Shameful Confession

So there’s something I should admit. It’s not pretty.

I don’t enjoy being around other people’s children.

Let me clarify a little here. If you are someone I know personally, like a friend or a relative, I’m obviously not talking about your children. I adore your children.

It is the children of strangers who annoy me so much.

How about a little background on this realization?

During my last two days off work ,the girls and I hit the community pool for hours each day. It was too hot to do anything but submerge ourselves in highly-chlorinated water.

Because I usually work during the weekdays, I didn’t realize that a local preschool brings their wards to the pool from 1:00 to 3:00 each day.

This is a lovely thing and I’m not complaining about this at all. If my kids were in daycare, I’d love for them to go to one that took them to the pool daily. What a great adventure for these kids.

Except…here it comes…there are some very gregarious children who simply cannot bring themselves to let me just swim with my own two children without interjecting their own thoughts into the conversation.

I realize these kids are probably lonely or craving maternal attention, or something. Or they’re just very friendly and that’s nice for them.

But I don’t want to talk to these strange children. I want to interact with my own children. Hello, that’s why I took time off work. I did not take the time off to spend it talking to strangers kids at the pool.

I am never unkind to these kids. I never actually come out and tell them to go away. I don’t roll my eyes at their questions and I never fail respond to their conversational overtures, but I don’t enjoy doing these things. My smiles are forced, though I do hope they’d don’t realize it.

I guess I wish these children were in the care of adults who were aware of them enough to realize that they might actually be bothering that lady over there who had a nine year old hanging from her back and a five year old who keeps leaping across three feet of water, always trusting that her mom is going to catch her before she goes under the second time. If the adults who are in charge of these kids were just a little more aware, I might not have to keep trying to politely find new, less crowded corners of the pool, corners that are hopefully too deep for these children to follow me but not so deep that Alyssa can’t find her way onto my back after I’ve pushed her off for the forty-seventh time.

Yes, I do blame the adults and not the outgoing, lovely children who just see a mom interacting with her children and probably hope for a bit of the same.

Damn, this is a judgy post, isn’t it? I was hoping for a little more humor and a little less judgment but there you have it.