Seduction and Snacks
Page 1
1. Arby’s Anyone?
Hello, my name is Claire Morgan and I never want to have children.
For those of you out there who feel the same way, is it just me or does it seem like you’re in the middle of a horrible Alcoholics Anonymous meeting whenever someone finds out you never want children? Should I stand up, greet the room as a whole, and confess what brings me to the seventh circle of hell I constantly find myself in? It’s a house of horrors where I’m surrounded by pregnant women asking me to touch their protruding bellies and have in-depth discussions about their vaginas. They don’t understand why the words placenta and afterbirth should never be used in a sentence. Ever. Especially over coffee in the middle of the day.
You know what brought me to this decision? The video we saw in health class in sixth grade. The one set back in the seventies that had some woman screaming bloody murder with sweat dripping off of her face while her husband lovingly pat her forehead with a towel and told her she was doing great. Then the camera panned down to the crime scene between her legs: the blood, the goo, the gore, and the humungous p**n bush that now had a tiny little head squeezing its way out. While most of the girls around me were saying, “Awwwwwww!” when the baby started to cry, I looked around at them in revulsion muttering, “What the hell is wrong with you people? That is NOT normal.” From that moment on, my motto was: I’m never having children.
“So, Claire, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m never having children.”
“Claire, did you choose a major yet?”
“I’m never having children.”
“Would you like fries with that?”
“I’m never having children.”
Of course there are always those in your life who think they can change your mind. They get married, have a baby, and then invite you over expecting you to be overcome with emotion when you take a look at their new little miracle. In truth, all you can do is look around at the house they haven’t had time to clean in six weeks, smell their body they haven’t had time to bathe in two weeks, and watch their eyes get a little squirrelly when you ask them the last time they got a good night’s sleep. You see them laugh at every burp and smile at every fart. They manage to bring poop into every single conversation, and you have to wonder who the crazy one really is here.
Then you have the people who believe your flippancy is due to some deep, dark, secret issue with your uterus that you’re overcompensating for, and they look at you and your va**na with pity. They whisper behind your back and then suddenly it turns into a horrible game of “Telephone,” and the whole world thinks you have life-threatening fertility issues where pregnancy will cause your va**na to spontaneously combust and your left tit to fall off. Stop the insanity! All my bits are in working order and as far as I know, I don’t have exploding va**na syndrome.
The simple truth is I just never thought pushing a tiny human out of me that turns my va**na into something resembling roast beef that no man would ever want look at, let alone bang, was a stellar idea. End of story.
And let’s face it people, no one is ever honest with you about child birth. Not even your mother.
“It’s a pain you forget all about once you have that sweet little baby in your arms.”
Bullshit. I CALL BULLSHIT. Any friend, cousin, or nosey-ass stranger in the grocery store that tells you it’s not that bad is a lying sack of shit. Your va**na is roughly the size of the girth of a penis. It has to stretch and open and turn into a giant bat cave so the life-sucking human you’ve been growing for nine months can angrily claw its way out. Who in their right mind would do that willingly? You’re just walking along one day and think to yourself, “You know, I think it’s time I turn my va**na into an Arby’s Beef and Cheddar (minus the cheddar) and saddle myself down for a minimum of eighteen years to someone who will suck the soul and the will to live right out of my body so I’m a shell of the person I used to be and can’t get laid even if I pay for it.”
It just stands to reason that after all the years of preaching I did to everyone around me about how I was never having children, I was the first of my friends to have one much to their horror, which I was highly offended by. I mean really, any idiot can raise a child. Case in point: my mother. She was absent the day they handed out parenting handbooks and instead turned to the age old, brilliant wisdom of Doctor Phil and fortune cookies to educate me, and I turned out just fine. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example. I’m not a serial killer, so at least I have that going for me. More on my mother later.
I suppose saying I hate children is a little harsh, considering I’m a mother now, right? And it’s not like I hate my kid. I just strongly dislike other people’s dirty faced, snotty nosed, sticky handed, screaming, puking, shitting, no-sleeping, whining, arguing, crying little humans. Give me a cat over a kid any day. You can open up a bag of Meow Mix, plop it down on the floor next to a bucket of water, go on vacation for a week, and come home to an animal that is so busy licking it’s own ass that it has no idea you were even gone. You can’t do that with a kid. Well, I guess you could, but I’m sure it’s frowned upon in most circles. And if my kid could lick his own ass, I’d have saved a shit load of money on diapers, I can tell you that.
To say I was a little worried about becoming a mother given my aversion to childbirth and children in general is an understatement. They say that when you have your own child, the first time you look into his or her eyes you will fall instantly in love and the rest of the world disappears. They say you’ll believe your child can do no wrong, and you will love them unconditionally right from the very first moment. Well, whoever “they” are should seriously limit the amount of crack they smoke and stop talking out of their ass while their Arby’s vaginas are flopping around in their grandma panties.
The day I had my son I looked down at him and said, “Who the hell are you? You look nothing like me.”
Sometimes it isn’t love at first sight. “What to Expect When You Weren’t Expecting to Get Knocked Up That One Time at a Frat Party” and the rest of the all-knowing baby books like to leave that part out. Sometimes you have to learn to love the little monsters for something other than the tax deductions they provide you. Not all babies are cute when they’re born no matter how many new parents try to convince you otherwise. This is yet another lie the half-baked “theys” lead you to believe. Some babies are born looking like old men with wrinkled faces, age spots, and a receding hairline.
When I was born my father George took my hospital picture over to his friend Tim’s house while my mom was still recuperating in the hospital. Tim took one look at my picture and said, “Oh sweet Jesus, George. You better hope she’s smart.” It was no different with my son, Gavin. He was funny looking. I was his mother, so I could say that. He had a huge head, no hair, and his ears stuck out so far I often wondered if they worked like the “Whisper 2000”, and he was able to pick up conversations from people a block away. During my four day hospital stay, all I kept doing whenever I looked at his huge head was speak in a Scottish accent and quote Mike Meyers from "So I Married an Ax Murderer".
"He cries himself to sleep at night on his huge pilluh."
"That thing’s like Spootnik. It's got its own weather system."
"It's like an orange on a toothpick."
I think he heard me talking about him to the nurses and formulated a plan to get back at me. I firmly believe at night in the nursery he and all the other newborns struck up a conversation and decided it was time for a revolution. Viva la newborns!
I knew I should have kept him in my room the whole time I was there. But come on people, I needed some rest. Those were the last days I would ever get to sleep again, and I took full advantage of it. I should have kept a better eye on which kid they put his bassinet next to at night though. I knew that little brat Zeno would be a bad influence on my kid. He had “anarchy” written all over his face. And who named their kid Zeno anyway? That was just asking for an ass-kicking on the playground.
Gavin was quiet, never fussed, and he slept all the time in the hospital. I laughed in the face of my friends who came to visit and told me he wouldn’t be like this once we left. In reality, Gavin did the laughing, waving his tiny little fist of fury in the air for his brothers in the Newborn Nation. I swore I heard, “Infant Pride! Baby Power!” every time he made noises in his sleep.
The moment I got him in the car to go home, the jig was up. He screamed his head off like a wild banshee and didn’t stop for four days. I have no idea what a wild banshee was or if they even existed, but if they did, I was sure they were loud as fuck. The only good thing about this whole ordeal was the fact that my kid refused to leave my body via my lady bits. No roast beefy beaver for this woman. All the baby books written by women who had the most perfect birth experience in the world said you should talk to your child in the womb. That was about the only piece of advice I took from those things. Every day I told him if he ruined my va**na I would video tape his birth and show all his future girlfriends what happened to your who-ha when you had sex, ensuring that he will never, ever get laid. Fuck playing Mozart and reading Shakespeare. I went with the scared straight method.
All my threats to him in the womb paid off. He sat there with his arms crossed for twelve hours and refused to move down the shoot. This was perfectly fine by me. C-section, here I come. I would go through having my gut sliced open again in a minute if I could skip the whole baby part and just get the four days at an all-inclusive location that served you breakfast, lunch, and dinner in bed, gave you a twenty-four hour morphine drip, and sent you packing with a thirty-day supply of Vicodin.
Before I get too excited thinking about legal narcotics without the ear-bleeding scream of a newborn, maybe I should go back to the night that got me into this mess. My horoscope that day should have been a warning of things to come: “You'll score a bunch of great computer gadgets and jewelry from your neighbors, who happen to die when you go into their house, shoot them, and take all their things.”
I don’t know what it should have been a warning of, but come on! Does that not have “bad omen” written all over it? The one and only time in my life I decide to have a one-night stand so I can finally give up the V-card, I get pregnant. I'm telling you, the universe hates me.
I was twenty years old and in my second year of college, well on my way to a degree in Business Administration. Aside from the constant ribbing from my best friend Liz, on the state of my virginity, life was good. Well, college student good. I didn't have VD, none of my friends had been roofied, and at the end of the semester, I had avoided needing to sell my organs to science to pay for food and pot.
Let me just say I do not condone illegal drug use in any way. Unless it's an all natural herb that doesn't make me feel guilty for eating an entire box of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch while watching hours of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. “Oh green water, oh that’s pretty, and a happy little tree right over there.” It also chills Liz out during finals so she isn't screaming and climbing the walls like a rabid howler monkey. Remember that whole “Hugs not Drugs” shit they tried to cram down our throats in high school? We fooled them. You don’t have to choose. You can totally have both and not die. But seriously, kids, don’t do drugs.
I remember that night fondly. And by fondly, I mean with bitter resentment toward all things alcoholic and with a penis.
2. Beer Pong May Cause Pregnancy
It was a Friday night and we were spending it the usual way - at a frat party with a bunch of drunken frat boys and sorority freaks of nature. I really don’t understand how Liz managed to drag me to these things week after week. These were not our people. Our people were back at the dorms listening to Pink Floyd, “The Darkside of the Moon” and watching The Wizard of Oz while arguing over whether or not the last season of Dawson’s Creek jumped the shark. (Pacey and Joey forever!) We did not belong with the crowd of trust fund babies that thought student loans had something to do with a foreign exchange student. As we made our way over to a portable bar on one side of the room, I could hear two completely wasted tools argue back and forth about who paid more for their Coach purse and who slept with the most guys last week. One of them claimed she was ashamed she brought the other to the party since she was wearing a pair of Louboutin’s that were “so last year”. These were the future leaders of our country, ladies and gentlemen. Christ, I felt like I was watching a live scene from "Heathers" ("I brought you to a Remington party and what's my thanks? It's on a hallway carpet. I got paid in puke."). Thankfully Liz interrupted me before I handed one of them a cup of liquid drainer.
"Oooh what about that one? He's cute. And he has good teeth,” she announced excitedly as she tipped her head towards a guy in a sweater vest manning the keg.
"Jesus Liz, he's not a horse," I moaned, rolling my eyes and taking a sip of luke warm beer.
"But you could ride him all night long if you play your cards right," she said with a creepy used car salesman wink and a nudge with her shoulder.
"I'm concerned about you Liz. I really think you spend entirely too much time thinking about my hymen. You’re secretly in love with me aren't you?"
"Don't flatter yourself," she replied distractedly as she scoped out more guys. "Come to think of it, I did bat for the other team in high school after one of Tom Corry’s Friday night parties. We never got past second base though. Someone knocked on the bathroom we were in and it suddenly occurred to me that I liked penis," she mused.
Hello, my name is Claire Morgan and I never want to have children.
For those of you out there who feel the same way, is it just me or does it seem like you’re in the middle of a horrible Alcoholics Anonymous meeting whenever someone finds out you never want children? Should I stand up, greet the room as a whole, and confess what brings me to the seventh circle of hell I constantly find myself in? It’s a house of horrors where I’m surrounded by pregnant women asking me to touch their protruding bellies and have in-depth discussions about their vaginas. They don’t understand why the words placenta and afterbirth should never be used in a sentence. Ever. Especially over coffee in the middle of the day.
You know what brought me to this decision? The video we saw in health class in sixth grade. The one set back in the seventies that had some woman screaming bloody murder with sweat dripping off of her face while her husband lovingly pat her forehead with a towel and told her she was doing great. Then the camera panned down to the crime scene between her legs: the blood, the goo, the gore, and the humungous p**n bush that now had a tiny little head squeezing its way out. While most of the girls around me were saying, “Awwwwwww!” when the baby started to cry, I looked around at them in revulsion muttering, “What the hell is wrong with you people? That is NOT normal.” From that moment on, my motto was: I’m never having children.
“So, Claire, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I’m never having children.”
“Claire, did you choose a major yet?”
“I’m never having children.”
“Would you like fries with that?”
“I’m never having children.”
Of course there are always those in your life who think they can change your mind. They get married, have a baby, and then invite you over expecting you to be overcome with emotion when you take a look at their new little miracle. In truth, all you can do is look around at the house they haven’t had time to clean in six weeks, smell their body they haven’t had time to bathe in two weeks, and watch their eyes get a little squirrelly when you ask them the last time they got a good night’s sleep. You see them laugh at every burp and smile at every fart. They manage to bring poop into every single conversation, and you have to wonder who the crazy one really is here.
Then you have the people who believe your flippancy is due to some deep, dark, secret issue with your uterus that you’re overcompensating for, and they look at you and your va**na with pity. They whisper behind your back and then suddenly it turns into a horrible game of “Telephone,” and the whole world thinks you have life-threatening fertility issues where pregnancy will cause your va**na to spontaneously combust and your left tit to fall off. Stop the insanity! All my bits are in working order and as far as I know, I don’t have exploding va**na syndrome.
The simple truth is I just never thought pushing a tiny human out of me that turns my va**na into something resembling roast beef that no man would ever want look at, let alone bang, was a stellar idea. End of story.
And let’s face it people, no one is ever honest with you about child birth. Not even your mother.
“It’s a pain you forget all about once you have that sweet little baby in your arms.”
Bullshit. I CALL BULLSHIT. Any friend, cousin, or nosey-ass stranger in the grocery store that tells you it’s not that bad is a lying sack of shit. Your va**na is roughly the size of the girth of a penis. It has to stretch and open and turn into a giant bat cave so the life-sucking human you’ve been growing for nine months can angrily claw its way out. Who in their right mind would do that willingly? You’re just walking along one day and think to yourself, “You know, I think it’s time I turn my va**na into an Arby’s Beef and Cheddar (minus the cheddar) and saddle myself down for a minimum of eighteen years to someone who will suck the soul and the will to live right out of my body so I’m a shell of the person I used to be and can’t get laid even if I pay for it.”
It just stands to reason that after all the years of preaching I did to everyone around me about how I was never having children, I was the first of my friends to have one much to their horror, which I was highly offended by. I mean really, any idiot can raise a child. Case in point: my mother. She was absent the day they handed out parenting handbooks and instead turned to the age old, brilliant wisdom of Doctor Phil and fortune cookies to educate me, and I turned out just fine. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best example. I’m not a serial killer, so at least I have that going for me. More on my mother later.
I suppose saying I hate children is a little harsh, considering I’m a mother now, right? And it’s not like I hate my kid. I just strongly dislike other people’s dirty faced, snotty nosed, sticky handed, screaming, puking, shitting, no-sleeping, whining, arguing, crying little humans. Give me a cat over a kid any day. You can open up a bag of Meow Mix, plop it down on the floor next to a bucket of water, go on vacation for a week, and come home to an animal that is so busy licking it’s own ass that it has no idea you were even gone. You can’t do that with a kid. Well, I guess you could, but I’m sure it’s frowned upon in most circles. And if my kid could lick his own ass, I’d have saved a shit load of money on diapers, I can tell you that.
To say I was a little worried about becoming a mother given my aversion to childbirth and children in general is an understatement. They say that when you have your own child, the first time you look into his or her eyes you will fall instantly in love and the rest of the world disappears. They say you’ll believe your child can do no wrong, and you will love them unconditionally right from the very first moment. Well, whoever “they” are should seriously limit the amount of crack they smoke and stop talking out of their ass while their Arby’s vaginas are flopping around in their grandma panties.
The day I had my son I looked down at him and said, “Who the hell are you? You look nothing like me.”
Sometimes it isn’t love at first sight. “What to Expect When You Weren’t Expecting to Get Knocked Up That One Time at a Frat Party” and the rest of the all-knowing baby books like to leave that part out. Sometimes you have to learn to love the little monsters for something other than the tax deductions they provide you. Not all babies are cute when they’re born no matter how many new parents try to convince you otherwise. This is yet another lie the half-baked “theys” lead you to believe. Some babies are born looking like old men with wrinkled faces, age spots, and a receding hairline.
When I was born my father George took my hospital picture over to his friend Tim’s house while my mom was still recuperating in the hospital. Tim took one look at my picture and said, “Oh sweet Jesus, George. You better hope she’s smart.” It was no different with my son, Gavin. He was funny looking. I was his mother, so I could say that. He had a huge head, no hair, and his ears stuck out so far I often wondered if they worked like the “Whisper 2000”, and he was able to pick up conversations from people a block away. During my four day hospital stay, all I kept doing whenever I looked at his huge head was speak in a Scottish accent and quote Mike Meyers from "So I Married an Ax Murderer".
"He cries himself to sleep at night on his huge pilluh."
"That thing’s like Spootnik. It's got its own weather system."
"It's like an orange on a toothpick."
I think he heard me talking about him to the nurses and formulated a plan to get back at me. I firmly believe at night in the nursery he and all the other newborns struck up a conversation and decided it was time for a revolution. Viva la newborns!
I knew I should have kept him in my room the whole time I was there. But come on people, I needed some rest. Those were the last days I would ever get to sleep again, and I took full advantage of it. I should have kept a better eye on which kid they put his bassinet next to at night though. I knew that little brat Zeno would be a bad influence on my kid. He had “anarchy” written all over his face. And who named their kid Zeno anyway? That was just asking for an ass-kicking on the playground.
Gavin was quiet, never fussed, and he slept all the time in the hospital. I laughed in the face of my friends who came to visit and told me he wouldn’t be like this once we left. In reality, Gavin did the laughing, waving his tiny little fist of fury in the air for his brothers in the Newborn Nation. I swore I heard, “Infant Pride! Baby Power!” every time he made noises in his sleep.
The moment I got him in the car to go home, the jig was up. He screamed his head off like a wild banshee and didn’t stop for four days. I have no idea what a wild banshee was or if they even existed, but if they did, I was sure they were loud as fuck. The only good thing about this whole ordeal was the fact that my kid refused to leave my body via my lady bits. No roast beefy beaver for this woman. All the baby books written by women who had the most perfect birth experience in the world said you should talk to your child in the womb. That was about the only piece of advice I took from those things. Every day I told him if he ruined my va**na I would video tape his birth and show all his future girlfriends what happened to your who-ha when you had sex, ensuring that he will never, ever get laid. Fuck playing Mozart and reading Shakespeare. I went with the scared straight method.
All my threats to him in the womb paid off. He sat there with his arms crossed for twelve hours and refused to move down the shoot. This was perfectly fine by me. C-section, here I come. I would go through having my gut sliced open again in a minute if I could skip the whole baby part and just get the four days at an all-inclusive location that served you breakfast, lunch, and dinner in bed, gave you a twenty-four hour morphine drip, and sent you packing with a thirty-day supply of Vicodin.
Before I get too excited thinking about legal narcotics without the ear-bleeding scream of a newborn, maybe I should go back to the night that got me into this mess. My horoscope that day should have been a warning of things to come: “You'll score a bunch of great computer gadgets and jewelry from your neighbors, who happen to die when you go into their house, shoot them, and take all their things.”
I don’t know what it should have been a warning of, but come on! Does that not have “bad omen” written all over it? The one and only time in my life I decide to have a one-night stand so I can finally give up the V-card, I get pregnant. I'm telling you, the universe hates me.
I was twenty years old and in my second year of college, well on my way to a degree in Business Administration. Aside from the constant ribbing from my best friend Liz, on the state of my virginity, life was good. Well, college student good. I didn't have VD, none of my friends had been roofied, and at the end of the semester, I had avoided needing to sell my organs to science to pay for food and pot.
Let me just say I do not condone illegal drug use in any way. Unless it's an all natural herb that doesn't make me feel guilty for eating an entire box of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch while watching hours of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. “Oh green water, oh that’s pretty, and a happy little tree right over there.” It also chills Liz out during finals so she isn't screaming and climbing the walls like a rabid howler monkey. Remember that whole “Hugs not Drugs” shit they tried to cram down our throats in high school? We fooled them. You don’t have to choose. You can totally have both and not die. But seriously, kids, don’t do drugs.
I remember that night fondly. And by fondly, I mean with bitter resentment toward all things alcoholic and with a penis.
2. Beer Pong May Cause Pregnancy
It was a Friday night and we were spending it the usual way - at a frat party with a bunch of drunken frat boys and sorority freaks of nature. I really don’t understand how Liz managed to drag me to these things week after week. These were not our people. Our people were back at the dorms listening to Pink Floyd, “The Darkside of the Moon” and watching The Wizard of Oz while arguing over whether or not the last season of Dawson’s Creek jumped the shark. (Pacey and Joey forever!) We did not belong with the crowd of trust fund babies that thought student loans had something to do with a foreign exchange student. As we made our way over to a portable bar on one side of the room, I could hear two completely wasted tools argue back and forth about who paid more for their Coach purse and who slept with the most guys last week. One of them claimed she was ashamed she brought the other to the party since she was wearing a pair of Louboutin’s that were “so last year”. These were the future leaders of our country, ladies and gentlemen. Christ, I felt like I was watching a live scene from "Heathers" ("I brought you to a Remington party and what's my thanks? It's on a hallway carpet. I got paid in puke."). Thankfully Liz interrupted me before I handed one of them a cup of liquid drainer.
"Oooh what about that one? He's cute. And he has good teeth,” she announced excitedly as she tipped her head towards a guy in a sweater vest manning the keg.
"Jesus Liz, he's not a horse," I moaned, rolling my eyes and taking a sip of luke warm beer.
"But you could ride him all night long if you play your cards right," she said with a creepy used car salesman wink and a nudge with her shoulder.
"I'm concerned about you Liz. I really think you spend entirely too much time thinking about my hymen. You’re secretly in love with me aren't you?"
"Don't flatter yourself," she replied distractedly as she scoped out more guys. "Come to think of it, I did bat for the other team in high school after one of Tom Corry’s Friday night parties. We never got past second base though. Someone knocked on the bathroom we were in and it suddenly occurred to me that I liked penis," she mused.
