Please Don't Call Me Narrow-Minded and Intolerant

I have been reading about the trend of young women morphing from liberal-minded voters into conservatives as they become mothers. It's as if the media believes we moms have lost all ability to be open-minded and tolerant as we sink into a closed world of diapers and laundry. This is ludicrous, and I would argue that as moms, we women become obnoxiously tolerant of things for which the rest of society has no tolerance at all.

Take Barney and The Wiggles for example. They could drive a grown man to suicide, and I don't see why they didn't just make terrorists in Guantanamo Bay watch The Wiggles for about 5 days straight and play the "I love you" song from Barney all night long. They'd be ready to talk in no time. Perhaps this method was deemed too cruel by the Geneva Convention, and I can understand that. Yet, you park an irritable 2 year old in front of either of those shows, and he will sit still and become an angel for the 20 minutes it's on. Magic! What mom couldn't learn to tolerate something so detestable in the name of 20 minutes of peace.

Another example would be screaming children in general. I have friends who will quickly hang up the phone if they hear my kids yelling in the background. I also have a few well-meaning individuals in my life who have commented that I should discipline my kids better so they aren't so loud. How intolerant and prejudice can you get? I mean, kids are loud, and us mothers have become open-minded enough to accept that fact and not judge another mother when her children are banging on pots and provoking the dog to bark while she's on phone with us. We've all been there.

I'm not even going to grace the topics of religious and political tolerance with my high horse today, but I defend the position that us moms are the most tolerant people on the planet. And on that note, I'm going to clean up yet another potty puddle. See, who besides a mother would tolerate the same kid peeing and puking in her house more than once?