It’s been a while since I’ve had time to write. I finally got a new job and being busy is a welcomed burden. When thinking about what I wanted to share with my friends who read WFTC, the unfolding of spring flowers and budding trees quickly lured me. I penned some flowery — all pun intended — prose about time change and season change and blah, blah, blah. I almost sounded bright-eyed and dreamy.

Thank God for cousins, co-workers, ice skates, and babies. I want to talk about parenting.

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m not a parent. I have no idea how hard it is to raise a child, but I’ve wiped enough adult behinds in my life to know that it’s not fun and somewhere between the taint and the balls, you gain a sort of protective pride for the ones you care for.

I get that much.

That said, my cousin invited my husband and me to her daughter’s second birthday party… to be held at an ice skating rink! Just what I wanted to do on a spring day — go ICE skating.

And there’s no good story to follow this, one in which I entertained a bunch of rink rats by tying my skates together and falling. No. I didn’t attend this milestone birthday.

At some point you get old enough to realize that it is sometimes good to do what you want, especially when there are sharp objects and screaming children involved.

I share my what-I-didn’t-do-this-weekend story with a co-worker who tells me how she spent part of her weekend visiting with her sister’s new baby. She explains that her sister made her wash her hands before holding the infant and that she can see in her sibling’s eyes that her own two children are nothing but hooligans.

I tell her that my cousin, the one who spawned the ice skater, was like that with her first. She used to tell me to wash my hands before I held the baby and I know she scowled when she smelled cigarette smoke on my clothes.

“In her defense,” my co-worker chimes in… oh, boy, I can’t wait to hear this!

She starts rambling about how smokers expel fiberglass and other particles for like 20 minutes after they smoke so I could give the baby some sort of life-threatening lung condition if I were to smoke and hold the baby just 10 minutes later while breathing.

Seriously?

My mother smoked while she was pregnant with me and all through my life. My zip-up footie pjs had butt-holes burned into them — telltale signs of love. Despite this, I say, “I think I turned out OK.”

My co-worker answers, “Well look at you now,” as if to say, You are a smoker, see.

Fine. I may be a smoker and I’ll give her the satisfaction of admitting that I probably prematurely started puffing because I watched my mother and it was partially a learned behavior. But now, decades later, it’s my own fault I smoke and, furthermore, if I do develop any lung conditions it’s certainly not because my mother held me when I was an infant less than 20 minutes after smoking.

You know what? Just stop having kids.

Children will be nothing but hand-sanitizer-slathered, bubble-brats protected from the world and, to be honest, a bunch of wimps. And while the rest of the world’s kids will be safe, nurtured, and protected from life’s harms, my kids will be meeting your kids on the playground, perhaps expelling this mysterious third-hand smoke they’ve picked up from Grandma on their way to school.

Chumps.

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Tags: diatribes, family & parenting // 3 Comments »