I don’t get close enough to infants or pay enough attention to very small kids to figure out if they’re a boy or girl. If I can hear a kid screaming at the top of it’s lungs I’m most certainly not going to hunt it down and figure out what gender it is. I’m going to run the other way. I know of many other childfree that use “it” the same way.

The angst that parents display at having their precious darlings called “it” is quite funny really. They inevitably whine about how their child is not an inanimate object so is not an it. Well, yes, yes it is an it. Because I don’t know the gender! And I don’t care!

According to Merriam Webster, one of the many definitions of it is:

a person or animal whose sex is unknown or disregarded ,

1. Unknown – means I just plain don’t know.
2. Disregarded – means I just plain don’t CARE.

So, parents, seriously. Just chill. Your darlings will not suffer severe psychological damage because some stranger they never have and never will meet has called them an it on the internet.

I was recently a member of a forum that surrounded the subject of etiquette. A poster, posted a topic asking if we members of the forum thought that a cashier had been rude to her that day. The way the story was told; she went to the grocery store; with food stamps in hand, to buy groceries for her family (her husband, herself and two children). In addition to the groceries she bought with the tax payers dollars, she bought a $100 single cup coffee maker. Upon arriving at the cash register, with $100 coffee maker clutched to her chest, she proclaimed that she was so excited to be purchasing it. The cashier’s response “Must be nice”.

The forum members went into a tizzy. Yes of COURSE the cashier was rude! How dare she speak the truth! How dare she make a judgment about another person while working her minimum wage job!

I, and a few others; thought differently. That SHE (the poster) was the rude one. Rude for buying an expensive luxury item while on the government dole.

Now; I don’t begrudge someone that’s going through hard times splurging a bit here or there. Lord knows I’d go crazy if I didn’t. But..two points…

1.) You can get a multiple cup coffee maker for $15 bucks from Wal-Mart or Target. (But it’s too haaaaaaarrrrrrd to make a single cup with one of those).
2.) When you purposely put yourself in a situation where you will more then likely be on the goverment dole PERMANENTLY? You have great big ones to splurge on a $100 something thats NOT a necessity. (But this is cheaper then Dunkin’ Donuts coffee everyday! Yeah, and, you shouldn’t be wasting precious cash on that either!)

Last week a wonderful and beautifully well written article by Janice Turner was published on Times Online.

I find the below most interesting because I’ve faced a taste of this a few times myself:

At 86 my parents don’t get out much, but once a week they like to have lunch at the café of their local supermarket. Since both now walk with a stick — my ma is registered disabled, my dad recovering from a stroke — they need to park close to the store.

But this week the disabled places were all full so they took the nearest one, a parent-and-child bay. Later they returned to their car to find a note pinned to the windscreen.

“This is not a disabled space,” it said. “This is for parents, you stupid old bastards.” So, it appears that some young and able-bodied mother or father — the note, of course, was anonymous — thought that their own inconvenience in having to walk small children a few yards farther across a car park took precedence over the needs of the elderly couple they had clearly observed struggling inside. And they were so enraged by this injustice that they took out a Biro and penned words calculated to scare or shame them into line.

A few months ago I was at the local Old Navy and lucked out at a spot right in front of the store. This spot was a regular parking spot, not handicap and no “parent and child” sign in site. As I was carefully extracting myself from my truck while protecting my bad knee, an SUV filled with a child in every seat pulled up, and the mother (I’m assuming) demanded I move my truck so that she didn’t have to wrangle 6 kids across the parking lot. I politely declined and went on my way. She was furious.

“How could I refuse her request? She has chiiiilllldddreeeen.”

My answer to this declaration is always a raised eye brow and a “So?” I’ve yet to have anyone explain to me exactly why them having children trumps anything else.

I will park in the parent and child spots if I need to. My knee and being able to walk the rest of the day trumps a lazy “parent” not wanting to supervise little Johnny as they walk across the scary parking lot.

We live in a world that revolves around children. Everything must be “child safe”, “child friendly” and “child accessible”.

One can no longer have a romantic dinner at a fancy restuarant without hearing the “quiet fussing” of an infant or the “happy” babble of a toddler; even at 9pm at night, when said children should be in bed, asleep. Seeing a rated R movie without it being interrupted by a child that’s far to young to see whatever scary thing is on the screen is a thing of the past. Libraries are no longer quiet places of tranquility where you can settle down with a good book, instead they’re indoor play grounds.

It has become acceptable to change diapers in full few of the public; not only is this disgusting, but the poor child gets no privacy! It has also become acceptable to flash ones breast while breastfeeding and to scream discrimination and hold “nurse ins” when discreetly asked to cover up because you’re disturbing other patrons.

I’d love to go back to a time when adults and not children were the center of things. When it was not acceptable to bring a baby into a bar, or set your kids loose on an unsuspecting restuarant, or use the street as a playground.