Heather Christena Schmidt

I’m likely going to lose some friends over this, and if so that’s unfortunate. The great thing about friendships is the ability to agree to disagree.

So let’s hope we can do that. If not, it’s been swell.

The older I get, the more friends and family I have adding to their families. In other words: everyone’s popping out kids like the Duggar family these days. Not a day goes by without a pregnancy announcement, a gender reveal, or a birth notice online.

This means that play dates are starting, too.  Play dates, day care dates, birthday parties, and so on. And, inevitably, the photos of the newest boyfriend-girlfriend combo of infants that are just so in love show up too. Over a play date, toddlers just exploring what it means to exist in this world toddle over to one of the opposite sex, and suddenly there’s thirty Instagram posts, with captions like:

Oh, mama’s in trouble! We have a lady killer here!

Future Mr. and Mrs!

Jay is loving on his girlfriend at play date today!

And so on and so forth.

I get that it’s cute. I get that it’s quaint and silly, and naturally since you all are such good friends it would be just wonderful if your children decided to get married, or whatever. It would be like the perfect ending to the bad movie that is your life – like in Riding In Cars With Boys, when Drew Barrymore’s son is with the best friend’s daughter.

The problem, here, is that we aren’t talking about young, consenting adults. We aren’t even talking about people that are old enough to date. There is no prom in the foreseeable future.

We are talking about infants. Fucking toddlers. In most cases, children that still shit in their pants.

There’s actually a chance those kids are taking a dump while all those photos of them falling so in love were taken. #blessed #mamasintrouble

Young children that can’t even speak for themselves. Young children that may – one day – not appreciate your comments and insinuations and pressure and implications, and photos.

Cute photos, photos of kids playing – great! Your children will love that shit being memorialized! But online bath time? And all the comments about how they are going to marry each other one day – let me tell you, oh ladies of the Interwebs… your children WILL see that shit, and they WILL NOT appreciate it as they grow older. At. All.

Almost as much as they won’t appreciate you posting photos of their dirty diapers and potty training moments online.

Yes, I said that. Again. Again I called all you ladies out for posting photographs and videos of your children being potty trained. (And I say ‘ladies’ only because those are the offenders I have seen, I’m sure some of the ‘fellas’ have offended as well. Or maybe they haven’t…)

Fine, fine – the status updates about how BJ finally peed in the big boy potty are quaint. But then the videos show up of BJ’s terrible aim, or his “girlfriend” Sara taking a deuce in a little, plastic bowl that plays the Mickey Mouse Playhouse theme song every time it gets fake-flushed. I call bullshit on this noise.

Bullshit. On. This. Noise.

Who am I kidding, though? Those kids so terribly in love from their last playdate aren’t named BJ or Sara anyway. This is goddamned 2016. Those children are named through an intricate process of vetting out the traditional names and picking from a carefully comprised list of unique names, often reminiscent of a side dish or exotic fruit. All the while each individual mother fantasizes what said names will look like when scrolled out in calligraphy on their future wedding invitations – Mr. and Mrs. Get a Life are proud to announce the engagement of their daughter Dragonfruit to her childhood sweetheart, Kale Cous Cous.

Which brings me back to my original point: little Dragonfruit and Kale Cous Cous do not want you hooking them up before they are old enough to date. All you are doing is hyper sexualizing their childhood, and putting pressure on them to be something you want, rather than whatever they will naturally decide as they grow up.

You all can see that I am clearly upset with a lot of things, here. But I think I made my point (or did I?).

Those kids just want to be…wait for it…kids. Fucking children. Innocent children that do not give a flying shit, certainly flung from their Mickey Mouse Playhouse potty that plays the theme song every time it gets fake-flushed, about marriage or dating or being in love. Or what and who society – their society – tells them to love.

They just want to fucking play. Fucking play and be kids.

Stop hooking up your children. Once you have an 11 year old like I do, with boobs and a period and boys falling all over themselves to play tennis with her, you’ll realize just how little time you have until this so-in-love shit comes raining down on you Whether you like it or not.