When I was 15-17 and hanging out on LiveJournal (the primary social media hangout for a lot of people back then, like Tumblr is now) there was this huge ‘hating kids’ movement. Or it felt huge to me I suppose, being a child and all. Fifteen is still a child, I’m quite sure of it.
There were a lot of blogs dedicated to hating children and most of them consisted of classist little parables about overweight mothers and their ugly kids holding up the lines in Walmart. There were worse, too. There was one particularly memorable one where some grown adults threw a temper tantrum having seen a stranger’s child win a Harry Potter costume contest over them. (It’s probably still festering away on the Internet somewhere.) I remember all this stuff like it was yesterday, it’s weird. People much older than me threw around phrases like “breeder” (for the mothers) and “crotch-turd” (for the kids). There used to be a poster at my high school advertising – I don’t know – better teacher-student relations? – that listed all the harmless phrases children were likely to be called, ‘sprog’ and ‘kiddie’, that sort of thing. I mentally added ‘crotch-turd’ to it every time I walked past. Fifteen is still a child!
Someone made a post about a bumper sticker they saw that read “My kid has more chromosomes than your kid”. Referencing Down Syndrome. “It’s called a poison womb, sweetie :)” the poster wrote, luxuriating in their privileges. “I don’t think I want kids,” I wrote in my childhood journal. “What’s the point of having a kid if it’s just gonna be hated from the day it’s born?”
Hurricane Katrina came in 2005. I was an ocean away and Britain doesn’t really have hurricanes, I’d never have to face something like that. There was an article going around about a pregnant nurse who had stayed at the New Orleans children’s hospital to help the sick and dying children there whilst the hurricane raged. If she was one of the thousand-strong death toll I didn’t know. “It means less pregnant mothers and babiez to deal with in the long run ;)” said some nameless commenter on one of my dashboards, out loud, publicly, proudly. I want to say I hope they never faced something like that. But I’m not sure I’m that charitable.
Fifteen is still a child! Seventeen is still a child! You deserve(d) so much better!