Warning: Diatribe

I’m very reluctantly (almost angrily) addicted to Chrissy Coppa’s Storked! Blog at glamour.com. It happened after the original Slaves to Fashion blogger left (got fired? or the more genteel ‘let go’?) and while that was offline, bored, I clicked over. The blog is about Coppa’s experience being single and pregnant at 25. I abhor it, and yet, I keep reading it, perhaps in the same way I would be irritatingly glued to the profile of my arch enemy or ex-crush on facebook.

Maybe I’m just being a jealous jerk because she has a book deal, but Coppa annoys me in so many ways. She writes about her life in New York pre-pregnancy—how glamorous, how witty, how sassily independent she was, as were all her friends, and oh how the men came running after them—so heavy on the narcissism it’s like she might as well stand outside the theaters of Sex and the City crying “that was my life!”

I’m being mean. I am just a jealous jerk. But seriously…today she wrote a haughty post about how a young, single woman in the grocery store didn’t smile at her baby. And she was pissed about it:
“I watched as she looked at him. Looked away. Looked at him, again. No emotion. Would it have killed her to smile at my BABY? No.” And then, “Suck it up. Smile at my baby, because I strongly believe if you can't smile at an unassuming BABY then you really need a reality check.”
Coppa acknowledges that maybe the woman was having a bad day or (horrifically) “might have had an abortion or something.”

I’ll easily admit that I’m one of those people who doesn’t smile at babies, and it’s not because I just had an abortion. Sometimes I just get tired of the Mom Smile I get in return. The “Yeah, I know my baby is the most adorable/cutest/sweetest, and now you know, too” Mom Smile. It just irks me. Sometimes I know the Mom in question is waiting for me to notice, and something just won't let me give her the satisfaction. Hey, I never said I was nice.

Your baby will get a smile, ONLY if he or she deserves it. You see, Chrissy, I take smiles kind of seriously and not all babies earn them. And if I’m having a bad day or just got an abortion, I kind of think that it might be your kid’s job to really put it out there and make me smile….and if he or she is not up to the task, what do you want me to do.