I have a little story for the men who couldn’t handle the side effects of a new, effective male birth control shot, and the researchers who canceled the study citing “safety/adverse effects” – the very side effects 30%  – that’s THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT – of women taking birth control experience daily.

The story is called: IF YOU FUCK THIS UP YOU WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE. AKA: Birth control. AKA: Pretend you are us. 

From the time we are teenagers, or choose to become sexually active with men, it becomes “locker room” talk for damn near every straight woman with a vagina (and yes, I know the definition of “woman” is broader than this. I am referring here to the aforementioned identity). In every bathroom, bedroom, hallway, and yes, locker room, the giant, glaring question: HOW DO I AVOID UNWANTED PREGNANCY?

Welp let’s go over the options.

Abstinence: okay, okay. Okay. Okay. But then not okay for most of us. This is the form of birth control that will be thrown in your face if you end up pregnant, or birth control fails. You will be told that you should have stayed abstinent if you weren’t ready to accept the possibility of failed contraception. Yes, even if that risk is 1%. And yes, even though you were 18 and the dude who also trusted that condom has since left you for your roommate.

You should have thought of that! Abstinence is the only safe way!

Condoms: Absolutely excellent except you have to have them all the time and sometimes men refuse to wear them, or whine and whine about it and after a few (hundred) beers, whine so long and hard (see what I did there) that you’re like FINE because you’re 19 and drunk too and then. Well, pregnancy.

YOU SHOULD HAVE STAYED ABSTINENT YOU WHORE. He’s just a boy being a boy stop having unrealistic expectations. 

The pill: You realize condoms are too unreliable. You need something more secure and consistent and less reliant on a partner’s dick going in it. The pill! Perfect! You make an appointment at the clinic. You get there and they stick a scope in your vagina before they can give you the pill. Standard procedure. It’s a cold, hard, metal thing about 12 inches in diameter. You stare at the florescent lights. You remind yourself why you’re doing this.

After they stick that in, they swab your insides with a small, splintering piece of wood that they call a “Q-tip.” For the grand finale, doc sticks her hand in you and pokes and prod while you watch the interns gaze at your pubic hair.

But you get the pill! Whew. Sweet relief.

Then you take it. You notice your weight goes up. You notice you are getting a little irritable. A little sad. You notice you’re yelling a lot. You’re crying more. Now, you’re screaming, and now you’re lying in your bed, eating, and you don’t know why. Things that used to interest you don’t. You are legitimately depressed. Your friend says, “Oh, you went on the pill? Oh yeah. That’s what happens.”

What now come again, you think. I have to LIVE like this? I guess if it’s normal. And you hang in there.

You try for a few more months until the migraines come. This can’t happen. You go back to the doctor. They tell you, “Yes, the pill is triggering your headaches. We can put you on the lightest pill since you aren’t responding well to this one, but you have to use a second form of contraception, like CONDOMS.”

And here you are RIGHT BACK WHERE YOU STARTED. “But are there any other options, doc?”

She tells you: “They all have hormones, sorry. The shot. The IUD. It’s all the same. Hormones. If you don’t respond well to the pill, you won’t respond well to those.”

You survive for a few years on the lightest pill, using condoms, enduring the problems and countless pregnancy scares, but then they come out with the NON-HORMONAL IUD and you’re like OMG THANK YOU BABY JESUS and you go back to the clinic and they stick in the scope and hand and splintering wood while a couple interns watch as usual and then they stick in your uterus a little T-shaped device that feels like a tiny fish hook being dragged through your insides.

And then the cramping starts. But you have reliable birth control and no hormones! It’s worth it! Years of security!

You ignore the stories of the way they get implanted in the uterus and cause scar tissue and thus infertility (because you know how important it is to not fuck up your baby-making capacity – you must keep it all working! Do not mess this up!). You ignore it because you have to accept this risk so you don’t get pregnant, and it’s the only thing that’s worked, and truly, you are out of options.

Then your period comes, and you remember that if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. Your formerly chill 3-day period has been transformed into an upside down volcanic explosion of what must be 60 % of the blood in your body. You change your tampon once an hour, twice an hour. Do I just LIVE in the bathroom now?

It doesn’t end. It’s coupled with waves of cramping that move like fire down your body. Your low back. Your stomach. Your guts.

Here it is: The cost of non-hormonal, not-man-reliant birth control. Fuck my life and my uterus.

The following week, your boyfriend tells you he can feel the IUD with his penis while you’re having sex, so could you please figure out some other form of birth control?

The end.

Check it out: IT IS TIME FOR MEN TO JOIN THE CLUB WE’VE BEEN FREQUENTING SINCE THE BEGINNING OF HUMANKIND.

(40 years, people. 40 years of no real progress in male contraception.)

What kind of 9^th-circle-of-hell bullshit is this?

Women suffer for years at the mercy of their uteri, and then at the mercy of birth control methods that work but fuck us up, fail and fuck us up, and we keep working and working and trying to get it right, and a good portion of our lives are centered around avoiding pregnancy, getting pregnant, staying pregnant, all the things about pregnant, and NONE OF IT IS PRETTY and NOW YOU ARE TELLING ME THERE IS POTENTIAL FOR SOME HELP AND RELIEF AND WE ARE TOO CONCERNED ABOUT MEN HAVING TO ENDURE WHAT WE DO?

What the hell is this, “Man Cold, Side Effect Style?”

You know, we with female anatomy endure a lot of bullshit to provide certain things, such as, oh I don’t know, new life. (Or, even worse, to get it to function the way it “should” if it refuses.)

And either way, we endure it our whole lives. Hiding it. Protecting it. Defining it. Mourning it. Medicating it. Fixing it. Figuring out how to orgasm it.

It’s taken a long time for us to get to the point when we have some agency over our bodies, the course of our lives, but still, the birth control situation remains complex and unclear for many of us, and we have no choice but to figure it out.

Are dudes too delicate to endure the exact discomfort we’ve been facing for years?

Once again, society is cool with the suffering of women. We think twice for men. Once again, society kisses the ass of man – or shall I say “penis” – while telling women Well if you didn’t want to deal with birth control, why were you born with a vagina? 

(Ummmmmm hey there. Didn’t choose this. Shouldn’t be punished for it.)

Yeah, I’m angry.

This one hits below the belt (I can’t stop myself).

Figure it out.

HORMONE UP, motherfuckers.

It’s your turn.

One of the main reasons I started this blog is because every time I go anywhere with the standard human population, I feel at times like an alien, particularly among other parents and their kids. Parents seem way more into this than I am, and their kids kind of seem like dicks. In general.

Sorry, but true.

Look, I don’t looooove being called a “breeder,” because surely there is little more to parenthood than fucking and birthing and nursing like a goddamn border collie, and I think the phrase “child-free” is rather hilarious in its connotation that kids are some sort of unpleasant condition to avoid, like lice or debt or termites.

On the other hand, the term is a reaction to “child-LESS,” which implies a lacking, which reflects the way society looks at people without kids as less than and deficient, which is also clearly bullshit.

As an optimist, I feel we could find some middle ground between KIDS ARE THE MEANING OF LIFE and KIDS ARE HEAD LICE.

But whatever. I’ve always been a dreamer.

Honestly, I get why a portion of the child-free crew hates us though.

I would too.

In fact, I already do, and I am firmly planted in “breeder” status.

Because on the whole, parents can be pretty obnoxious and we often do it with an air of pretense, running around sure we have more fulfilling lives while our kids ruin your dinner (which we already discussed).

I often think, my god, if I were judging all parents by this sight, I WOULD NEVER HAVE KIDS. 

Take the other day, for example. I went to a petting zoo at a pumpkin patch with my kid’s first-grade class, where I saw a few kids in a pen with a baby cow.

Um, calf. It’s called a calf. I’m so country.

Anyway, I’m chaperoning along with 75% of the rest of the kids’ parents, and I’m standing outside the pen watching these kids with the calf. There are five kids in a small enclosure with the animal, and three of them are tormenting the shit out of the poor thing.

They’re squealing and tapping his head and darting this way and that, running in circles, and you can see the poor calf getting confused and agitated with no escape from the little bastards.

I look around and see at least three parents watching this and doing nothing.

I immediately remember why I hate people.

HOW THE HELL CAN YOU WATCH THIS AND NOT DO ANYTHING? WHY HUMANS WHY.

To make it worse, I realize the worst two offending kids’ parents are standing right there, and I think, well I shouldn’t say anything because thou shalt not parent other people’s children, but then I realized NOPE this is bullshit. I’m not going to watch this happen.

I’m not the police. I give very few fucks about what other people do. But this is an innocent animal. This ain’t right.

So I tell the kids, “Hey you all need to stop running around. You need to stand there and gently pet the cow or get out of the pen. You are tormenting him.”

Kids: “What does that mean?”

Me: “It means you are teasing him in a mean way. You are hurting him. “

And as an aside to the lady next to me, I say, “They’re like fucking bull-fighters in Madrid right now.” She didn’t think I was funny. As usual.

The kids stop. The parents do nothing. One kind of glared at me.

I walk away.

From across the barn, I see them immediately doing it again, and again the parents say nothing. I walk over to really lay it down because now I’m fucking angry. But luckily, my friend saw it too and actually went INTO the pen and physically stopped the kids and was showing them how to not be evil. She renewed my faith.

Oh thank god. We’re not all crazy.

And we aren’t.

And I guess there are people in every corner who are self-centered and ignorant, kids or no kids, but I truly don’t understand how parents don’t think it’s their job to teach their kids not to harm others.

Is that not basic decency?

Do they think it’s cute? Do they truly not notice? I’m no genius, but one thing that’s clearer to me than anything is when my kids are being annoying. Because they are annoying ME first and foremost, I can only imagine what they’re doing to innocent bystanders.

And an animal? Fuck.

Sorry, animals. And humans.

In conclusion. Dear parents: Please teach your kids not to torment adorable fuzzy baby animals who have no escape and never asked to be subjected to your kid in the first place.

I should write a parenting advice column.

I could call it, “Captain Fucking Obvious.”

Or, “You would know this if you’d pull your head out of your ass.”

But only you people would read it, and you already get it, so never mind.

Thanks for being an alien with me, with or without kids.

Thanks for your total dedication to not raising kids who fuck with the rest of us.

We can do this, America! I am a dreamer!

Hey look! It’s a kid not being mean to an animal at a petting zoo! Wheeeeee!

There is a point in every family vacation when I begin referring to my children as “Poor Life Choice Number 1, 2, 3, and 4.”

Not to their faces, obviously. That would be mean. I did however refer to my older kids and nieces and nephews as “SLAs,” which stands for “slightly less annoying” (than the younger kids). But that is 100% the truth and I’m standing by it. And they wore it like a badge of honor.

Seriously, taking kids on family vacations is bullshit. I would like a family vacation without my family, please. Is that too much to ask?

“Family vacation” almost immediately moves from excitement, anticipation and all the beautiful mental pictures of “how great” it will be to throwing away a shit-filled pair of shorts in a Taco Bell bathroom.

Sorry, Taco Bell.

On the plus side, they weren’t my shorts.

I am the picture of positivity.

Also, sorry, hotel staff, for the puke on the bed you had to clean up at 4pm on a Friday because I played with my toddler too long and he LAUGHED TOO HARD I GUESS after drinking milk, and puked. So gross.

More proof one should always limit engagement with offspring.

I’m kidding. All I want to do in every waking moment of my life is engage with my special snowflakes on a level so exciting they vomit.

Literally four of the six of us puked at different times for different reasons WHY WHY WHY WHY.

 At least twice a day on every family “vacation,” my husband and I look at each other and say with our mouths or eyes, “We’re never doing this again,” “What the fuck is wrong with our kids?” and WHY ARE WE PAYING ACTUAL MONEY FOR THIS. It feels like tossing $20s into the air while chasing a sugar-fueled toddler into a Lego store.

To illustrate the level of bullshit, I made a Family Vacation BINGO card. Every one of these things happened during our recent trip to Disneyland.

I think I ended the trip more tired than when we left. Pretty sure the last hour of the car ride had every single one of us screaming at equal volume and with equal maturity. And we won’t be unpacked for a month. And holy shit is that place expensive. WE WILL BE HAVING A VERY SMALL CHRISTMAS, kids.

(Disneyland prices are some nonsense, and yet, it’s so oddly horribly fun. I mean, I think it is. I hate crowds. Fuck crowds. And yet, it’s a small world! What is wrong with me. WHY DO I LOVE DISNEYLAND with its corporate princess capitalist patriarchal systems of oppression? The rides are so fun, people. And it’s so clean! I want to hate it and yet I do not hate it. I think it’s like adult acid without the regret.)

BUT, the trip was amazing. We went to Disneyland for fuck’s sake. As a family. We are so lucky. I know all this, and yet, I got frustrated and lost my patience and thought WHY ARE WE HERE and kept thinking Janelle! You are ruining the family memories! Stop! Be grateful! You’re acting like an asshole!

And I gotta tell ya, these feelings were especially intense because just one week before I left for this trip, I sat in a hospital room with my grandfather and grandmother, mom, brother, and cousins as my grandpa passed his final hours on earth. I watched him pressed to the furthest right side of his bed so he could be as close as possible to my grandmother, the woman with whom he spent 70 of his 87 years, with whom he raised 4 daughters and shared 20 grandchildren and 44 great-grandchildren. I watched their hands never let go as they played and replayed with their eyes the story of their lives together.

 And I realized, they were replaying what I am living now.

I watched them travel a lifetime in a few hours, tracing cracked fingers over paths of kids, jobs, grief and joy, and a few times I stole a glance at my husband across the room of beeping machinery and nearly palpable love, and I observed his face, the barely perceptible lines when he smiles, the black hair with just a few gray hairs, the strong, square shoulders and quickness of the way he moves.

We are so young.

We are, so young.

My heart ached. My eyes were on fire. This is it, Janelle. These are the years. This is life. What the fuck are we waiting for.

It all felt small. It all felt unimportant. These days that race by in frantic monotony. The shit-filled shorts. The puke. The bickering over the front seat. The pure exhaustion. The whining.

I thought, “I’ll never forget this! I’ll never get worked up about stupid shit again!”

Two weeks later, I’m making a Family Vacation Bullshit BINGO card.

I guess that’s the luxury of being here, and not being a spiritual giant.

Still, I want to remember. We are a family. We are together. We go on trips. We
walk hand-in-hand and hold our babies and make them laugh so hard they puke. We watch bigger cousins holding younger cousins as our teenager races to a ride, as if she were seven, and we run to CVS at 2am because the toddler has a random, inexplicable fever. I see my son and daughter dressed up with Goofy. I nearly cry it’s so damn precious. I love them so much I almost have to look away.

We take pictures. We try to remember.

Someday, we will try even harder.

I feel altered by my grandfather’s death. My grandparents were always there. They seemed immovable, fixed. Their home, where we played in the basement and now our kids play, and them, in love, inseparable. I knew in my brain it couldn’t last forever. I didn’t know it in my heart.

I guess we can’t. It’s too hard.

But what if we could? What if we could live our lives in the knowing that someday, at the very best, at the very luckiest, we will think of the days of racing around after slightly less annoying children and puking babies as the memories that fill a room with so much love and warm light that it can almost be held, by me, by you, in the last breath of a man who had this once.

Or a hundred times.

Still, it would never be enough.

It feels it will never end. It feels relentless and pounding. It feels so sacred it takes my breath away. And one day, it will.

So fuck it. Let’s live this. Let’s hate it and love it. Let’s scream and laugh and let our babies fall asleep against our arms and with their hands on our faces and let’s stay up late and be bad parents and great ones on occasion but let’s not under any circumstances miss this.

It’s a BINGO game of bullshit, but it’s ours, and it’s the best we’ll ever have.

Until next time, kids.

And thanks for making me wear a tutu.

It confuses me that Donald Trump is getting such a bad rap. I’m voting for him.* And I’m going to explain why.

I’m voting for Trump because I’m hoping for a fascist state. At least I think I am. I just want everybody of the Muslim nationality to wear patches and get into camps. I only like Americans.

Wait. Muslim isn’t a nationality? Oh, well. Whatever. Close the mosques! This country is getting overrun by the ethnics and someday whites will be a minority! We need to protect our religious freedoms!

We should make Islam illegal though because ISIS.

Thanks, Obama. (Another Muslim!)

I hear America put people in camps once before and that makes sense to me because it was rooted in racism and irrational fear. I like racism and irrational fear because I’m white and those things have served me well for at least 200 years.

I endorse Trump because Sarah Palin endorses him and I like Alaska and its big bears. Very American. I also hate sex before marriage but I enjoy the two kids I had at 16.

Forgiveness! God is good! I also like the freedom girls. Remember them? They wore sparkles! I love sparkles. I love small white cheerleaders singing memorized songs like Hitler youth. It makes me clap.

I also like vague rhetoric about America being the best country in the world and how we’re going to take down the bad guys because brown people in the Middle East are the bad guys. Also they wear weird clothes. This is how we know they’re bad guys. Sometimes people talk about “white terrorists” but we all know they don’t exist because terrorists are brown.

It may not be immediately apparent how freedom girls, brown people, and weird clothing connect with Trump’s promise of freedom, but I assure you, they are connected and I, for one, am ready to make this country great again!

Like when we had Japanese Internment. Those were the good old days! Also, anti-immigration laws based on national origin. Yes, please! The heyday!

And get marriage back to its sacred condition of a man and woman marrying and divorcing 2-5 times, like Trump did, and women staying in the home and not having access to safe abortions and no gays marrying because when I say “freedom” I mean for white straight Christian men.

Jesus!

I know everything The Donald says is true because he reminds me of my grandpa and I always liked my grandpa.

Which reminds me, I like Trump because he’s a real American success story. He’s white, male, and rich, which means he WORKED HARD for what he has and never took handouts. He didn’t pay taxes because he’s an excellent businessman! His billions make him more valuable and more American and even though I’m poor, I believe THIS MAN has my interests in mind. At least he understands the value of not taking handouts, unlike like those darn urban youth.

I’m not racist though. That Hillary is a super race baiter. If people would just stop talking about racism, it would go away! Like AIDS! And poverty!

I don’t see color as long as people act white and aren’t terrorists and don’t talk funny or wear weird clothes or have a name like “Sanchez.”

Speaking of which, we need to close our borders and build a wall!

Freedom. Stamina. Big hands.

Yeah. That’s right. I endorse Trump because America was founded on FREEDOM, and Trump symbolizes freedom. He is everything right in our country, which he explains by talking about really important stuff and using the best words and not being a loser.

Trump is so smart his sentences don’t even make sense to the standard mind. What a guy! He doesn’t lie. The media just skews his words. What they say about Hillary, though, is true. 100%.

I know this because I hate her.

Really though, mostly I just love those cheerleaders in red-white-and blue satin who make me clap. And the rallies where he says “Make America Great Again!” So much hope. Right around the corner.

I love clapping.

Trump 2016.

*This is satire. I’d rather have my left arm eaten off by rats.

The good news is, I made it to back-to-school night. I am happy to report that after 14 years, 10 months as a mother, I have figured out how to read school calendars and not miss important events like “paper parades” – HEY BTDUBS WHY CAN’T WE USE THE INTERNET FOR ALL THAT PAPERWORK LIKE REGULAR FUCKING HUMANS? – and, of course “back to school night.”

I even went for both elementary kids.

The questionable news, though, is that once again I said something I should have kept inside, thereby marking myself already as The Freak Mom. In front of the entire first grade classroom.

Why is that always my job, people? Why?

It was going fine until I tried to be funny.

(Story of my fucking life.)

But it wasn’t my fault. The teacher asked if we wanted her to “review the homework packets or throw them away at the end of the week” and I was like HAHAHA reviewing homework of first graders LOLLLZ! And I laughed, and then she looked at me, and I was like, “Oh for sure throw them away. Less work for you, and, I mean, they’re 6. We’ll probably all be okay if they’re not, like, graded.”

Approximately nobody in the room thought I was funny but HOMEWORK WHAT COME AGAIN?

It’s first grade. Where are my people? 

I shot a look at my mom, who was standing in for my husband because he was at our oldest kid’s back-to-school night, which was scheduled on, that’s right, the same night at the same time.  

Maybe the school district hates us and that’s why they make us choose kids by having it on the same night.

You know what? Maybe the same person who created the paper parade – AND CALLS IT “THE PAPER PARADE” MIGHT I ADD – also decided that having the elementary and junior high back-to-school nights at the exact same time is a good call.

This is why I don’t go to PTA meetings. I hate everything.

Also, I prefer complaining about the way things are done instead of actually doing anything about them.

WHAT? Isn’t that the American way?

Not that they don’t have good reason for making parents show up at the school instead of, oh, I don’t know, emailing like humans. I’m sure they have a perfectly good reason for making us all show up at 5pm on a Monday in August when it’s 375 degrees outside so we can stand in line with a bunch of flailing children to get tiny half-sheets of paper check-marked instead of, say, texting.

For example, it gives them a chance to size us up, and it gives us a chance to size each other up.

I’m fucking kidding. I mean, I definitely don’t ADORE the “paper parade” – event or nomenclature – but I know it’s probably the first and possibly only time some of those parents will make it onto campus to support their kids.

Stop being dicks and ruining it for the rest of us, parents.

Anywho, I quieted down after the homework comment and started sorting through the papers. There was a common core math grading sheet, a list of all the things my kid needs to know by second grade, a sample report card, and a daily schedule, which was jam-packed minute-by-minute with math and language arts and science and all kinds of important shit except playing, art, music, and/or any variation of FUN.

Being something of a nihilist, my brain immediately shot to everything I know about schools being machines to create worker-bees and mindless obedient drones and I thought about my little 6-year-old George and was like I MUST GET HER OUT OF HERE.

And then I remembered her telling us how they have to line up all day by number (She is number 14. She was 6 last year. So on her papers she has to write “Georgia 14,” which has always freaked me out) and this got me thinking of dystopian sci-fi novels where all the people become numbers, and then I started imagining millions of humans whose lives had been reduced to numbered assembly lines of obedience and that got me thinking of unschooling, and if that was possible, and whether or not I was personally ruined by public school, and how really that’s not relevant because I used to PLAY in school in 1987 and then I heard my mom say, “Janelle! Are you even listening?!”

No. No I was not, mom. I was imagining dystopian death camps, but thanks.

Also, damn. Now the teacher is talking about folders. This seems important.

But I start coloring the bookmark we’re supposed to make for our kid because LEMME TELL YA SOMETHING IF I DON’T DO IT NOW THAT SHIT AIN’T HAPPENING EVER.

I write “You are my best” and possibly cry a little, because she was two years old when she started saying that to me and now here she is in The Matrix.

When I tune back in she’s telling us about “reading packets” and I catch the last, fatal words, “Must be turned in weekly,” and I know I’m fucked.

Uh, mom did you catch that? 

Hi, I’m 37.

Then it was over. I looked around at the parents and I was like, “Wow, homework in first grade, huh?” And they were like, “Yep!” with glee.

So I nudged, “Seems a little young, don’t you think?”

They unanimously disagreed, saying “it wasn’t much” and “taught responsibility.”

In my brain, I added VOLUNTEERING TO BECOME NUMBERS as a thematic element to my dystopian fiction while I smiled  largely) to mask my utter fear of them.

A sentence formed in my head: When did they give up living? The main character would ask that at some point. I felt a wave of depression.

All of this because of first-grade back-to-school night.

Is this normal?

Where are my fellow weirdo nihilists? I NEED YOU. Can we have some sort of signal for events like this?

Like at the paper parade and back-to-school night we can have a hand gesture that means, “Yes, I too am worried about folders and numbers and lines obliterating humanity one gleeful school year at a time and together we must FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT for of brain and body!”

Later, my friend told me I could just not have her do the homework, which I thought was fucking brilliant, but when I asked George about it she was like, “I can’t wait to do homework!”

So that was a motherfucking quandary.

But she does hate lining up all day. And I can’t blame her.

I told her she should enjoy it now, because someday, when we all exist on rubber assembly line belts moving through our lives with microchip-brains, lining up in sequential order will feel like the good ol’ days.

I didn’t actually say that though. I know better.

Sometimes.

I just told her, “Lining up sucks, but keep one foot out of the line at all times to remember who you are.”

She looked at me like I am an alien and ran away, but as she left, I whispered, “They can never break you unless you let them!”

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Happy new school year, bitches! Let’s make it a great super normal one!

found this battle-axe drawing on Rocket’s desk so that’s promising