And no, it's not me. Settle in, kids, for I have a tale to tell.
Monday afternoon I was coming home from my
exile at Starbucks. I pulled into the driveway and got out of the car. I was fumbling with my purse, travel mug, and cell phone (my mom had called as I turned off the car), and trying to get the car door closed when this woman came marching up to me. She stopped at the edge of the driveway and began berating me about how we (or maybe just I) need to drive slower on our street because there are children playing and
every single parent on the street is angry with us but no one else "has the balls" to say anything.
I had never seen this woman before in my life. Not once! And there she was, yelling... yes,
yelling... at
me to be more careful when
HER children were playing in the street. As if I'm not already careful because I'm completely paranoid about the children who just sit themselves down
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET like it's storytime at the library.
She continued her tirade, harping that she was going to call the base police on us and screaming--it escalated to
scuh-REAMing--that if we hit a child "it's
OVER for you." I think at this point I snapped my cell phone closed because this was clearly going to take a while. She continued to say that we obviously don't care as much about driving safely because we don't have children of our own, and that we'd been going at least 30 down our street when the speed limit is 15. Then she veered into a personal attack on me, saying that I'm a bad neighbor because I "never come out" of the house.
Throughout this, I did my best to remain calm and tell her that I was sorry if either of us had caused anyone on the street any concern, and that we'd be more vigilant about our speed from now on. (For what it's worth, I did an experiment yesterday, and there's no way that my car could get up to 30 on our little cul-de-sac without busting through the last house's garage door before I hit 20. It's just not long enough to accelerate that much!) I also told her that I'm inside a lot because I
work all day doing
MY JOB (a very foreign concept to these women who do nothing but pump out ill-behaved, street-playing children like one-woman puppy mills).
And then I told her that it was
really nice to meet her and suggested that perhaps I'm not the one who has a problem being friendly (I may have allowed the venom to creep into my tone of voice at this point). Because seriously, if she's
such a good neighbor, where was the welcome wagon visit when we
moved into base housing back at the end of June? Heck, not one person on the entire street even bothered to come say hello when we first got here.
So THAT is why I'm not going out of my way to make friends with the people here: because they're cuh-
RAZY bitches who think that instead of them going outside and supervising their kids' playtime, I should just stop driving in the afternoon. (Note: I know they're not
all like this. I have met three other wives on our street and they've all been nice.)
Jason thinks that this woman is mental and way too worried about what we are and aren't doing. Like, heaven forbid that a Navy wife have a vocation other than breeding. He said she's probably jealous that we're free to go out whenever we like and that we have a nice car. Sorry for her bad luck, but here's a newsflash: not having children is fairly simple--on our military health plan, birth control pills are free.
I've had it with these Navy people and
talking about kids. From now on, our new policy is that if people ask why we don't have kids, we'll simply say that I can't. End of discussion, problem solved.
