Saturday, September 4, 2010

Women and children.

Today I want to discuss a few situations that I have come across in the last month. They all have to do with women and children and judging.

1. The other day I went to Food Lion. For people unfamiliar with Food Lion, it's like Harris Teeter's inbred cousin. For people unfamiliar with Harris Teeter, well...it's obvious that you don't read my blog very often since I write about the Teet every other week. Now...back to my recent trip to the Food Lion...
As I was checking out, the 25-ish year old cashier with a few missing teeth asked if my kids were ready to go back to school. I simply replied, "I don't have any kids."
To which she replied with a simple, "Uh ohhhh!!"
Go ahead and read her response out loud. "Uh ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!"
I promise...it felt good.

2. There have probably been 17 or so instances (most recently about a week ago) when a patient at work has asked if I am married, then inquired as to if I have birthed children. They always seem to give one of two responses after I tell them no on both accounts.
Either "Oh...it will happen before you know it!" or "Why not?"
My favorite is the "Why not??", like it's a question that can be answered. I'm starting to think that I need to give a, "My fiance left me for my grandma!" or just start sobbing uncontrollably.

3. A couple days ago a 20 year old friend of mine on Facebook stated, "I hate when people only talk about their kids on Faceboook...no one cares."
I commented, "I was thinking the same thing!"
Then an influx of angry mothers commented after that with such gems as, "Wait til u have kids b4 you make that judgment."
All that meant to me was that being a mother makes you too busy to type out words, but not too busy to not have time for Facebook.
I felt irritated that all of these moms felt it necessary to verbally slam a 20 year old with an opinion that the conversation stopped when I said something along the lines of, "There is a difference between talking about your kids and talking ONLY about your kids, you bitter wenches."

4. I believe I've written about this before, but there is a woman at my work who has told me multiple times, "Sarah, you don't know love until you have a child."
Needless to say, I am not friends with this person.

So this brings me to my question...

Why do strangers find it appropriate to comment about the status of my uterus usage (or non-usage, rather)??

2 comments:

whatnot said...

1. That clerk is a moron.
2. Those patients are idiots.
3. Those facebook moms are imbeciles.
4. The woman at your work is a nitwit. No, "nitwit" is too nice of a word...she's a fool.

I'm not sure how it became "small talk" to converse with strangers about the reasons they don't have offspring or to make blanket statements about how only parents can know true love. Chalk it up to the increasing social retardation of our society.

Julie said...

They're probably the same people that like to ask me how tall I am. Social skills, they have not!