Happy Mother’s Day, You Cruel Excuse for a Parent

Mom, Do You Really Think It’s Okay To Call Your Seven-Year-Old Daughter a Bitch and an Asshole? TL;DR

Argumentum ad Baculum

You’ve been calling me a bitch for as long as I can remember.

Nowadays it’s good to be a bitch. I’ve even seen a T-shirt with the slogan:

‘You call me ‘bitch’ like it’s a bad thing’.

You called me a bitch recently when I proudly told you that I stood up to the telephone company that was trying to bully me out of five hundred dollars. I won in the end when they withdrew their unjust demand. Despite your best efforts to the contrary, I have learned a way to effectively respond to injustice. I took a leaf out of Prussian Blue’s book (literally): Speed, aggression, Strength.

Thanks for that.

Thanks for teaching me to stand up for myself towards everyone else.

Almost everyone else.

A dog can be a bitch. I love dogs. All dogs. Even the ones that aren’t bitches.

You’ve been calling me an asshole for a long, long time, too. Mine still contracts involuntarily when I hear the word.

An asshole is a good thing, isn’t it?

At least that’s how I felt as I waited for my son to defaecate for the very first time. I felt relieved that his internal plumbing was in order, including the final sphincter.

Some guys even call each other assholes and joke about it. Like Ijeoma Oluo calls her friend Joey an asshole here:

For them, it’s no big deal. That’s okay, isn’t it?

And some people even use it for sexual pleasure. They experience ecstasy. So an asshole is a good thing, right?

Then I grew bigger than you. I was a little waif of a thing: my growth was probably stunted by the cow’s milk you fed me even though you knew I was allergic to it. As I grew, you dropped the corporal punishment (is that really the right word when it was gratuitous?) and used your cutting tongue to slice pieces off my tender skin.

You taught me how to use words to my advantage. With your sharp wit, you taught me how to cut people down who crossed me. (Watch out, Prussian Blue). You taught me that the keypad can be mightier than the rod of the stairs.

I learned how to goad you with my feigned indifference.

You roared: ‘I’ll thrash that indifference out of you, you bitch’.

And I skitted niftily away, narrowly missing a flick of the rod.

I had struck home.

Please click the green heart below to boost the confidence of a little girl whose mother has used her, abused her and degraded her. (This is an experiment to see if playing the sympathy card can boost my statistics)

Do it, so I can brag to my mom about how many recommendations I get for my articles that she will never read (“They’re too heavy”).

Help me to rub her nose in the fact that I may even become a successful writer despite her pulling out all the stops to rub me out. Or pulling out all the stops to get me to rub myself out.

Matricide by Kailee Marie Pedersen:

Here’s an essay by Clare Bayley about the word bitch:

I was guided to the above link by this article by Kristen Vermilyea :

Check out this wonderful article by Abby Norman :

There are fewer articles about being an asshole. Here’s one:

This story was first posted about a year ago on Medium.

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