always happy to indulge my fetish for clicking the block button

Aquarius aesthetic 

So many of my soash-meed feeds have turned into what seems like an endless parade of tone-deaf white privilege and Karenesque-levels of whinery over trivial woes¹ that my eyeballs have actually sprained themselves from over-rolling.

I mean, I get that we are all going to make the occasional joke about some perceived hardship that we are enduring, but when it’s all the damn time, I just can’t deal. My income has been slashed in half. I have so many friends that have no jobs and have been trying for weeks to get into their state’s overwhelmed benefits systems with no luck. I just wish some folks would reflect a wee bit before they click the Post button for their third screed of the day about how they “can’t get in touch with a repair man to come fix the brick pizza oven on the back patio and on top of that only three of the four kids have a Nintendo Switch and Target won’t have stock again until Wednesday and can’t you understand how hard this is for meeeeeee.”

Okay, back to the nerdery.

Mom rants about kids.

Really? You can’t handle your children through a quarantine? Then why do you have them.

Boo-fucking-hoo. You have to lead actual humans through hardship and they are reacting in all kinds of ways like humans do. Just like you.

Playgrounds? Closed.

Can’t see her aunt/uncle, cousins, grandparents, friends

Her preschool is still open, but is using very intense safety measures which include her having her temp taken multiple times a day, we can’t walk her to or from her classroom, etc.

The attendance rates at her school have dropped drastically because people have lost their jobs and can’t afford to keep sending their kids, or have opted to keep their kids home, which means most of her homies at school aren’t there.

If I first loudly profess how much I love my child and how lucky I am to be a mother am I allowed to say how profoundly difficult it is to try to work full time while simultaneously caring for an infant? Or is it that I’m struggling at all that makes me a bad mother? And if I preface it by saying that I worry everyday how this situation is affecting his development can I then voice my resentment that I spend 80% of my waking hours in my living room because it now takes at least 10 hours to do 8 hours of work and I barely have time to feed myself and I hate that some days we don’t get to enjoy our kid because every minute that he doesn’t actively need something has to be dedicated to work or just keeping the mess from consuming our home? Or am I never allowed to vent about the trials and indignities of motherhood because I must always, without exception be putting my child’s needs above my own and to do otherwise makes me a horrible, unworthy mother? 

My neighbor with two tweens who’s working from home while her husband works 12 hour shifts at the hospital, is she allowed to vent? How about my other neighbor who goes into work at night so she can take care of her 3 month old during the day while her husband goes to work? Or should they also have just gotten goldfish? 

We support essential workers and want to make sure that we come out of this valuing the low-paid essential tasks of our society….except for the care, feeding and education of children, which doesn’t even count as work.  It’s silly to complain about taking on 3-4 additional unpaid jobs while also trying to do your regular jobs during a pandemic. 

And yes, children thrive on routine and become emotional when their routine is disrupted.  This is also true of human beings of literally any age and it’s inhumane to decide that parents (and, as always, lbr, mothers) don’t get to ever express frustration. 

tumblr, meet chicken