MockMom

I Only Let My Son Play with Wooden Toys. Why Is He Such a Douche?

Melanie Trotsky from Beaverton, Oregon raised her son with wooden toys, no TV or video games, and a vegan diet, and yet somehow her oldest son, Cole, still managed to become an enormous douchebag.

She grips her cup of organic, silver-needle tea with both hands and looks thoughtfully out the window. “I just never thought Cole would go that way. We raised him in the Waldorf school, backpacked through Europe in the summers, and never let him near a mall. And his best friends, Falcon and Finn, are exactly like him…”

Melanie continues, “The thing is, and I don’t know where he gets it from, but he has this elitist attitude about everything and won’t talk to people who aren’t exactly like him. We didn’t raise him that way. At all. We told him that although other people make poor decisions and let their children go to public schools, have screen time, and eat food that isn’t locally sourced and organic, we should feel sympathy, not ostracize them.”

Melanie holds an 8-quart jug of kombucha she brewed at home and pours some in a mason jar as she continues, “I spent his entire childhood telling other mothers why everything they were doing was bad and why my way is better to help them out of their self-imposed ignorance. I’d even have Cole put down his wooden toys for a few minutes to explain to the adults he knew why he thought their lifestyle was an offense to his liberal sensibilities. He was so kind to try and help them. I just don’t know why he is so judgmental and mean to people who aren’t like us now.”

I asked Cole to comment on what his mother said, but all he would say was that my clothes weren’t made from organic fiber, my iPhone wasn’t the latest model, and he could tell I wasn’t a vegan. He then simply rolled his eyes and left the room.

Melanie is visibly upset. She picks up her worry beads she bought on her trip to Turkey last summer and adjusts her Sweaty Betty Om Yoga Pants. “You see what I mean? I noticed those things about you too, and it was hard for me to speak to you, but I pushed through it. I didn’t ‘judge’ you. I just don’t know why Cole is such an enormous douche.”

A version of this post originally ran on Bourgeois Alien

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About the Author

Elizabeth Argyropoulos, also known as, “Bourgeois Alien” on Twitter and on her website by the same name, has always thought of herself as funny…but not funny, “ha ha” more of a, “ha ha, wow…that’s sad” kind of way. She has a degree in English Lit and studied improv at Second City in Chicago. While living in Chicago, she met, married, and moved to Greece for a almost a decade with her perfectly loud Greek husband. While in Greece, together they produced an even louder Greek-American son. They now all live in happily Florida, where they all fear they’ll be eaten by gators or man-size mosquitoes.