Mother Goose Needs Therapy

Back when my wife and I were just dating, I used to buy her children's books. This served as sort of a time machine to take myself back to when I used to be a kid (when I read books with pictures) and was also a subtle way to say, "I wanna read this to our kids."

The first children's book I bought for her was "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" over seven years ago.



I had remembered what a cool book it was when I was a kid and she'd never read it... so to me... it offered her a glance into my childhood.

The passing years we were together brought more books like:



AND



AND



One of my personal favorites...

Our pile of books pre-kid expanded fairly rapidly and when I found out my wife was pregnant over three years ago it made it that much more exciting knowing that I'd finally get to read them to my kid.

Now that she's over two and growing like a weed... we've read EVERY book in her shelf at least 40 times. In an effort to switch things up, I grabbed an aged book I found in the deep inner recesses of my closet: Mother Goose And Her Book Of Sick And Twisted Nursery Rhymes.

This book is indeed nothing BUT twisted and extremely effed up.

For example:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again!



Humpty Dumpty seconds before death...

You can't tell by the rhyme itself... but Humpty Dumpty is a giant living egg. Then he falls to his death while breaking into a million pieces. While it makes about as much sense as a land where it rains meatballs or a dog whose farts help rob a bank... its central character dies! These are supposed to be stories that parents read to their kids before they drift off into dreamland. I don't want my kid dreaming of some "Egg-man" falling off a wall and shattering his body into a million bloody pieces!

Another example:

Three blind mice,
See how they run!
They all ran after a farmer's wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a sight in your life,
As three blind mice?

While the central characters in this rhyme didn't die... they got their tails cut off!!! With a carving knife no less!!! Don't get me wrong... I don't want mice in my garage more than the next guy but I'm not sadistically cut off their tails!!! I'm going to set out a mousetrap.

How about this one:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.
She gave them some broth,
Without any bread,
Whipped them all soundly, and sent them to bed.

Man... what a bitch. Call social services! Sorry about your luck having to live in a shoe (how's that possible anyway) but it ain't your kids faults!! This lady just "didn't know what to do" so she starved them and whipped them. Ooooookaaay... where's the good moral fiber in that story?

Again:

If all the world were paper,
And all the sea were ink,
If all the trees
Were bread and cheese,
What should we have to drink?

Okay... that's not sadistic... it's just stupid.

One final time:

Rub-a-dub-dub
Three men in a tub,
And how do you think they got there?
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker --
They all jumped out of a rotten potato!
'Twas enough to make a fish stare.

W... T... F! Okay, so I want my little daughter envisioning three men in a tub together. No. And how I ask you... HOW... did they jump out of a rotten potato? What were they doing there in the first place?

I could go on forever... but I'll stop.

What a sociopath! I don't know who "Mother Goose" was or why she felt the need to reveal the innermost workings of her twisted mind to CHILDREN! All her stuff is a mix of randomness, death, torture, child abuse, etc. etc. etc. I think she's really more suited to write lyrics for Slipknot as opposed to writing books for kids!



Rumor has it that the dude in the lower left corner is actually Mother Goose!

I know I may seem a little extreme and I'm not seriously on the "blacklist Mother Goose" bus but seriously folks... seriously... if they made Mother Goose into a movie it would be rated X.

What do you think?

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Come visit me at my home: Hands To War.