Like It Is

The DINK trend is growing

We all love to find nice neat little names for things. Especially groups of people. When we choose our own names or title or whatever, we’re comfortable using them. Take Childfree for example. For us (and by “us” I mean childfree men and women) we choose to use this word because it means we have made a deliberate choice not to procreate. The reasons for our choice are irrelevant, the fact is we have made a choice.

On the other hand, many childed people have great difficulty even articulating the word “childfree” when referring to those of us who have made the decision not to pro-create. To them, Childfree means something negative – except when they want to use it to describe their time away from their kids.

Instead they prefer to call us “childless”. We are still in the process of educating the childed and it will take a while, however childless denotes a lack of children – as in wanting them either now or sometime in the future. Childless is easy for the childed to articulate because of course everything possible must be done to reverse the lack, and those that lack are somehow to be pitied. As in “Those poor childless people.” It also makes a not very subtle assumption – that the being together of two married people implies that there must be a child as well, if not currently present, definitely in the making. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Childfree, childless

Not Cool

I thought this was rather interesting coming so soon after my article on anti-childfree visitors to childfree blogs. This is an example of the nastiness expressed by the anti-childfree against childfree people who happen to blog about living as a childfree person in a very childed society.

Someone, obviously taking offence at the blogger being childfree, has decided to have a weekly article on her own site – to mock the childfree blogger. Definitely stupid and pretty juvenile. Very uncool. But sadly an example of the crap that childfree bloggers have to contend with.

I did comment, and I hope you’ll go over to Purple Women and Friends and read her story for yourself. And I’m pretty sure she would be most interested in your point of view -  particularly since many of us know what it’s like to be on the end of anti-childfree trolls and their unsavoury tactics.

Technorati Tags: childfree blogs, childfree blogger

Police tell mother: Don’t scold daughter ‘because of Maddy’ | the Daily Mail.

Not that this is a childfree story, but it does take fuckwittery moronic behaviour to a whole new level of absurdity.

When mother Ruth Ball scolded her 4 year old daughter Leigha when she threw a tantrum for being refused sweeties, little did she know that some nosy parker was taking down her car licence number in order to report her to the police.

“Ms Ball was at a newsagent in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, when Leigha started screaming after being refused sweets. She swept her daughter out of the shop and put her in the car to calm down, standing a couple of feet away with her three-year-old son Jack.

A few minutes later she got into the car and drove the family home, thinking no more of it.”

Imagine her shock and outrage when a policeman appeared at her house the next day and told her off, telling her it was “inadvisable to shout at her daughter and shut her in the car after what happened to missing Madeleine.”

Because of what happened to Madeleine?! Now I am sorry that Madeleine was abducted and all, but hang on. Are we to believe that because of this girl being abducted, parents everywhere are to be castigated for disciplining their children who are behaving badly? I guess we now know why some children are so badly behaved.

Here is a mother trying to instill some discipline into a screaming child and what do we have? A policeman (who admittedly didn’t know why he was there anyway) telling the mother off for disciplining her child.

Meanwhile the child molesters and thieves must be laughing their heads off.

And I must be dreaming.

As for the member of the public that reported the mother? What a moron. Imagine having kids with the likes of these around. Shudder.

Technorati Tags: childfree

Lindsay Lohan arrested for drink driving

What can I say? Does this not have curious overtones of the Paris Hilton drink-drive arrest of a couple of months ago? In fact, just change the names and it could be the same news really. Seems Lindsay Lohan needs to change her rehab… all that money and she’s still on crack cocaine and and so stupid she gets behind a wheel cocaine squirrelled away in her car and… wait for it – drives with a suspended license! Surprise!

Oh and wait. She says the cocaine isn’t hers. ‘Course it isn’t. Some one planted stashed it with her for safe keeping. Didn’t they?

A smart liar lawyer might help her argue that one. But not sure exactly how she’s going to explain driving on a suspended license. Unless she says she was high out of it, but that mightn’t be so wise. Ummm, hello? Smart Liar Lawyer?

I hope she gets at least six months. More if possible. But I fear we will have to wait for the first dead body before we see a celebrity go to jail for any decent amount of time for driving drunk behind the wheel.

Edit. Lindsay says she’s “innocent.”

Next.

Technorati Tags: Lindsay Lohan

Exactly why do some parents and wanna-be parents visit childfree blogs and sites to slag off the owners and their readers? Note this post is not directed at the parents who read, and or comment, but never slag off others in the conversations.

I refer to breeders (not parents, and there is a difference), who either deliberately seek out or happen upon a childfree blog or forum and immediately begin to inform all on said childfree blog of shier opinion of them or to flame the forum. They are not interested in engaging in discussion, they are interested in telling childfree people how wrong they think they are for being childfree. I’m beginning to spot their pattern… sometimes it begins with an innocuous comment to a post. There’s some back and forth as readers respond. When readers respond from a childfree perspective – unsurprising, since in the main this blog is a childfree space, the non-childfree person suddenly reverts to type and throws out the rather typical insulting comments – before they pretend to leave for more reproducing-friendly shores while still hanging about here. Read the rest of this entry »

In this thread I mean. It’s a good thing Brightfeather sent me this link.

Mom and chatty toddler kicked off flight

Otherwise I might have had a bit of a problem wading through the howling indignation expressed by all the “mommies” on this blog thread. I call it a version of “let’s worship at the alter of the (Madonna) and child.” See what you think.
Any childfree person who has traveled on a plane with a parent and small child can without hesitation bring to mind the sinking feeling when the child starts acting up. The feeling gets worse as the parent may ignore the unruly child, or try to calm them and give up. I remember the feeling well, since it happened on my last trip. I can only pray we don’t have the same experience on our upcoming flight.

For the record, I am well aware that there are many well-behaved kids who travel with their equally well-behaved parents. They travel like any other paying passenger. They don’t necessarily sit still all the time. But they don’t disturb other passengers (including their parents) to the extent that one’s flight is ruined. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: childfree

Recently I have seen some really odd uses of the word childfree.Odd, because it’s being used by some childed folk to describe themselves or to describe what they are doing. Why?

On one hand “the childfree” as we’re called are people to be feared. I mean, according to some aren’t we supposed to hate kids? In fact, isn’t the mere mention of the words, kids, children et al, supposed to send us into a frenzy of rage, immediately triggering an impulse to gobble up any kid in sight as a nice tasty snack?

And - hang on – aren’t we supposed to be terrifying – even though you couldn’t possibly tell whether or not we are childfree unless we told you. We usually don’t. And us telling anyone is usually as a result of a) someone blathering on about their kids two minutes into a conversation, b) the tiresome, but predictable questions “so, do you have kids?” “are you planning to have kids?” or even worse “so, how many kids do you have?”

The subsequent responses to each of these questions are generally potential conversation killers and silent confirmation to the childed of she/he must “dislike kids.” A mystery to me.

So why then am I seeing things like this… Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: childfree

It’s Friday. Time for a laugh. And a timeless lesson on how Consultants can make a difference for an organization…

Last week, we took some friends out to a new restaurant, and noticed that the waiter who took our order carried a spoon in his shirt pocket. It seemed a little strange.

When another waiter brought our water and utensils, I noticed he also had a spoon in his shirt pocket. Then I looked around saw that all the staff had spoons in their pockets. When the waiter came back to serve our soup I asked, “Why the spoon?”

“Well,” he explained, “the restaurant’s owners hired Andersen Consulting to revamp all our processes. After several months of analysis, they concluded that the spoon was the most frequently dropped utensil. It represents a drop frequency of approximately 3 spoons per table per hour. If our personnel are better prepared, we can reduce the number of trips back to the kitchen and save 15 man-hours per shift.”

As luck would have it, I dropped my spoon and he was able to replace it with his spare. “I’ll get another spoon next time I go to the kitchen instead of making an extra trip to get it right now.”

I was impressed. And I also noticed that there was a string hanging out of the waiter’s fly. Looking around, I noticed that all the waiters had the same string hanging from their flies. So before he walked off, I asked the waiter, “Excuse me, but can you tell me why you have that string right there?”

“Oh, certainly!” Then he lowered his voice. “Not everyone is so observant. That consulting firm I mentioned also found out that we could save time in the toilet. By tying this string to the tip of you know what, we can pull it out without touching it and eliminate the need to wash our hands, shortening the time spent in the toilet by 76.39 percent.”

“After you get it out, how do you put it back?”

“Well,” he whispered, “I don’t know about the others, but I use the spoon.”

He isn’t childfree but…

I found this interesting thread in a Google search. I am posting the original message in it’s entirety with the link back to Men’s Issues, because I think it’s well worth a good read – and I’d like as many people to read it as possible. For that reason this article is rather long – so be warned. Although I’ve posted Bazahuma’s very well written forum post here, I encourage you to go over to Men’s Issues and read the responses. The discussion there is very interesting…

Bazahuma says

“I’m 47 and married to my second wife who is 38. We’ve been together for 9 years and married for almost 5. I have a daughter who is 13 from the first marriage. I love my daughter in absolute terms. She spends half of her time with us, has known my wife since she was 3 and they adore each other. All together we, as a family, have a great relationship.

Here’s the issue and sadly I imagine it’s been heard many times. Before my current wife and I even started getting serious I told her that I absolutely did not want to have any more children; which she stated was not a problem for her. She had a career she was working on launching and didn’t think pregnancy and babies would ever fit into her schedule. Prior to her moving in with me, almost two years into our relationship we had another sit-down discussion about children where I expressed absolutely no desire to have any more children and that if she thought for a moment that she wanted kids then I wasn’t the right guy for her and to be fair to herself, to me, and my daughter she should find someone who shares the same desires. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: childfree

This story came out last week, and I first read it on BBC Online but I was so stunned that I felt I’d rather blog about other things. No doubt you’ve probably read it elsewhere since it was carried on every major news channel. I had a view though, I thought it’s worth sharing on Like It Is – and thanks to everyone who sent me links to the story.

Girl Could Give Birth to Her Sister

In summary Melanie Boivin, 35, from Montreal, Canada has placed 21 of her eggs on ice for her seven year old daughter Flavie Boivin to use when she grows up. Daughter Flavie Boivin has Turner syndrome, a condition in which one of the two X chromosomes normally carried by women is missing. It usually causes infertility, though women who have the condition can conceive with donated eggs.

This is thought to be a first for a mother-daughter egg donation. Perhaps that’s why she went public with her story? Her mother, not wanting her to miss the chance of having children because of her condition, or meet a shortage of donated eggs, has frozen her own eggs so that her daughter will be able to use them. Should she wish to.

I have to say when I first read of this I felt more than a little disturbed. Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: Melanie Boivin, Flavie Boivin