The news this morning was grim. Another Sunday, another no-holds-barred fight at a baby shower. Two hundred people involved in a bottle-bashing, chair-smashing brawl. A two-month-old child hit in the head with a table. When will the violence and the competition to see who can give the nicest Snuggli end?
I know what the hard-core baby shower advocates will say. When baby showers are outlawed, only outlaws will have baby showers. So much talk, you say, but the baby shower-industrial complex owns Congress–and your state legislature–lock, stock and Thomas the Tank Engine teething ring.
My experience with baby showers is limited, as I’m male. But just because the “Jack ‘n Jill” format is more popular for wedding showers doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of the fact that baby showers are a seething cauldron of envy and females hormones, just waiting to boil over into a stovetop mess of strained carrots.
“Orange dynamite”
Because women, like adolescent males, run in packs, the prospect of gang violence is never far beneath the surface at a baby shower. One innocent remark to another guest whose twins are now four months old–”When is the baby due?”–and BOOM. You’d better be ready to dive under the bassinet.
Your best bet when the shooting starts.
Baby shower violence is an issue that neither political party has been willing to face squarely. Throw more money at the problem, say the Democrats. Provide more pre-natal counseling and expectant mothers and friends will revert to their innate better selves. Yeah, right. Fuzz-brained liberals.
“Well, my baby couldn’t possible be as ug–I mean as cute as yours, Sara Beth!”
Cut people’s marginal tax rates so they have more disposable income to hire private security guards, say Republicans. Either that or give a tax credit to manufacturers of diaper disposal bins. More of the same old, same old trickle down. Which, with babies, is usually not a good thing.
“You little stinker!”
No, what we need is a bi-partisan solution that brushes aside the old categories and comes up with a new paradigm. One that will bring together ancient enemies that have been warring with each other since the first baby shower in 1541, for which Anne of Shrewsbury sent out invitations with a little green dragon on them.
“You couldn’t wait until we served dessert?”
That is why I am today calling for a National Summit on Baby Shower Violence, at which the best and brightest minds in government, academia, business and maternity wards will be brought together in one room, locked up with a buffet lunch and gallons and gallons of bottled water, and kept there until they solve this critical problem.
Or they run out of poopy diaper jokes, whichever comes first.
Did you read recently that they determined the dingos really did take the woman’s baby?
Maybe the National Summit will talk themselves to death in the process. Only hope. Will gnaw off my arm before going to the quaint little events.
I believe that’s known as a “coyote” shower
Australian dingo?