Other People's Kids are fine. It's their parents I can't stand

When I was a teenager, I swore I was never getting married and never having kids, and I meant it...the irony here is out of a group of 4 of us that hung out, I am the only one who got married, had a kid and had to eat those insistent words of my youth.

My main reason for not wanting kids was because I was really not a fan of children in general. I'm an only child, so I never had a brother to convince me to stick my fingers in the spokes of a bike wheel before proceeding to spin the wheel as hard as possible, thereby losing a finger by bike-spoke amputation (like my dad did to his brother when they were kids), or a sister who stole all my clothes, read my diary and then tattled to my parents that I was smoking pot behind the gym when I was supposed to be at volleyball practice. I was fairly content to be an Only...I never longed for sibling and I'm sure my parents were thankful for that because after all the constant screaming and crying and no sleeping of my babyhood (my mother: "you did not sleep through the night for 2 years...TWO YEARS up being up half the night. Those people who said babies sleep all the time? LIE.) you could not have paid my poor mother to have another baby.

As a kid I was not a big fan of Other People's Kids either. I grew up in a great neighbourhood with lots of kids so there was always someone to ride bikes, play barbies or build forts with. Unfortunately there was that one mom aka Crazy Lady (aptly named but the other parents and she was seriously insane, with a capital I) who used to drag her son over to wherever we we gathered and insist we include him RIGHT NOW, even though the kid was creepy as fuck and we were all a little afraid of him. Then she'd proceed to start screaming at her daughter (who was a nice girl despite her horrible family, that we did hang out with) for no apparent reason, and that would usually end with Crazy Lady smacking her and dragging her home by the hair. Literally. Even at a young age, I resented having some creepy kid foisted on me by a nutbar mom which in turn made me leery about Other People's Kids even way back then.

As I got older I discovered I hated babysitting. My neighbourhood was ripe with opportunity and almost every time I did it, I'd regret it. In hindsight, I'm sure the kids weren't that bad, but I was not exactly the nurturing type and spent most of my time changing the clocks in the house to trick the kids into going to bed early so I could watch movies, call my friends and eat ice cream.

Once I got to the age when my friends started having kids, I remember having a conversation with a new mom and a mom of a 2 year old. They spent half an hour discussing bellybuttons and how long it takes for one to fall off while I sat there thinking "Are we seriously having this conversation??? BELLYBUTTONS?? Is this what happens to normal people after they have kids? OMFG, motherhood really is a cult and I don't wanna join, EVER"

Which of course was foreshadowing and I joined that same cult a few years later.I will admit after I had my son I became a lot more tolerant of children in general. No longer did I panic and mutter "Get it off...GET IT OFF" when someone plunked a baby on my lap that smelled of sour milk and Eau De Poop. I also became selectively deaf to the dulcet tones of screaming 3 year olds tearing my living room apart. And that was when I really started to notice that it usually wasn't Other People's Kids who annoyed me...it was  mostly their parents. Annoying kids are far easier to ignore then some uber-mom who gave me shit about not breast-feeding my son until he was 6 or letting him sleep in his own room so I could get some rest I was desperate for. And did I know I should be making my own baby food out of organic vegetables grown in my own garden and lovingly pureed by hand, because giving him the jarred stuff means I'm lazy and don't love him? And did I want a recipe for suger-and-gluten-free birthday cake because the minute I allow one grain of sugar to pass his lips I've put him on the road to diabetes and childhood obesity?  And was I really going back to work one day a week when he's 4 months old, because he'll need therapy when he's older, due to abandonment issues, you know.

Yeah. Other People's Kids don't piss me off nearly as much as some of their parents.

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