'My Kids Are Not an Inconvenience to You': a Mom of 4 Speaks Out

You’re in line at the supermarket, praying that, for the duration of your wait, your kids won’t be kids. And even if it’s totally unrealistic to expect them to be angels all the time out in public, you do, because the side-eye from other adults makes you cringe. Jessica Johnston gets it. As a mom of four, she feels like she’s forced to preemptively apologize on behalf of her kids. But she’s not going to—because they’re not doing anything wrong.

“I often feel like we bother people by being us. Not necessarily by anything we do, but just the idea of what we ‘might do,’” Johnston, the blogger behind Wonderoak.com, writes in a post shared with Love What Matters.

Yes, she’s armed with specific examples.

•“We just moved into a new neighborhood and I met an elderly woman a couple blocks down the street. She looked at me in shock (almost horror) when I told her that we have four kids and she kept saying, “Four? Four??” Then she looked at me square in the eyes. ‘I guess that will be okay,’ she said, ‘as long as they are quiet.’ She was dead serious.”

•“When we’d wait our turn for our passports and tickets to be checked at the airport, we’d hear heavy sighs behind us like, gawd are you kidding me. I felt like turning around and saying, “FYI sir, we paid for six tickets, you paid for one, so we have every right to be here.’”

•“When we asked for a rental application for a certain house, the property manager replied with a simple one line email: ‘Sorry this house is too small for your family.’ It was a three-bedroom, which is the size of home we’ve always lived in. No questions, no asking if we were sure it would work for us. It was a clear blow-off from someone who didn’t want to be inconvenienced by children.”

Johnston would like to emphasize her kids are not an inconvenience. In fact, nobody’s kids are. “These ‘annoying kids’ are the future,” she writes. “Kids are a normal part of society; it’s always been that way. You are not actually entitled to a child-free life. You don’t have to have them yourself, and you can go to as many adult-only things as possible, but you don’t get to expect that we are going to keep kids out of your way in the world we all share: parks, sidewalks, grocery stores, restaurants (yes, I take my kids to restaurants and I won’t apologize), the beach, airplanes…etc.”

Plus, Johnston, like most parents, is doing everything in her power to raise little humans that won’t bother you at all.

“We teach our kids to respect people and to not act like wild animals (except the 4-year-old, she’s kind of a loose cannon),” she says. “We teach them to give up their seats on a train for an elderly person and to look someone in the eyes when they shake their hand. We teach them not to wrestle or yell in inappropriate places and to say please and thank you. They aren’t perfect at it by any means, but they’re pretty damn good. Outside of that, I will not apologize for having kids, and I won’t apologize for my kids being…kids.”

Feeling empowered yet? It’s just a matter of practicing standing your ground. And if you need an example, just take it from a mom who bore the brunt of a toddler meltdown—and a stranger’s comments—at a museum.