It’s no secret that many of us of a certain demographic love good Karen stories. Stories of uppity white women making outlandish entitled demands, asking to speak with managers, getting off on generally being pains in the ass to millennials, minorities, and society in general.
We love when the internet feeds us stories of them, exposing their bullshit, low-key doxxing them and revealing them left and right, but I have to say it’s not nearly as entertaining when the Karens start targeting you, or attacking your personal world, proving themselves to be real-life insufferable c-words, and not just demons from stories on the internet.
On my daughter’s birthday, we went out to eat; a rare occurrence considering my two toddlers, but the grownups outnumbered the runts, so we braved the excursion. My group was sequestered in a wing of the restaurant that it became quickly apparent that this was where all larger groups, parties with kids, diners needing special accommodation, and ironically, black people (this is a pretty white area), were all stashed away.
The booth seat in which I was sitting at with my daughter, had small openings in the wall behind, that can peek into the booth behind us, if she stood up. And being a curious now-three year old, of course she stood up and took a peek at the neighboring booth. Despite my quick admonishing her to not do such, the woman in the adjacent booth wasn’t slow to hide her displeasure at being seated near some young children.
I get it, I’ve been them before too. When I was in my teens and twenties and had no consideration of the challenges of being parents dining out with toddlers. And she probably was too 40 years prior, the old fucking Karen hag who started making remarks about “it was so empty here” and clearly voicing her displeasure at being near my kids.
I took #1 to the bathroom and when we came back, I noticed that they were gone. They had moved somewhere else in the restaurant, because they didn’t want to be near my kids.
Here’s the thing, had they stuck it out 10-15 minutes, I wouldn’t have blamed them one bit for wanting to move. My girls did get noisy for some bursts, and #1 did poke her head over the partition again. If they moved after those little annoyances, I wouldn’t have taken it as a slight.
But the fact that they did, in advance of any troubling behavior, irked the shit out of me. It’s like they banked and hoped that my kids would do some mischief to justify their self-important moving so they could continue to have their trite white people conversations about probably how colored folks are ruining their town or some shit.
I felt insulted and unfortunately triggered by it, and it was a stinky moment in what was supposed to be an entirely great dinner with family for my daughter’s birthday.
And before I could really let go of the salt of the following day, it didn’t take long for another Karen to piss in my corn flakes.
One of most important takes my au pair has is driving #1 to and from school several times a week. We have a wonderful pre-K that my daughter is learning a lot and developing social skills, and it always brings great enjoyment when she flexes some new knowledge or demonstrates some intellectual growth.
But on this day, there’s a post to the school’s parent-teacher organization’s Facebook page, of some parent spouting off about how they saw someone who broke the sanctity of the carpool line, by cutting out and leaving before the cars in front of it. I get it, it’s a safety hazard, and without express instruction from staff, it is something that I’ve been admonished about too in the past, and I therefore never do it anymore.
However, this parent started going full-Karen mode, spouting off some rhetoric about how she hadn’t even finished loading her kids yet when she was passed and how much endangerment she was put in, and exaggerating the fuck out the whole situation in a classic Karen tactic, meant to garner sympathy and solidarity from other Karens.
And then the kicker, is she talks about how she took pictures and will report the offender to the school… and then basically describes my car, obvious due to a specific detail that my car is the only one with it.
Completely unnecessarily, my car is low-key doxxed and singled out, with no other real intention than to mark me to other parents whom consciously or unconsciously, can make judgments about my house.
My au pair didn’t know the rule. That’s a failure on my part for not educating her. But she’s also an intelligent human being, and a single instruction is all she’d need to correct it forever.
Instead, I get Karen’d and am publicly singled out and shamed, completely unnecessarily, for no real reason other than so this c-word Karen could feel high and mighty.
Admittedly, this pissed me the ever-living fuck off. Yes, this does mean that a Karen got the best of me, and it took all the restraint in the world to not engage this bitch on social media. I ended up removing the one specific detail she outed on my car, and only those who are as observant about other peoples’ cars as I am, or any other Karens that this specific Karen is yenta’ing with will be able to figure out who it is, but I was burned up by it all because regardless of her intent, she put me, my au pair, my children, in a position of defamation, all because this bitch was so over the moon to have a legitimate gripe to post on the internet about.
For years, the Karens have always just been these fictional beings that I and many others have just been entertained by. But when the Karens start hitting home, the jokes become less funny and I’m just left feeling all full of piss and rage and want to retaliate without repercussion.
