This is not what I think (boy wouldn’t that be a sign of self loathing). This was a search used to find my blog. Someone who works for Pfizer in New York City finds us annoying and actually went to the trouble of conducting a Google search for related information on the internet. Like there are websites that offer resources for the poor urban people that have to put up with those irritating suburban moms.

And if there are, it appears that my blog is one of them!

The Big Piece of Cake was selected because of a line from my old Babies are the New Black post: “That’s what suburban moms who read Us Weekly do. We judge. In our stained sweatpants.” This link made the cut due to the fact that it included the words “suburban moms” and “so.” Not surprisingly, the researcher spent “0” seconds on my site. And who could blame them since all they saw that day was a misleading blog name promising baked goods and a post about my obsession with dolls. Sorry to disappoint.

Initially, I just had a little laugh over those crazy keyword searches that people conduct, and conceded that the search could have been for information less obvious than the selected words would indicate. It’s possible that my friend at Pfizer didn’t actually need data on annoying suburban moms and was really just looking up a movie quote or a funny story they read in the news.

You never know with internet searches. I’ve certainly conducted some weird ones myself. Just yesterday I wrote an entire post about the most beautiful blog family I’ve ever seen, only to discover that I lost the link to their site. My solution? See if I could locate the blog in a targeted Google search of course. The key word combinations I came up with were pretty bizarre. Here is a sample: “Mormon blog with four beautiful daughters.” Is that creepy sounding or what? One would think that I’m a psychopath putting the finishing touches on my homemade girl cages. Yikes! But in reality, I was just writing a funny post about not believing that such a beautiful family could possibly exist. I’m still peeved about spending time on that post for nothing. So if you are incredibly good looking, have four Nicole Eggert look-alike daughters and once linked to my Mormons Are Funny post, please comment so I can be in touch.

Back to my point – this odd keyword search made me think. Are suburban moms annoying? If I’m just speaking for myself, I’d probably choose “off balance” over “annoying” – but you know, semantics. If we’re going to take the search literally and go with the actual definition of “annoying,” “causing vexation : irritating <an annoying habit> <annoying questions>,” I’d have to say yes. We are annoying. And there are several points in favor of this conclusion.

First, we are rather pampered by the ease of our suburban lifestyle. Even though we don’t live in the city, we’re also not in the country and have pretty much any retail necessities that one could imagine in close proximity to our homes. And unlike urban families, we can drive everywhere with very few worries over traffic. While I am the first to complain about the hour it takes to get my group out of the house and buckled into their car seats (a sure sign of an annoying suburban mom), I also know that I’m much happier tooling around in the comfort of my own vehicle than trying to navigate the public transportation system.

Secondly, we don’t have as many opportunities to parallel park, so we irritate downtown drivers with our geriatric parking style – often pulling out completely to start all over again when it’s clear that we overestimated the amount of space we had. And pulling up to the car parked in front of us? Why would we ever do that? It’s not like city street parking is hard to find or anything. Oh – it is? Well how the hell would we know that? The shopping centers and strip malls we frequent all have parking lots.

And let’s talk about those vehicles we drive. I’ve already written about my own tank, but it’s pretty safe to say that most suburban moms drive some form of a minivan or SUV. I can defend this choice based on my own inability to find an economy car that accommodates three car seats – but I already covered that in the other post I mentioned above. The bottom line is – necessary or not, we drive big cars. And people can’t see around us on the road. And we’re usually so distracted by our children fighting, crying, puking, etc. in the back that we really don’t notice that we’re weaving, driving too slow or confusing people with the blinker that has been on for the past five minutes.

So based on our driving and parking styles alone, you can imagine how much other annoying suburban mom fodder I could pull together. But I’ll close with the obvious. The annoying suburban mommy bloggers.

What can I say about us…? Well, we’re kind of whiny. Whether we call ourselves career women or work at home moms, we do A LOT of complaining on our blogs. Of course we also exclaim over the daily joys of motherhood and the angels that were sent to us in the guise of offspring. But seriously, we do our fair share of kvetching. You think you don’t? Comment and I’ll come visit your blog to check it out. You’ve obviously discovered some nirvana that remains hidden from the rest of us. Please – disclose your secret.

And on the flip side of our communal bitchfest, we also torture people with syrupy sweet anecdotes about our children. We are SO proud of our little monsters that we fully expect to win awards for world’s cutest kids (which by the way is a title that was most likely already given to the world’s most beautiful family referenced above – sorry). Even when we are complaining about them or recounting amusing stories about their bad behavior, you know that we’re secretly pleased by what little characters they are. GOD we’re annoying.

I have based pretty much all of these observations on my own subjective experience. So if you’re feeling a bit ruffled and misrepresented, just let me throw a disclaimer out there. I am quite possibly one of the most annoying people I know. I have numerous flaws that rub people the wrong way, and I write about them all the time. My annoying habits related to my status of “suburban mom” are such a small part of the truly irritating person that I am.

And when I say “I am” – I really mean, that “we all are.” Come ON Pfizer employee in New York City (I’m back to assuming that the search was intended for evil). Do you really think that you’re any less annoying than the rest of us? Of course not. It’s all so subjective. I was once a city kid that had never even heard of my current neighborhood. I’ve done my fair share of eye rolling and guffawing over the suburbs – but now that I’m on the other side, I see that it goes both ways. No one is safe. We’re all annoying. And on a good day, we choose to call this state of affairs “diversity.”

*Before commenting on this – please read the “Pfizer employee’s” comment and my response (I think we’re #22 and #23). Thanks!