Regular readers of my posts here at the Bar None might know that I’m a two-time dad. Not a two-timing dad, I mean I’m a father of two young kids. Having kids, as those of you who do will attest, is about the greatest joy on Earth aside from getting shitface plastered on a Saturday night and ruining your Manolo Blahniks. Becoming a father for the second time recently, to a baby boy, reaffirmed my appreciation of all that women do in the process of conception (my favorite bit), pregnancy (fucking emotional hell) and eventually childbirth (fucking emotional awesome!). Now, I’m not gonna sprawl here and pretend I understand how women feel, or find some way of appreciating their pain and agony during the laboring and birthing process, because I’m not an idiot, and my wife knows where I live.

This isn’t some kind of women-bashing anti-feminist rant, no sir. Don’t get all high and mighty on that score! Women reserve the right forever to be pissed at the folks who caused them to endure such agony – fucking Adam and that stupid bitch Eve, when they got thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Apparently, upon the casting out, God told Eve that forevermore women would have endure immense agony during childbirth thanks to her gutless nibbling on a piece of fruit, so we can all thank the pair of them for what women now have to go through each time that sperm slams into the egg. If you believe in that, of course. Darwinism would have you subscribe to the theory that it’s a part of nature, and that enduring childbirth is some kind of throwback to natural selection in that only the strongest will survive. Darwin was a sadist, wasn’t he?

There was no WAY I was ready for THAT!

Whichever theory you subscribe to, there’s no denying the power and force of will of one pissed off mother. I recently had to bear witness to a little tete-a-tete at my daughters 3rd birthday party, where the wife of one of my cousins – let’s call her “Eve” for the sake of argument and a kind of serendipity – let fly on a fellow member of the fairer sex at the local play-gym we were holding the party at. Eve’s young son, who is normally pretty docile, was being pummeled by this older kid (not too much older, I’ll be honest) and not really responding – he’s a lover, not a fighter. Cain – that’s what we’ll call this kid – decided to simply walk away; a not entirely unexpected response considering the non-violence conditioning his uptight mother had instilled in him. However, several minutes later, this older kid returned to start beating up on Cain yet again, and this time Eve had had enough. Marching over to the older child, she grabbed his arm and gave him a stern reprimand to stay the hell away from her child. Almost immediately, the mother of the offending child was upon them, berating Eve for daring to touch her child and threatening to do all kinds of bodily harm because there’s no way her darling fucking pip would ever harm a fly.

What Rod looks like while writing for The Bar None.

Minutes passed, with neither female wanting to stand aside, until cooler heads (ie, the men standing about all agog) prevailed. Unfortunately, there was no jelly or mud and there was no pit to fight in, so a perfectly good opportunity for setting the women’s lib movement back again was missed. Following this confrontation, there was all manner of posturing and aggrandized glaring across the room, as both mothers tried to kill each other simply with their eyes. If looks could kill, there’d have been a homicide or two that day.

Let’s set the record straight – the mother of the older child, who for the sake of keeping this miniscule narrative going we’ll call Abel – was completely in the wrong. She claimed her child had been provoked – he hadn’t. She claimed Eve had assaulted her child – she hadn’t, she’d merely stopped him belting her son again. She claimed that Cain had started it first – wrong again, because I saw it all and I would stand on a pile of Nazi skulls and declare my allegiance to the Justice League that Cain was merely an innocent victim of “older kid bullying”.

These guys would make awesome parents, right?

Rod, you ask, what the fuck are you trying to say? I’ll tell you. Sometimes, women are so protective of their kids and their precious little reputations that they’ll blindly ignore even the most obvious wrongdoing in order to escape persecution. This incident highlights how society tells us that our precious little darlings and their upstart, no-care attitudes, and the “softly-softly” approach to parenting we’ve adopted because we’re afraid of being sued for child abuse has amounted to naught for the good of us all. Spoiled, do-no-wrong children will end up running this world; perhaps they already do, don’t they, politicians of the world? I’m all for mothers being protective of their spawn, yes even the devil-spawn we see screaming in the shopping malls on Sunday afternoons, their undiagnosed ADD running rampant as their mother, who turns a blind eye to the discomfort of fellow patrons, continues her quest to obtain the next sale item faster than anyone else. Girls, you know you do it. For Christ’s sake, control your fucking children. And learn to realize that they are not innocent darlings who never do anything wrong – in fact, more often they’re cheeky little shits you’d want to slap silly if it weren’t a crime.

I’ll admit that my daughter has definitely turned a little bratty in her 3rd year, and has been known to throw things in a tantrum from time to time. But for fucks sake, my wife and I would never let her get away with that kind of behavior. A behavior reinforced by an ignorant mother too stupid to actually parent her child when she can simply avoid it by pointing the blame at someone else and hoping nobody notices. Perhaps she’d been drinking.

Women fighting in The Bar None.

With all due respect to mothers out there, sometimes you women can get a little crazeeeee! The above incident is really tame compared to some of the stories you could Google and read for yourself. I’m okay with a mother getting upset if her child is wronged, harmed or caused pain. That’s to be expected – as a father, I feel the same way. What I’m not okay with are mothers who fly off at the drop of a hat with little consideration for things like… oh, the facts maybe? Go fuck a pineapple, I say to them. No, you have a little shit for a kid, not a little angel. That snot running down his face isn’t cute, it’s a fucking geyser of putrid germs and a potential epidemic, yet you insist on letting this sick kid play with other (quite well) children so that you can spread the disease about just so the little fuckstick can have five minutes of playtime.Your kid’s right to have a good time should not impede my kid’s right to not get his fucking head caved in by your kid’s bullying tactics.

Christmas of Awesome!!

In order to own a gun you need a license. You need a license to drive a car. You need a license to do just about anything in this damnable world, and yet they’ll let anyone with a cock or a vagina become a parent. No course to study for, no test run first: just up-the-duff and away you go. And let’s be honest: there’s a whole lot of people out there who should be anything but parents. Perhaps it’s time to instigate the old sci-fi classic cliche… people need a license to have children. Damn, that’d work wonders, wouldn’t it? How do some of these imbeciles even get their kids past infancy, I ask? Darwinism will win out eventually, I suspect, but there’s a hell of a lot of stupid, stupid parents getting about with no clue as to how to adequately raise a child. Perhaps parenting should be a class at school? Perhaps some kind of University Degree that comes with an ability to recognize the difference between what’s socially acceptable and what isn’t. Like wearing shoes, for example.

Give people all the guns in the world, but in return they have to bring their kids up to know what’s right and wrong. It should be fucking mandatory. Blame shifting and lazy parenting should be punished like we do to child abusers – because not parenting your child properly is almost the same, really – not teaching your little bundle of screeching joy to read and write is signing their social death warrant. About the only job they have an opportunity is to sweep the dregs from the piss-trough at the Bar None, because folks who can’t read or write (and thankfully none of them will be reading this!) can’t become a fucking heart surgeon, can they? Denying your child the right to a good life is as bad as kicking a puppy across the street. Deny that, liberal dickheads!

Parenting for Dummies?

I realize I’ve got to the end of this rant and have had a singular dearth of booze-related humor, and for that, I apologize. I just wanted to get this stuff off my chest. It’s bugged me for a while now, this bad parenting thing, and yet it’s taken until now for me to put my thoughts into words. Albeit not very succinct words, I admit. I have every respect for mothers, especially those who have had it rough, but having it rough is no excuse for slacking off on what is actually one of society’s most important jobs. To all those who insist we coddle our children and wrap them up in cotton-wool to protect them from the pedophiles and sex predators lurking on every street corner, this is the whirlwind of fucked-upedness you’ve sown for us all.

Parent your kids properly, or don’t fucking have any.