Much to the befuddlement of my close friends and family, I, Megsie, have recently become a pseudo-mommy to my boyfriend’s two year old daughter. What is baffling about my new role is how much I’m actually enjoying it. Suddenly I’ve gone from that girl who makes jokes about abortion-clinics-as-amusement-parks (seriously, my “whack-a-mole-placenta-slip-n-slide” idea is worth big bucks!) to the obnoxious fawning mommy who sends videos of the child singing off-key to unsuspecting friends. The best part? I didn’t even have to give birth to experience these crazy maternal instincts!
To give you an idea of what I significant change this is for me, allow me to enlighten you on my particular brand of crazy: A mere two months ago, I had a traumatising encounter with a rabid pack of middle school boys which ended with me hiding in bushes like a frightened rabbit. Seriously. Children are scary.
Let me preface this story by stating that I am a self-diagnosed pedophobe, which is more socially acceptable than pedophilia, but less acceptable than homophobia if, like me, you grew up in the Bible Bra. For the uninitiated (which should be all of you since I just made up that term), the Bible Bra is like the Bible Belt, except further Northwest (Idaho and Utah, in particular). Put another way, if America is the Whore of Babylon as some apocalypse harbingers seem convinced of, she is reclining in a North-Westerly orientation, with her voluptuous breasts covered by the modest Bible Bra (Boise is her left nipple), and her southern regions are covered by the Bible Chastity Belt. Which I guess would make Florida her penis. It’s not a perfect analogy. Sue me.
Moving on.
Children. They are scary. They scream, bite, move erratically, and are generally disgusting, festering, cesspools of poo and snot. Children are vicious. At any given moment while interacting with a child it might start screaming hysterically, throwing a temper tantrum or pulling your hair or earrings.
Children will hurt you with their words. They will hone in on your greatest insecurity and then scream it loudly until everyone within a ten mile radius is aware of your deficiency: “Hey, you have big feet. Did you know that? Look how big your feet are compared to mine! They are HUGE! MOMMY! MOMMY! MOMMY! SHE HAS BIG FEET! LOOK AT HER FEET!” And instead of being allowed to return the insult (oh yeah? Well YOUR EARS ARE DEFORMED, YOU LITTLE DUMBO), you have to put up with the insipid mother cooing about how cute her child is, and, worst of all, she’ll then give you that shrug and knowing smile which we are supposed to accept as an excuse: “kids, y’know? What can you do?”
Ooh, ooh! Pick me! I know what you can do! Put them into a cryogenic freeze so that the little fuckers stop terrorising the rest of us until they have reached the age of reason (which is about 20 for females and 25 for males).
Even children who are tolerable as individuals become more frightening than a zombie horde when assembled in packs. Their chaotic and vicious tendencies are magnified exponentially as they work themselves into a frenzy cunningly disguised as “play”. As such, I’m sure you can appreciate my panic at being confronted by a pack of about thirty prepubescent boys.
My tale begins on a lovely summer morning, only a few months ago. I was taking a relaxing jog, minding my own business (and trying not to breathe like an asthmatic bull) when I went around a turn in the trail and saw three boys coming towards me, a few hundred feet away. I briefly considered turning around and running away rather than facing them but I remembered just in time that one should (a) never show fear and (b) never turn one’s back on a predator. Besides, there were only three of them! I could take them! I steeled myself and continued warily forward.
Suddenly from around the corner a herd of boys materialised, swarming across the path like flies on a carcass. I was trapped! Unable to turn and run without drawing more attention to myself, I realised I would have to walk THROUGH the child-horde which was now completely blocking my path. I felt a deep, primal fear surge within me, but resolved not to show it. Everything I learned from the Discovery Channel raced through my mind: Don’t let them sense your fear. Move slowly and deliberately. Don’t turn your back to them. If they charge you, throw your arms in the air and scream like Tarzan. If they keep charging, RUN LIKE THE WIND!
Nature fact: Did you know that you can wade into piranha-infested waters and as long as you remain calm you will be safe, but if you start thrashing around, they will attack in moments? Well, it’s true. They can sense fear. The same principle applies to encounters with children.
Most of the boys ignored me as I walked past. A few stared openly at my chest which was squished into an impressive quadruple D uni-boob, thanks to my patented technique of using two sports bras to keep those fuckers in place. (Most of the boys only came up to my shoulder anyway, so leering is excusable). A few even spoke to me, but I was too stricken to offer up much more than a perfunctory head nod.
As soon as I passed the group I took a side trail, intending to loop back to the main trail later, thus avoiding a second encounter with the children.
About fifteen minutes later I decided that SURELY I had waited long enough for the children to move on and I began climbing up a short hill to return to the main trail. Alas, I heard voices coming from the ridge above me and I looked up to see the same boys coming down the path towards me. I froze, trying to think of what to do. A little voice of reason told me that I should just keep walking and nod and smile politely when I passed them, like a regular human being, but that voice was drowned out by a voice of sheer panic reverberating through my head:
“RUN, BAMBI, RUN! DON’T LOOK BACK! RUN!!!”
So I did.
This next part is kind of embarrassing.
Okay, really embarrassing.
If you know me personally, now would be a great time to thrice deny me. I’ll give you a minute or two to do so.
Great. Now that you have disavowed me and I am just a crazy person amongst an abundance of crazy people on the internet, you may continue reading:
As I said, the horde of children was beginning to descend towards me, but I was reasonably sure they hadn’t seen me yet. If I turned and went back on the trail now, they would see me and know I was avoiding them. I would look like a crazy person! I was beginning to panic. Instinct was taking over. In the back of my mind I could hear my Psych 101 professor explaining, “our most basic responses are controlled by the hypothalamus. Just remember the four Fs: fighting, feeding, fleeing and reproduction…”.
If I had a soundtrack to my life it would have been tribal drums beating in rhythm with my racing heart.
If I was in a horror movie, everything would have been slow motion shots of wide eyes, labored breathing and zombie-children.
So, I did what any creature with a functioning hypothalamus would do and ran into the bushes to hide.
This would have worked great if I hadn’t become entangled by a bramble bush in full view of the trail. It also would have been better if I hadn’t been wearing a florescent pink shirt.
I couldn’t climb any higher, and the boys were nearly directly below me on the trail. I was trapped.
I had no recourse but to summon my remaining shreds of dignity around me like a cloak and resign myself to my terrible fate of being noticed. I stooped down casually and began to examine a small growth of mushrooms in front of me, hoping that I would be mistaken for a botanist studying the native flora and fauna. I’m sure that was the first conclusion a group of eleven-year-old boys came to. Hey, look at the botanist, guys! Not, Hey, look at the crazy lady staring at mushrooms!.
I’ve come a long way in overcoming my fears. Since that day I have actually conversed with some neighbor boys without hiding in bushes, I have comforted a crying child without looking for any dumpsters to stash it in, I have cleaned pee up off the floor more times than I care to remember, and wiped snot from a nose that is not my own. Most bizarrely, the reward of having a small child wrap her arms around me and tell me she missed me actually outweighs the terror of being (sort of) responsible for the life of a miniature human being.
Watch out, world: My biological clock is ticking and has begun the inevitable countdown towards forcing me to reproduce! Must. Fight. The. Urge.
Maybe I’ll just steal a baby off of a Craigslist posting.