. . . home on Friday night.
I stayed late at work, fucking around on the 'net. Turned out to be all of the good, though, as there was a serious snafu involving Security and students without ID cards. Let's just say that it's a good thing that I was still there, and was able to make the appropriate phone calls and straighten everything out.
Still, it was emphatically *not* what I wanted to be doing at seven o'clock on a Friday night, and I left work in a thoroughly pissed-off mood.
Stomping down Fifteenth Street, I paused at the corner of JFK, waiting for the light to change, when lo and behold -- a small child came barrelling out of LOVE park and threw herself against me, clinging to my leg like a terrier and screaming, "Mommy! Mommy!"
Uhhhhhhhh . . . *not*.
Had I been in a better mood, I probably would've said gently, "No, honey, I'm not your mommy. Let's go find someone to help you get back to her." And I would've called the cops and handed over the screaming critter and gone home.
Instead, being cranky and already short of patience, I tried to peel her off my leg and said, rather rudely, that I wasn't her mommy and she should go back into the park and wait for her.
Of course, the kid started yelling hysterically, loudly, and senselessly. A crowd began to gather. I was getting madder and madder and just wanted to get away.
The cops showed up and accused me of attempting to abandon my child.
I was freaked and seriously aggravated at this point, so I got snarky.
Note to self: getting snarky with the cops gets you nowhere. They got mad back at me. I gave them more attitude. The kid was screaming and people in the crowd started videotaping the whole thing. I was mortified.
Som do-gooder from DYFS (or whatever they call it Pennsylvania) showed up and started laying into me about child abandonment. "It doesn't belong to me!" I howled.
The chick from DYFS looked at me and told me that I was using the pronoun "it" in a clear attempt to dissassociate myself from any normal maternal feelings I might have for my child, thus making it easier to abandon her.
I think I might've started cursing at that point. Possibly not, but shortly thereafter, I was stuffed into a police cruiser and held at bay by an extremely large German Shepherd.
At that point, I started to get nervous.
The cops were demanding that I somehow *prove* that I wasn't this child's mother, the DYFS bitch was demanding that I be locked up and preferably tortured, and the little girl was yelling like a banshee.
Then the Channel 10 news van cruised by, and all I could think about was that I was going to end up on the 11 o'clock news and could I just slash my wrists now and save myself the utter humiliation of it all?
So here's the puzzle for you: how does one prove that one is NOT a parent?
There's no way to do it. All I could do was hand over every name and phone number that I could think of or find programmed in my cell phone. I showed them my paycheck stub, which states that I only have one exemption. Not that it means much, but I was grasping at straws. I was practically emptying my backpack, looking for something, *anything*, that might count as proof!
Eventually, they let me go. I guess because I wised up and started behaving myself -- cooperating, they called it. And since they couldn't prove that I really *was* abandoning my child, I guess that they couldn't legally toss me in jail overnight.
I escaped, narrowly, with my sanity intact, although my pride was in tatters. And if that woman from Child Welfare had had her way, I would've been drawn and quartered on the spot!
Hmph. Why couldn't I have drawn one of those social workers who doesn't give two hoots about the kids? Noooooooo, *I* had to get some chicklet fresh out of college and all dewy-eyed about saving the world. ::: snort :::
I say I hate children. What I really mean is that I don't particularly like them and I certainly DON'T WANT any of my own. None, nada, zip, zilch. Bupkus. If I wanted to hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet, I'd put shoes on my dog.
So, yeah, maybe I'm a bit dissociative when it comes to kids. Although, frankly, all kids look alike until they hit ten or so, so "it" is, in my opinion, a perfectly reasonable pronoun. I also use "it" to refer to adults and animals of indeterminate gender. It's not like I'm reserving its use only to apply to children.
From a clinical perspective and the distance of a couple of days, it's fascinating to realize that none of the adults present on Friday night could understand my reaction to the situation. The only way the woman from Child Welfare could reconcile my lack of (the supposedly innate and instinctive) maternal response was to classify it as a pathology.
In other words, because I was not cooing and cuddly, I was automatically of questionably sanity and quite obviously suspect of all kinds of nefarious crimes against humanity.
Really. The reaction of the cops at the DYFS explanation of my so-called "disassociation" was as if I'd just slaughtered a puppy in front of them. They looked like they would've liked to pin the Center City rapes on me, too.
After all, a woman who would abandon her own child would be capable of *anything*, wouldn't she?
So what does it say about our society that a woman who does not care for children is therefore criminally culpable, psychologically questionable, and dubiously moral?
Thank God (or the deity or not of your choice) that there was no female companion with me that evening. If even *one* idiot in the audience had made the obligatory crack to the effect of, "Oh, of course. They're lesbians. Naturally, persons of such low moral fiber would abandon a child in a public park," . . . well, I would've started swinging.
And then I probably *would* have spent the night in the Roundhouse.
So what do you all think?
Maybe I should just never walk down Fifteenth Street again.
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