Little Kids

By now I bet you're beginning to see a trend emerging, but before I acknowledge it, I want you to hop into my proverbial DeLorean so we can take a little trip back to September through December of 2011 (a mere five months ago, this won't take long).

If you don't know what this movie is, it is well past your bedtime and you are too young to be reading my blog.

As a poor fuck with a penchant for online shopping, I decided last semester that I should be working all of the jobs, and thus relied on the glorious black hole that is Craigslist to find myself some supplemental babysitting income.  If you didn't already know (how would you not know?), Craigslist is sketchy as PHUQ, and while I did happen to get lucky and find an absolutely awesome family to babysit for (who lived in a mansion and essentially payed me to play Wii and eat gourmet dinners with their daughters), I also stumbled into the four month long misfortune of babysitting the Anti-christ himself.  We will call him "Seth", which happens to actually be his real name that I haven't changed at all because the name "Seth" properly captures his personality to a degree that I cannot replicate using some other moniker.

As a brief preface, I should say that I am not usually the kind of person people want around their children, nor am I the kind of person that seeks children out, pinching their cheeks and squealing in a high pitched voice about "how ADORABLE!!!" someone's kid is.  I don't know what to do with kids - I'm not sure how to speak to them and I find that they generally make me uncomfortable.  Kids always smell like something unnatural, which is a strange concept to me because most babies smell delicious.  How does a small baby go from smelling so good to smelling like an old piece of dirty bacon?  I'm not sure, but that's how children smell to me, and I don't like it.  As for infants, I'm downright afraid of them - I had to hold my cousin's five month old baby at Thanksgiving and I nearly sent myself into a full-fledged panic attack because she was so small, and what if I got her sick or dropped her by accident and she died?  I would be THAT cousin who killed the baby, and then what?  How do you get a job after you kill a baby?  That sort of background really only looks good on a resume if you're trying to become an abortionist, and honestly, that's not where I thought my life was headed.  The whole thing just doesn't work for me, and you know what?  Apparently there is a small amount of girls out there that struggle with this whole "kids" and "babies" thing too.  I can't be the only one who doesn't like or know how to act around children, and maybe my fellow frigid women out there can identify with me when I say that I simply prefer to nurture more important things than kids, like my blossoming alcohol addiction or my collection of Jeffrey Campbell's.

Think about it - would you want your child hanging around me all day, mimicking my mannerisms and learning how to properly pronounce the word "cocksucker"? Didn't think so.

Anyway.

So I found Seth's mom via my Craigslist extravaganza, and after determining that she wasn't going to harvest my organs, we agreed that I would watch Seth and his brother Carter two to four days per week.  I don't know how I didn't see the omens of horror, or at least notice something weird was going on prior to my first day (I'm mostly referring to the fact that Seth's mom had tattoos on the inside of her earlobes and had to show me a picture of her ex-husband just in case he showed up at the house so I would know he wasn't allowed in), but I was blissfully aloof.  I figured I had garnered such awesome success from my other Craigslist family that everything was probably going to work out just as swimmingly with this one.

Well.  Cue the start of the Twilight Zone music.

On my first day, I went to the house and the boys' mom was already gone.  The house lay in abandon, and as I let myself in I remembered that I had never actually met Seth and Carter before.  My central nervous system responded to this with a spurt of good-natured anxiety - hope I can remember their names and not get them confused!  So jolly, I was.  So carefree.  So naive.  I waited for the boys to get home from school, my body spread on the sofa like a 120 pound sack of potatoes, and I turned on the TV to catch the ending of Intervention (LOVE other people's pain).  Things were wrapping up pretty nicely as Alice agreed to go to rehab, when all of a sudden I hear the bellowing howls of an animalistic fury rapidly approaching the house.  A moment later, two miniature boys came barreling into the living room, beating the ever-loving shit out of one another.

Carter is unimportant - the kid is a chubby brown-noser who obviously feels the need to take responsibility for his younger brother since he is the first-born.  Yadda, yadda, yawn.  But Seth.  Seth, my friends, is a fucking SOCIOPATH.  The boys stopped hitting each other when they noticed a stranger was in their presence (I believe their vision is based on movement), and Seth swivels his head with a look of curious indignation, shooting daggers of both interest and anger out of his tremendous blue eyes.  He approaches me head on, and, standing three inches from my face, says, "Who are you supposed to be?"  And for a moment there, I honestly didn't know.  Who the fuck AM I supposed to be, you know?  And so I'm staring back at this kid, caught in a haze of what I now recognize as supernatural forces, and I see that he literally has no emotion behind his eyes, his features just a hollow, dead shell masking the utterly impenetrable darkness that is encased inside of his six year old body.  He's still grilling me as I meekly whisper "I'm . . . I'm Vick," and as the words register in his brain, clicking and whirring through his sub-human cognition, he breaks his stare and life resumes.  He turns away, rips off his school shirt, and begins humping the television set with great passion and fervor.

Just so you guys are aware, if you Google image search "dead behind the eyes", this is the first photo that comes up.

Every encounter I had with Seth over that four month span of time was fucking awful and emotionally scarring.  The sheer amount of physical and emotional abuse I endured persists in my memory so vividly that I pray to Allah every night that I have not now become apart of some larger cycle of violence that will later on cause me to abuse my own children*.  I don't understand how Seth even managed to continue living on the most fundamental, day-to-day level - the kid NEVER ate.  I would spend hours learning to cook the random foods I was supposed to prepare for dinner only to have him glance at his plate and tell me that no, he would not be eating that trash, and like the battered housewife I was, I would bring his perfectly prepared meal back into the kitchen and weep softly into my apron.  Seth's energy source wouldn't be such an interesting facet of his personality to me if he wasn't so active - he destroyed everything he came into contact with.  He was like a hurricane on Adderall, and instead of using his power for good, he would shred his mother's books, eat his own homework, and attempt to punt the family's teacup chihauhau.  Seth's body was a mashed ball of wiry muscle, something you'd see on a Neanderthal, and for some time I thought that he might be a throwback: some unfortunate mixing of genes that had laid reticent throughout thousands of years of human history only to gain expression in the year 2006 when a woman with ear tattoos would pro-create for the second time and produce Seth.  Ultimately, things proved much worse.  You see, after my four months of work with Seth, the only conclusion I could draw up was that he actually IS the unholy spawn of Satan himself.  Seth was born soulless, a robot of destruction that the Dark Lord had chosen as his vessel for conquering the fallen race of mankind, and there is not a single doubt in my mind that Seth will one day kill us all.  Mark my words, twelve years from now, you will look up at the six o clock news and find yourself confronted with the icy cold gaze of Seth, who will have just been convicted of (at the very least) brutally slaughtering a nice suburban family.

It's a gross generalization to think that all kids are like Seth - they aren't and can't be, mostly because I think there is some sort of law in the universe where Satan can only have one reincarnation alive at a time.  I will even go so far as to say that some little kids are okay, namely infants (though they do scare me with their fragility) and those who have just learned to talk, because they are like weird little drunk people who smile a lot and make you laugh.  It's really between the ages of five and eleven years old that we begin to see how fucking wretched little kids are.  From age five onward, kids start getting a real handle on human language, and also on human emotion.  They can smell both fear and annoyance, as Seth proved one day when he began copying everything that I was saying and I nearly lost my shit and killed him (which, when I think about it, I am extremely lucky that I didn't, because then the infernal soul of the devil would have been forced to occupy some other living body, and mine would have been nearest.  Close call, you guys.  Close fucking call.)

Who's a pretty girl?

What's even worse is that it's during this time frame that kids begin to understand they can manipulate you to get what they want, especially if they aren't your child.  Little kids will cry and plead and throw unending tantrums, reducing your emotional stamina to a pile of smoldering ashes before you finally cave in and give them whatever it is that they desire.  They can pull the Mommy card on you and run screaming into their parent's arms, pointing at you as the bad guy and causing a fiery hailstorm of disapproving looks and "you should be ashamed of yourself" 's.  But even parents get the shit on (both literally and figuratively) when it comes to little kids.  How many times have you seen a mother with her crying child at the store, begging for the kid to stop and ultimately picking the child up like a 40 pound holiday ham and dragging him/her out of the store?  And how many times have you judged that woman?

Are you fucking kidding me, People of Walmart?  I can't.

Let's be real, probably a lot, and though sometimes it is genuine bad parenting (see above), I feel like most of the time it's because the little kid is a fucking manipulative freak.  Kids are just an entirely other species - they don't know what anything is or where they are, they are helpless to adults yet know how to flip the script on us so that we are helpless to them, and everything they touch somehow becomes more sticky that the cockroach semen-covered items for sale at Rite Aid.  Every time a strange kid has approached me, they have either asked for something I have and am unwilling to give up (Uh, no you can't have this ice cream cone.  I just bought it.  With money.  That I earned.  From having a job.  Which you don't have.  Because your small and lazy.), or they have said something completely fucking weird to me and totally ruined my day (See: "If you're a lady why do you have a mustache?"  I'M IN BETWEEN WAXES YOU LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT).

The nail in the coffin of little kids (absolutely HORRENDOUS way to start a sentence, but you know what I mean) is that I can clearly remember some of the messed up horseshit I used to do to my own parents/strangers when I was a kid, and it fills me a swelling balloon of self-loathing when I look back on it.  Did you know, for instance, that my younger sister is blonde and small and the polar opposite of me in every way?  And did you know, as further background, that my mom used to work mornings cleaning houses and nights waitressing (with an hour off to get us from school in between) to support us financially?  And, getting to the exact summit of this tragic look backward, are you aware that one day we dressed my sister's My Size Barbie up in one of her swimsuits and set her out to float face down in the swimming pool, and then told my sister to hide when mom came home from her morning job, and she did, and when mom walked in, exhausted from her first half of the day, and asked where Jess was, I said I didn't know, and that I think she went out back a little over an hour ago, and then my mom went out back only to see what looked like her youngest child floating dead in the swimming pool?  Because that's fucked up you guys.  That's some seriously fucked up shit right there, and that is something the mind of a nine year old girl thought was hilarious and appropriate at the time.

More like My Size Dead, am I right?

Little kids just suck.  They are small assholes who we all, as a society, give a free pass to be dicks because we think they can't be held accountable for the bullshit that they pull.  To offer a horrible metaphor (mostly because this is one thing I know we all did to our parents growing up), we watch little kids as they take a sip from our Life's water bottle only to ruin the entire drink with a foul looking backwash that is the direct result of eating old Skittles they found on the floor of Life's minivan.  I'm not even sure what that is supposed to mean, but the one thing I am most definitely certain of is that little kids are slowly ruining my life.

P.S.  Do you want to know what Seth the Antichrist had said to me on my last day of babysitting?  He looked me dead in the eye before I put him into his bed and said, "I wish you didn't exist." Don't worry Seth, after babysitting you I wish I didn't exist too.


*I'm not procreating.