The One with the Baby Shower (or, When I Get Really Mad...)

I'm very feisty. I also tend toward colorful emotional outbursts that stem from my fantastic temper. I'm learning, slowly over time, how to curb my temper and redirect the outbursts toward benign outlets, such as freewriting. Below is one such outburst, penned some time ago in the throes of anger (and really, I promise, not directed at any one entity, but the entire world in general. I generalize when I get mad. It makes me feel much better much, much faster). Now it's just amusing proof of my ridiculous temper.
I should also mention I don't hate kids. I just hate being pestered on their behalf. I have nieces, I have nephews, I have younger brothers and I love them all.

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7 AM...

Finds me drinking tea and scanning the internet for tea sandwich recipes, ridiculing myself for agreeing to make them in the first place. I've had many tea sandwiches in my life-- no, let me rephrase. I've taken bites of many tea sandwiches throughout my lifetime. The only ones I liked in any sense of the word were at an actual "tea" in Hawaii, and I think that was because of the location. Tea sandwiches were one of the weirdest ideas conceived by women. I'm positive men did not discover tea sandwiches because they are not meant to fill you up. Case in point. Point in case. I discover in my searching that tea sandwiches are generally not supposed to contain meat, crust or normal food. Here are some actual kinds of tea sandwiches out there, right now, in the world: Goat cheese and watercress. Cucumber mint with cream cheese. Broiled fig and Gorgonzola. Watercress olive. Lavender egg (Lavender egg!! Who eats that?).
Basically, what I'm gathering here is as long as it has watercress, cream cheese and something you would otherwise never put on a sandwich, it's kosher for a tea sandwich. I refuse to make a sandwich for anyone that contains lavender. So finally, I find an idea for cranberries and turkey with Dijon and say, to heck with it. I'm making something up.

9:30 AM...

Go to the store. FoodMaxx. I hate FoodMaxx. Find turkey, bread: Check. Cranberries. These are only found at Thankskgiving and Christmas, looks like. After hacking my way through the displays, I finally find a few cans (I assume forgotten from last year's holiday season) and take one. Go home. Start making sandwiches. It is at this point I realize, this is ludicrous. I don't know who would ever eat sandwiches like this. I tried one, just to see if they're edible. They're not. Now I am convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that tea sandwiches were only ever invented because someone, somewhere was starving, and all that was to be found were a few leftover pieces of bread, some cream cheese, watercress and lavender. Someone else noted this display of sheer desperation and decided to make the idea a monument to creativity. Eventually, everyone forgot why in the world we began eating these monstrosities in the first place and made them a requirement at baby showers, teas, bridal showers, and funerals. We still make them to this day. Meanwhile, said starving person finished the sandwich, got sick, and decided to go buy a hamburger instead.

10:30 AM...

Get to the shower. I can't stay because I have to work. In fact, I should be working now, but instead I'm making sandwiches no one will survive past the first few bites.
Oh, the crazy hedonism of weekends.
Here, we arrive at one of the single most hated phrases I have ever heard in my life: "So, Jinn, when are you going to be having one of these(meaning, a baby shower for a munchkin of your own)?"
For upwards of five years now, I have been tolerating this idiotic phrase with some semblance of patience. Five. Years. Imagine someone asking you when you will decide to sit down at your kitchen table with a pair of pliers and proceed to pull one of your own teeth. To which you would reply with the appropriate rebuttal. Then imagine this same person pointing out that it is possible that it might happen at some point in your future (if you were a mental case, perhaps). Which, you have to concede the possibility, however small, does exist. Even though you would never do it in a million years. Now you have some small idea of how I feel when I am forced to face this hated question:
"So, when are you having kids?"
It's like, the single thought that goes on in the minds of everyone who knows me and knows I'm married. As if having children is all I am now capable of! (One of these days, I'm going to scream that statement, at the top of my lungs, to an unfortunate, unsuspecting soul, and then they'll all be sorry.)
Welp, you're married. Now that you've forgone the rest of the life experience, when are you having kids?
Up until this moment in time, I've managed to avoid stupid conversations about my own life choice by just saying, "I'm not ready for kids yet." A gross understatement, but it gives those people some small hope that I will, in fact, one day have kids. The possibility exists, but is so diminutive it's not even worth talking about. Today, I am done trifling.
I am in the room for no more than five minutes before the question comes out.
I put the plate of tea sandwiches very carefully on the table, turn slowly to face the speaker, and in a voice of uttermost calm, I tell her, "I am never having children."
Naturally, in the wake of this statement come the attempts to try to convince me that I am only joking and deep down, I really do want kids just like every good girl is supposed to. I ask you. Why would I joke about something like this? If I wanted kids eventually, I'd say so.
However, I now have some added ammunition that I have never before in my life been able to use, and I level it at my assailant with a scathing grin: "However, my brother is going to be having one."
And for the first time, in my life, this actually shuts them up about the matter. Triumph. I have triumphed over idiocy, for at least the next ten minutes. In the meantime, I am beating it out of there as fast as I possibly can. Jump in the car, speed out of the parking lot, and get the heck home to my cats and stories about assassins, elves and psychopathic shapechangers. And real-human food, like taquitos and chocolate chip cookies.
I will now return to my life. Thank you.