Thank You for Crapping in Your Diaper and Screaming at Me

Parents are very strange creatures. They have a baby which costs a lot of money in doctor bill’s, which is just the beginning of huge expenses that begin before birth. The cost of having and raising a child a middle class child is estimated to be just under a quarter of a million dollars. Oh boy!

Plus those little beasties are total ingrates, selfish little beasties, caring for no one except themselves. “Feed me, clean me, keep me warm or I will scream and holler and cry and make your life miserable and make you feel inadequate and guilty.” That is a truth that parents ignore all this with a magnanimity that boggles the imagination. When the baby makes their adamant demands a typical parent will say things, “Oh are they just so cute (in reality almost all babies in wrinkly and ugly by most esthetic standards). “Just listen to the power of those little lungs” (do you like firecrackers going off in your house regularly?) “My sweet weety wittle babykinds” (turning normally articulate adults into babbling idiots.) “My that was a good poopy whoopy wasn’t it?” (crap is crap and there is nothing appealing about it to sane minds.) “Oh he/she is so smart,” (they don’t know diddly just wants.) And the list of such insane and inane behavior goes on and on for parents, grandparents, great grandparents, uncles and aunts, and even total strangers. To sum up the feelings of all such whacko it can be expressed in a single word, gratitude! They feel gratitude for have such a self absorbed demanding little critter which will demand great amounts of their time, money, and very souls. Strange! Yet that is what they feel, gratitude.

Now bear in mind that gratitude is an unnatural act; it is something that has to be learned and often with great difficulty. Children, as stated before have no sense of gratitude at all just demands. But as we train these little monsters we teach them to say “thank you” when they receive something from someone. It is not natural for them to do so, but parents have some control over them, at least to begin with, and so the obedient ones begin to say “thank you” when it is appropriate. They mimic civilized thoughts and some never get beyond that point, the just act in a socially acceptable way because it is really in their own self interest to do so. To move beyond mimicked gratitude is a major development which I will delve into in the future but not now.

For now, I’ll just leave you to ponder this strange phenomenon.

Gratitude is the best attitude.

Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.

    --Aesop (620-550 B.C.)