The Luv Doc

Dear Luv Doc,
I have a friend who had a baby a few years ago, and she is finally getting to a point where we can occasionally have lunch. I really like spending time with her, except that she sometimes brings her baby boy with her, and he is a terror. He throws his food, he makes a huge mess, he squirms out of his seat, and if she lets him out of it, she lets him run all over the place. I don’t know how she puts up with it, and I am not sure I want to. Any suggestions? Is there a toddler whisperer?
- A. Friend

I feel you A. Condoms: not just for muling drugs and water balloon fights. Amirite? America has got to stop treating parenthood as some inalienable right like assault weapon ownership or hydraulic fracturing. It’s serious fucking business. One slipup and you end up with that guy in the next cubicle who clips his toenails during lunch. Let’s have some sanity please – at the very least a written test like the one you take at the DMV, or how about forcing people to watch a scary video featuring a colicky 9-month-old baby with projectile diarrhea?

But no, nothing. Amazingly, the only requirement for having a baby in America is being able to get it in the hole. That’s it. A few minutes of squicky squicky in the back of the short bus might be a bit of a logistical challenge, but it’s nothing that can’t be overcome by someone with the mental acuity of a banana slug. All it takes is want and perseverance – or maybe just brainstem-level evolutionary imperative. It is even possible to conceive a child in a music festival porta-potty with a Juggalo who has a severe case of whiskey dick, but is that really deserving of a pastel-colored party eight months later?

OK, maybe it is. That would take a lot of focus, but making babies is clearly the easy part. Otherwise there wouldn’t be nearly 7 billion of us running around trying to make more. No, the tough part, as ever, is the finish – or rather, the long, ugly slog to responsible adulthood. It takes a monumental amount of time, energy, humility, steadfastness, and patience. None of that shit is especially fun, and if, for some reason, your idea of a good time is taking a 7-year-old to a pizza party at Chuck E. Cheese's, you need to be on several forms of birth control – and probably see a therapist. UnFUCKINGcool. But that’s the kind of horrible shit you have to do as a parent. That’s the ticket you bought.

However, if you visit that kind of misery on your friends, you won’t have friends for long. So, instead of whispering into her kid’s ear, tell your friend that if she wants to bring her child out to play with the grownups, she needs to keep its fingers out of the queso or leave it at home. Why? Because raising kids is the responsibility of the people who made them. She doesn’t get to ruin your fun just because she can’t have any.