It's the Brain Damage!

I drove my mom and sisters up to Happy Valley to do some back to school shopping.  Holy crap on a cracker, can you say "baby factories?"  I swear, every screaming child under the age of five within potlucking distance of Zoobie land was in Ross and Old Navy today.  Even worse, it was their deadbeat parents that dragged them in the store, let them run wild while Mom and Dad snuck a Diet Coke in the dressing room ("Heavenly Father is our baby-sitter."  Geesh... I wish I could get an emoticon to roll its eyes).

My family wonders why I'm still single - why I don't even date.  Well, gee, let me spell it out for you: dating leads to liking a guy, which leads to REALLY liking this guy, which leads to falling in love, which leads to an engagement, which leads to a wedding (which is it's own kind of insanity), which leads to a honeymoon, which (sooner or later - especially in Mormon culture) leads to a boatload of children driving everyone around me absolutely crazy, which will quite possibly lead to my mug shot on the 6:00 news headlining a story of how I locked them in a closet for a year/drown them in the bathtub/fed them rusty nails for dinner (take your pick - CSI has a whole list of them).

Now, I have nothing against kids in general.  In fact, kids can be a lot of fun.  When they belong to other people who have the time, the desire and the disposition for them.  I can only handle so much - which is evidently the case for some Old Navy shoppers in Orem because I saw and heard a lot more kids than I saw/heard adults corralling these terrors (maybe it was the noise bouncing off the concrete floor - but I doubt it).  I actually had a bet with myself going on if the parents of a little girl ahead of me in the checkout line would notice that their sweet angel still had a plastic margarita-ish glass in her hand when they got out the door after they had paid (turned out I lost the bet, but it was pretty close).

When I start to get down on myself that I'm not married and don't have kids, all I have to do is go shopping in Utah County (barring that - go to any Wal-Mart on a Saturday morning) and I will be cured of that within minutes.  I am a staunch, tried and true Mormon - but I might even start reciting the Catholic vows of chastity.  Just in case.

In fact - that's how you can combat teenage pregnancy.  If any high school-age couple is contemplating doing the "wild thing," don't assault them with statistics of how young mothers don't finish school or that the guy is going to have to pay child support - don't even bother talking about STDs.  Just let the two baby-sit five or so kids under the age of ten for a couple of hours (some should be boys who are just old enough to want to try to beat the crap out of each other) and they'll have their legs locked up tight.  Bonus points if the kids are related to one of the teenage couple (because then you can scare them by discussing genetics and "The Mother's Curse.").

My one consolation - I didn't have to cart any of those yard apes home.  Heaven be praised.