A Brief Rant

I was working on a post about my resentment of bureaucratic prying into my life in the form of endless questionnaires unrelated to actually given birth ("Has anyone hit you recently?" "No, but I did suffer a rather painful toe-smashing at the feet of a booted toddler."), bright little pamphlets advising me that babies do cry and that rocking and singing to them is more appropriate a response than shaking them to pieces, and chatty ladies from the insurance company with no discernible information calling up to see how I am doing.

I don't want strange ladies with unclear motives and no apparent intentions of dish-washing calling me up to chat about how I am doing and if I have enough help. I don't want (even at the lure of a $50,000 grand prize) to fill out a little card that says I now know that it is normal for babies to cry, as if to admit that before I was a nincompoop and potential child abuser but have been redirected by their pamphlets onto the straight and narrow path.

Surely elderly ladies at church (who after all have no unknown but potentially sinister powers behind them) are enough for a reasonably competent mother to endure. And while I do not deny the existence of incompetent mothers in the world, I somehow doubt their habits are changed greatly by little pamphlets and calls about their bad habits. They would probably do better with a few nosy elderly ladies in their lives, but it's hard to come up with a good corporate program for distributing those.

Well, I guess I just wrote it.