Dear boy,
The secret is negative reinforcement. Consider learning your child to self sooth. Learn them to know that no one is coming to save you.
All that cradle caterwauling you did while your father and I listened from the bedroom? Training. Don’t be confused. You must have heard us bicker.
“Don’t you go help the baby,” I said.
“No, you don’t help the baby,” your father said.
Our only regret is you weren’t an orphan. Tolstoy, Poe, Babe Ruth, Marylin Monroe. These are the kinds of people you have been groomed to become, spoiled by any slight parentage as you are. They learned to be the smartest, the most athletic, the most beautiful through self-sufficiency. But their downfalls all came from lack of negative reinforcement, and just a little intervention.
All the way to his grave, Tolstoy was still mothered by his wife, who practically wrote all his books for him, handled his book keeping, and executed the edits.
Marilyn was little miss Benzos, little miss medicate me to the grave.
It’s a marvel Babe Ruth could keep it in his pants long enough to hit any balls other than his own. He was the Genghis Kahn of baseball; he could hardly keep his bat to himself. And who could blame him, Mrs. Ruth never had the gumption of divorcing him and get a nice settlement and spend the rest of her life auctioning off his balls - signed, of course.
For crying out loud, Edgar Allan Poe was found in the street, prone on the pavement, soiling another man’s clothing. A real boozer that one. And a homosexual boozer at that.
Needless to say, all the other mothers at the country club glamoured over your genius. At merely two years old, you unbuckled your stroller, followed a gentleman into the restroom, and relieved yourself on the toilet. How the gentlemen had never managed to walk out of the bathroom on account of each of his Achilles tendons slashed was a matter of mere speculation. Were his jugular not slashed, I’m sure he would have attested how impressive it was to see you climb up onto the bowl.
Imagine, a toddler on trial.
Our continued purchase of your diapers was a mere formality.
And oh, how adorable you looked with a paring knife from dinner.
To think, allowing a baby to handle diaper rash on his own would expedite motor coordination, self-hygiene, lateral problem solving, et cetera.
Even before your synapses could connect in such a way to form the words, lying there crying those long nights with an itchy little asshole, a burning baby cock and balls, you knew the lesson no Babe Ruth, no Poe would learn until too late: no one is coming to save you.
Simple Darwinism my dear.
It was no easy feat, not coming to rescue you from all your little ails and heartbreaks. How simple it would have been to kiss your little booboos from when you, say, dropped a knife in your foot, or fell from a ladder while constructing some sort of tripwire activated contraption that, when activated, would release a pair of cinderblocks from opposites to smash together. It was so effective that I could hold up a bag of oranges and, ta da! Instant orange juice.
Oh, how I dreamed of letting your father walk through that.
If Mr. Poe had a mother like me, he wouldn’t have been such a sickly child with such a weak constitution. Like you, he would have enjoyed a childhood benefited by a daily full supply of vitamin C.
Of course, parenting doesn’t stop just because you don’t have to change diapers anymore. Far from it, there’s still schooling and proper socialization, etiquette training, extra curriculars, et cetera.
Consider the virtues of homeschooling your progeny. It will save you the trouble of learning the names of teachers and their spouses, their children, their license plates and addresses and the long list of their deepest darkest fears, some of which become newly introduced by rambunctious tikes such as yourself. Who would have thought that, instead of taking history exams, forcing Mrs. Delaware’s immediate family to play Russian Roulette, except all the chambers are loaded and you hold the gun the entire time without pointing it at yourself was a viable alternative?
And oh, there was a spell where I was worried you would become spoiled by your peers. They were so fond of you, and showered you with gifts every day at school. Even at a private institution, where the lunches were paid for in advance, all of your classmates still brought you lunch money and chocolates and the like as tribute. I took it as proof of concept – how quickly you were willing to spread the value of negative reinforcement. Your peers knew, for the good behavior of bringing tribute, they wouldn’t wake up chained to the monkey bars with their fingernails missing.
Positive behavior to avoid negative consequence.
Same as learning to wipe your ass to avoid rash.
Same as disposing evidence to avoid life in prison.
But what you didn’t account for was how your little friends weren’t brought up to be as resilient as you. How they never learned to self-sooth, how assured they would be taken care of by someone, cradle to grave. Do you realize how lucky you are to have me as your mother? All the blackmail it took to keep the mouth of Mr. Frank, the father of your fingernail-lacking-friend, Stewart, shut? The snooping to excavate Mr. Frank’s from a certain Epstein’s flight list, followed by the threat of exposure that would all but guarantee that little Stewart would only get to see his daddy through a glass barrier every Christmas for the rest of his life?
With an upbringing like that, what do you think are the prospects of a child like that to get into Harvard, or even Brown?
Consider neutering your child early on. Come high school, you’ll get to spend more time reviewing report cards and the addresses of noncompliant educators, than say, scrubbing substances like Rohypnol from tox-screens before they reach the authorities. Oh, it will save you the time and energy of having to coax these young girls into getting into your limo to some abortion clinic, comforting them with the usual, “Come now, dear, it couldn’t have been that bad. It must have only been 20 minutes, and I doubt you were conscious at all!” and then you nod feign understanding when they show you the scratches and bruises on their back and legs.
Consider the calculations of paying these girls off. When they show you the bite marks on their calves, on their shoulders, that’s another $50,000 you have to add to the check, each. Strangulation marks around the neck is another $100,000.
These little whores, leaving sweat marks from their bare thighs because their skirts are too short on the top-grain leather, they’ll say things like, “Oh boo hoo I’ll never be the same, I’m ruined, my innocence is lost,” et cetera. Then in addition to writing checks, you have to pull up pictures of their little Shih tzus or Chihuahuas from their social media accounts. You make small, subtle comments, like how it would be a shame if their precious little Fidos or Butters ended up hanging from their leash, or flattened beneath the tires of a limousine until their intestines came out of their mouths.
While all the blood shrinks out of these girls faces, I explained to avoid these consequences, it would be best if they scraped my potential grandbabies out of their filthy wombs.
They get rid of your babies, and they get to keep their fur babies. Positive action to avoid negative consequences.
Same as scraping your tongue to avoid bad breath.
Same as learning not to cry so I don’t press a pillow over your face.
For teaching you simple Darwinism like this, you’d think I’d win mother of the year.
So of course they comply. I cut them their check and they go get their little operation, keep their mouths shut forever and ever, use the hush money for cars, for college, for trips abroad and if I ever hear they let spill a peep, ever tarnish the reputation of you, my precious boy, they get another dose of Rohypnol and wake up in a shipping yard container to live out their days as a sex slave on an island for your father to visit, et cetera.
Consider all this and more before you have a child. Consider all I’ve done and will ever do for you. You come by your monstrous nature honestly, by your father and me. But still, we’ve done better than the parents of Monroe, and Tolstoy, and Poe, and Babe Ruth. We’ve been here, watching you, protecting you, sending you to the finest educational institutions, adorning you in the finest clothes, shielding you from the law with every bloody footprint you’ve taken.
Cradle to grave, you will always be my little boy, and I will always love you. That is my greatest failure: loving you and loving you.
Love,
Mother
The dark humor here is both unsettling and thought-provoking.
10 outta 10. That was fun to wake up to.