Beat the Parents

Dear Succubi,

Please control your children. You may giggle to yourself as your child, probably mis-diagnosed with ADHD, rams into walkers-by with its scooter, but I can assure you no one else finds it cute or amusing. In fact, not many years from now neither will you when your local cop shop phones you to say your offspring is present in their holding cell, written off motorbike is in pieces outside, his blood alcohol broke their breathalyser and a “friend”, lets call her Sharnelle, is in tow. And it’s all your fault.

Unfortunately I am still working on a pitch to government for strict breeding license laws to be enacted. Until such time as that comes to fruition, the LCD is free to engage in unthinkable acts resulting in impregnation and spawning of gargoylic beings. “That’s fascist” I hear you say. Yes. It is a little.

Let us fast forward to early infancy – the worst phase of all. You are in a shopping centre café, screaming mutant by your side. Your child is special in that it should be neither seen nor heard. You are one of a legion of mothers who are very lucky they got sprogged up before the license program has had the chance to work its magic. Some even have another horror on the way already. No rest for the wicked as they say.

Your child is hitting two hard objects together repeatedly as you ply it with E-number laden food. You are exchanging gruesome birth stories with your platoon. I look around to find where you keep your amplifier, but amazingly your volume is achieved unassisted by technology. I briefly consider harvesting your DNA and selling the cocktail to Bose. You have me wishing your doctor had used all 60 sutures available to him and used 10 to seal your oral cavity as well as your… anyway, no one within a 20 metre radius has touched their food.

Next to your table you have parked what can only be described as a pram-monster truck hybrid. With a numberplate. What happened to the good old days when some aluminium piping and fabric qualified as a stroller? We turned out fine fine fine fine fine. Where was I?

I’ll tell you a secret – the shock absorption and cushioning of your $3,000 Jane Slalom “Meteorite” does not seem to be enhancing your child in any way. The only thing more absurd than your babymobile is this thing. Which brings me to my next point.

You have had a child. This is the path you have chosen and yet you don’t obey the rules. For at least a 4 year period: Running – no. Running with baby – utterly ridiculous. Taking child out in public – no. Congregating with other mothers and their children in public – this should be punishable by something that would make birth seem like eating warm buttery popcorn. Speaking of which, if you engaged in a little discipline occasionally perhaps your child wouldn’t be so out of control, you wouldn’t need to diagnose and drug it and other people wouldn’t wish it was legal to carry around tranquiliser darts. Just throwing that out there.

To clarify, the following are not cute: you not tethering your child, shoes with lights, children underfoot, Bratz (more like Slutz), wheelie shoes, teaching your child to walk up stairs in Westfield. Ok, so that is a little bit cute, but also glacial. Please do it at home. If you have one.

Finally, children in dress-up. Your daughter does not a convincing fairy make. There is nothing in her “handbag” except a half eaten Crayola and shaping her to be a “woman” at age 3 is not just unoriginal, it’s disgusting. Your son is not Spiderman. Or any man for that matter. Stan Lee would never write a character wearing loose printed cottons, purchased with room “to grow into”. The only sentence your little Spiderman will be forming any time soon will be the prison kind, but that’s at least 7 years away.

So, unworthy, loud mothers in the public domain, since you won’t invest in a pacifier or a nanny, I will pacify you. Please use contraception or abstinence, but failing that, please just stay at home for half a decade. That washed out “respite or death” expression you wear permanently is how I feel on the inside when I see your child make a sudden movement. Please keep it at home, or I warn, if this gauntlet doesn’t hit you, it may very well clip your child and no amount of padding on your over-sized brat transporter will save it.

Kyrani