Day 120 Sterility. Try it.

Some people should just never bump privates. Mr and Mrs Hitler are an obvious example.

Please don't be offended/ask to shut down my blog because of this image... I got it from here, where it actually connects to the subject at hand.

Less obvious is the 17 year old mother of a patient on my floor. Now, when I say this mother is "a child" I'm genuinely not being condescending: this girl's wisdom teeth have yet to grow in and she doesn't even have a driver's license (granted, I didn't get mine til I was 20 but that's beside the point). Fact is, this girl accurately portrayed her immaturity on my last night at work.

See, doctors like to know that the baby's mother can provide all the care for their child, including waking at regular intervals to feed and clean the baby and soothe them if they get fussy, because babies like to cry, poop and eat and not necessarily in that order. It's not enough to see mommy pass on the responsibility to grandma. To do this, docs require the mommies stay for 3 days to show they can do the care. When I reported this to the newly-pubescent mother, she actually reacted with shock, exclaiming,

"Omigosh! Three days? That's so long!"

...I literally stood on the other line of the phone thinking (but professional repressing), "You think three-fucking-days is long?! Child, do you have any idea what the next EIGHTEEN YEARS of your life is going to consist of?! ROARR!!"

When the mother finally did come onto the floor and, among other things, have the audacity to wonder in amazement, "Why is he so fussy??" (Gee, maybe because he's a frickin baby and you haven't been in to see him since we transferred him through three different rooms??) I sent my senior coworkers a look of panic and hastily asked them when the mother stepped out,

"Don't you ever worry about the homes you're sending these children to??"

The consensus: "Every time."

Apparently, I'm not the only person who just doesn't want to give babies back to their otherwise incompetent parents. And I don't mean that in a I'm-totally-gonna-take-one-of-these-kids-home; my maternity instincts aren't set to kick in until, you know, I get so bored that I feel like torturing myself. To prove my point, I'll refer back to the baby who was born with an addiction that I spoke about before: clearly her mother should've found a condom or a rehab center or, heck, even Jesus before giving birth. I mean, I'm glad that that particular child is going to be taken care of by medical foster parents (who have cojones of steel and love to do this for a living), but you really gotta worry about stupid/dense/unprepared people bringing life into this world.

One 14-year-old mother who'd once graced the floor prior to my arrival was simply astounded by her pregnancy, citing oh-so-intellectually, "I don't even know how I got pregnant! He (the father) didn't even come inside me! He came on my leg and I just rubbed that shit up in there."

...Just...

Epic.fuckin.fail.

And the best part is that I'm not even targeting underaged mothers. There are some really dense mothers of multiple children that I dread having to talk to because they really just don't get it. Mothers that feed their children herbs they grow and refuse to acknowledge the correlation between the funky herbs and their children having seizures. Or the mother of a child with a structural oral issue who refused procedures because surely he can eat even though you have to literally squirt the milk into his mouth and hope that he'll swallow on his own. Or moms that use organic diapers and insist that something else must be causing the freakish rash all over their child's ass even though nothing else is being used on him. Or, my favorite, the mother who rubbed powder of unknown origins onto their child's umbilical site even after the flesh over the area began to peel away, leaving a concave sore in their child's belly.

For the record, it's one thing to not know but another thing to ignore facts at the expense of someone else's health.

...but just barely

To be fair there are definitely a fair amount of parents on the other end of the spectrum, who come every day despite the fact that they live an hour away, who are willing to learn, and who can see past the deformities and problems of their child and only see this little soul they love so much. 

There aren't intrinsically bad parents. No one knows how to be a good one and there's no set of rules that you can apply to every single child. But there is such a thing called effort, another one called patience, and a huge component labeled "common fucking sense" that really help the process go along a lot smoother and requires less incidence of long-term psychiatric consultation for everyone involved. And if you're lacking in all three, do the world and your yet-to-be-born-to-a-sad-life-progeny a huge favor.

Protection: it sure as hell isn't just for your dumb ass.