Women of childbearing age say the darndest things.

I don’t have kids yet, in fact I don’t know if I ever will. However, being a young married woman under 30, people do like to ask when I will have kids. They never ask “if” I will only, “when”. Regardless of my answer, these same people like to take what they feel is a weird quirk about my life and ask if I will force my children to adhere to said quirk. Let’s take one older woman Kassie who cornered me at a family event a few weeks ago.

“Hey Shelly” she said “You are one of those feminists, are you going to raise your kids gay?”

I wasn’t sure of the connection, I guess most feminists do support gay marriage, but having had millions of similar conversations I responded:

“No, I plan to make them miserable.”

Not my best response, but it ended the conversation. However, Kassie is both persistent and unimaginative, just two days ago she asked me:

“Hey Shelly” she said “You are one of those vegetarians, are you going to raise your kids vegetarian?”

“No, I plan to MAKE them vegetarian by giving them a pet turkey as a Christmas present then pretending to be too broke to buy food at Thanksgiving.”

You may think this is a bit harsh, but if you have a womb, you understand how the entire world feels as though they have a uterine time share in your pelvis, with your in-laws and your own parents going splitsies on the ovaries, your friends discussing your cervix, the media putting up advertisements on your uterine wall and complete strangers taking a slide down your fallopian tubes. It isn’t just women, men do it too.

“Shelly,” Hank from the art gallery where I volunteer asked me just last week “what are you going to do if your kids want to join the conservative party.”

While the reality is that I would be very happy to have politically engaged kids, Hank needed to be put in his place.

“Hank” I responded “I would buy them Karl Marx bed sheets and sneak into church and put Tommy Douglas’s face in place of every Jesus I found."

My favourite question came from a co-worker (and I won’t say when or at which job).

“Shelly,” he said asked with a voice of concern, “If you wait any longer will you even be able to have kids, won’t your uterus just dry up?”

Now I want it clear, I have never before asked a man about what he intended to do with his sperm, or if his testicles were slowly shrivelling from lack of use, but in this case, I made an exception.

Oddly enough, no one has ever asked if I will raise my kids to be sarcastic.