For instance one of the cardinal rules of being a mother is that unless you live in a tax bracket that means you have fulltime staff and never actually have to be alone with your spawn you are on call 24/7. From the moment that squalling slippery creature exits your womb until they enter first grade you have no rights or access to any of the following: alone time, me time, quiet time, reading time, or any daytime activity with female friends.
Given that this is such a basic tenet of motherhood you can understand my agitation as I worked at my local library today and witnessed a fake Uggs wearing, acrylic nail mother who parked herself in the reading room with her adorable 3 year old son after grabbing the latest issues of People, US Weekly and Star. At first I didn’t pay much attention because the tot (in a cute knit ear flap cap) was so good, sitting quietly on the chair opposite his mother but after 30 minutes I was seething. The most interaction this stupid cow had with her child was to say ‘sshhh’ every time he quietly said Mommy. He behaved better than most adults would have in the situation, doing no more than giggling, laying on the floor and waving at me when I smiled at him (and so what if I was flipping off his mother behind her back- he doesn’t know what I meant). Only when she had read each magazine cover to cover did she finally gather him up and leave- of course without bothering to put the magazines back because apparently alphabetization is an advanced brain skill she did not possess.
For those of you not aware (I’ll rant on you later) libraries come equipped with children’s rooms chock full of books, puzzles, games, and toys; all kinds of things to engage their tiny minds and also allow their mothers to park their fat asses and read trashy magazines. You don’t even have to play with him but why not at least give him an opportunity to learn and have fun? I felt so bad that I wanted to go over to him with a book on trains but then I would have been the bad guy impugning her parenting skills. So I did nothing and that poor critter probably lost 10 IQ points that morning and learned nothing more than how to shift his weight from one foot to the other.
If you expected me to go off on brats then I guess I did- the adult kind. I’d like to believe that this selfish fool will get hers some day but more likely the rest of us will end up enduring the acting out tantrums and mind bogglingly bad behavior of a once good little boy.
Now you know....when I worked as a librarian, my wonderfully professional and knowledgeable boss, Ms. Patricia Watson, often chided me for letting (or heaven forfend, encouraging) patrons to return their materials to the shelves---you missed the opportunity for an in-house count of their usage! Ms. Watson is no longer with us, unfortunately for us. In the next post on breeding though, I hope it will extend its scrutiny to both breeder and breedee.
ReplyDeleteOoh this would totally annoy me too!! And to prove your point when we go to the library now (I'm a library-aholic) I spend perhaps 2% of the time randomly grabbing a book for myself and 98% helping my little boy enjoy all the cool stuff libraries have for little people. And although I'm working on increasing it to maybe 3 or 4% for me, this is otherwise as it should be :-)
ReplyDeleteStopping by from the Rewind!
None of my children would put up with that! What a calm boy. Perhaps he will do well despite his mother! Thanks for Rewinding x
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