When it comes to being in horrible relationships, from boyfriend/girlfriend to buffet/elastic waistband, we just never know when to stand up and put them in the “failure” category. After all, we would never dream of turning “The Diary of Young girl” by Anne Frank into a Thursday night sitcom featuring a laugh track. Although, can you imagine the comedic prowess someone like Dakota Fanning could bring to such a role?
The night began with a magnificent amount of promise due to the fact I would be dining at America’s finest, Red Lobster. My friend had extended me the invitation to join him, his girlfriend and his family for dinner celebrating the day his mother expelled him from her uterus, or, in laymen’s terms, his birthday.
While perusing the menu for the trans fat-laced entree I would be decimating my six pack with, I noticed someone joining our table. It turns out my friend’s girlfriend had invited her best friend of the week. I looked up only momentarily to say hi to this girl whose only salient characteristics were the Hello Kitty purse on one arm and toddler in the other. Call me old fashioned, but I just consider parading your child around in public to be poor manners. I am of the impression children should be neither seen nor heard.
While she beguiled us with tales of her on-again, off-again baby daddy, I sought solace in a Red Lobster coloring sheet. While she took a much-anticipated Diet Coke break —after an endless stream of chatter — I asked her a harmless question. “So, if you say he does not pay child support, he cannot hold a job and his hostility frightens you, why not leave him?”
When she pointed her long, hot pink acrylic nail at me, I berated myself for breaking my cardinal rule of not caring about anyone but myself. She yelled, “You don’t even know him!” I quietly, but decidedly tuned out the waif in Ugg boots who was making a scene in the Red Lobster. The last thing I remember was something about him watching “The Notebook” with her. I guess domestic and verbal violence takes a back seat to the works of Nicholas Sparks.
For the rest of the dinner, I listened to 30 minutes of her mixing expletives and “I love you, boos,” on her rhinestoned-encrusted cell phone. No matter how great the affliction, I am now under the impression nobody cares about who their partner really is as long as a warm body is in bed with them. Or in her case, a screaming redneck who aids in a temper tantrum in America’s favorite seafood shanty.
I equate love to the Tickle Me Elmo craze in the ’90s — everyone wants it no matter how much of an unnecessary hassle involved. As the night ended and this girl calmed herself down with a long, slow Marlboro Light, I looked into the bright eyes of her toddler who would someday be burden with the unbalanced household he was brought into. With two parents like these I had to wonder if he would ever wish his mother had been pro choice.
Brady Mallory, an Austin, Minn., native is a broadcast major at South Dakota State University
