Nothing to See Here…

Have you ever encountered a rabid group of {insert political interest here} in your internet wanderings?

I’m a big message board person. In fact, I was way into message boards well before the internet had made it out of the science labs and universities. Back in the 80s, with my 1200-baud dial-up modem (shut-up!), I would connect to message boards and read and post messages. They were all local, because who wanted to dial long distance? And only one person could be connected at a time, so there would be nights where I would redial my favorite boards for hours getting busy signals before I would finally get through. I remember when the first 2-line board came out (2 people connected! at one time!) and later 4 and 8 line boards (chat! up to 8 whole people in one chat session!).

But I digress…

Back in 2001, I joined an internet message board meant for crabby pregnant women all due in January of 2002. It was a place for us to safely complain since if we unloaded ALL of the bullshit at home, our husbands would divorce us and then who would change the diapers, right? So I’ve been hanging out with these ladies for a long time on a parenting community. One of the forums on the parenting community is a debate board. We debate everything. I swear, we’d debate toe-lint if someone started a thread (and somehow, it would be the born-again Christians against everyone else and the Republicans against the Liberal Democrats and, well, someone would call her opponent a nazi, and you know the drill, right?).

Once we were debating Michael Jackson and an entire virtual swarm of people from some Michael Jackson fan club swooped down and told us how wonderful he was and how wrong we were about him and how they would TOTALLY let their 7 year old sons spend the night in his bed.

But I digress (again!)…

There was a thread on this debate board eons ago, started by moi’, where we debated the topic of children out and about in the world. It was my position that there were many cranky people who gave dirty looks when a child would do anything remotely child-like in a restaurant. The example I used, if I recall, was my 2 year old in a high chair dropping her spoon over and over. We had been out to eat the night before I posted this and my toddler had played this game with me and I was happy to play it because it was a quiet game and it kept her from lobbing biscuits at the other patrons’ heads while they enjoyed their nice pancake meals. But this old man next to us - whom my daughter was attempting to charm the bowtie off of - was giving us venomous looks. He obviously felt I was lax in my parental responsibilities for not teaching my 2 year old to stop dropping the spoon over and over. It should be mentioned that this all occurred around 5PM on a Friday at a restaurant which would share the same Zagat’s quality rating as, say, Denny’s, and offered balloons and crayons to its smaller patrons along with a pancake that had a face made out of chocolate chips and whiped cream. In other words, it was not exactly haute cuisine.

This debate thread, then, got rather heated because even though it was a parenting community, we had somehow attracted some rabid CHILDFREE advocates who wanted to tear us (or maybe just me) all to pieces. Up until then, I had never even heard the term childfree. I was amused to learn that I was a breeder (well, yeah, I suppose it’s true). Wikipedia covers some of the controversy, and you can easily Google up some of the other amusing terminology used by the childfree, such as Moo (female breeder, mostly because she’s about as smart as a cow), Sperm-and-Egg-Omelette (a baby), or Crotchfruit (a child).

In any event, as I learned of the existence of these people and how badly they really hated, resented, deplored me (personally, I thought they were jealous of my adorable children! haha)and my overactive uterus, I took up a defense against their miscategorization of several things. Now, I’m not writing this post to get into the nitty-gritty of the child-free and their attitudes about my uterus and my family planning decisions. Not gonna go there.

In fact, I’m writing this post in support of them. See, I’m thinking about switching teams.

This past weekend, we went out for breakfast with the three little ones. Not unusual - we typically go out to eat at least once if not, say, for every freaking meal on the weekends. But yesterday, ack! We were at another fine Denny’s-like establishment and it was a freaking nightmare! The 20-month-old is either teething or possibly possessed by Satan, I’m not sure which. She insisted that her cup of milk with its bendy straw should be handled like a sippy cup and tipped upward with each drink, spilling milk all down the front of her multiple times. I think I must have been shooting laser beams from my eyeballs because she screamed every time I looked at her. The four-year-old did not want to sit in her chair and preferred sprawling in the aisle and pulled the dead-weight-wet-noodle maneuver each time we tried to pick her up (how effective is that maneuver?). As well, she insisted on handling all application of butter and jelly herself using her chewed-up bendy straw to spread the substances on her biscuit. If the nine year old would have sang the annoying song from High School Musical one more time (I’m beginning to hate Tivo), I think I might have duct-taped her mouth shut. I was so tense and when the food finally came, we ate in eleven seconds flat just so we could get the hell out of there.

So, after that fiasco, I’ve reconsidered the value proposition of the child-free mentality and I just have one question: If I saved my hospital receipts, can I return the little crib-lizard along with the nose-miner and the other crotch-cricket for a full refund? Please?

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