Hella Kids Hero

A bumper sticker changed my life recently.

I was out driving around with my daughter. What a perfect day it was - one of those before-summer afternoons in which you can just smell the possibilities ahead. The beach days. The late-evening backyard barbecues. The lazy afternoons spent doing nothing more productive than reading a half-entertaining pulp novel. We were having a great time, a time that you don’t necessarily remember moment-by-moment, but one that lives on in the filmy haze of impression.

Then it was all brought to a halt, both literally and figuratively.

The light ahead turned red. Not being from Florida or Oregon, I stopped, and so did the nondescript late-model SUV ahead of us. I couldn’t tell you the make and model right now if I had a knife at my throat - just one of those anonymous vehicles chosen for maximum forgettableness, because sometimes you just need a car that moves stuff to different places.

But the owner of this particular box on wheels was a secret genius. With just two strategically placed bumper stickers, they were not only able to get me to laugh - I’m laughing still, hours later - but also completely rewire my brain and make me completely rethink my stance on humanity.

Two stickers. Ready for them?

Sticker #1: “Member of Bad Moms Club”.

That’s pretty fine by itself. I mean, we’ve all been there. There are days that I definitely qualify as a full member of the Bad Dads Club, if not vice-president or higher. And I really have to give it to someone who is willing to publicly acknowledge their lack of confidence in their ability to rear a small human. None of us are experts, but I’ll trust the loudly belching weirdo that is open about their lack of expertise more than the stuffed shirt who writes a whole book on how to parent correctly. At least I’ll know I’m getting sketchy advice.

But it doesn’t stop there, and in conjunction with the other sticker, I felt born again. I felt like the scales had dropped from my eyes, that I was able to perceive the whole of humanity in a new and more charitable light. Here goes:

Sticker #2: “Hella Kids Up In This Bitch”.

I’ll let you catch your breath.

Phew, I needed a second as well. We need to break that down. Not since Hemingway’s verrrrrrry short shoes story have I laid my eyes upon such a rich yet concise mind-feast. It was incredible. I was seeing through space and time. Giant space whales hooted songs of delight at me as I floated past on clouds made of hope and raspberries.

We could leave it there, but that would be boring. Let’s break down this absolutely delicious little word dessert, bite by bite.

“Hella”. What an absolutely brilliant way to start a sentence. We want the clear denotation of “many” or “a lot”, but we want the connotation to go further. It simply can’t stop at “oh my, I seem to have accumulated quite a few children”. No, it is this one word, this mangled remnant of “hell of a lot”, that really starts things off with a bang.

Think about it. When’s the last time you heard “hella”, just out and about? It’s probably not waiting in line for your balcony seats at the latest matinée of “Don Giovanni”. “Hella great arias,” you might heard said, but probably not. No, “hella” is probably said at a sporting event, with the sun in your eyes and the smell of stale popcorn in the air. It might also be found wafting the hallways at your local high school, probably with a hint of irony sprinkled on for taste.

And that word - “hella”, just in case you lost the plot - needs to be given time to roll around your mouth like a fine single malt. Do it now. Say it out loud, even if your spouse is watching. If they ask what you’re doing, just shrug or say you’re quoting a No Doubt song.

Let’s actually explore that a bit further. No Doubt, no doubt one of the finest bands of the late 20th and early 21st centuries (fight me, I’ll take you), really sticks out in my mind as one of the main popularizers of the term. “Hella Good”, an absolute banger of a song from the early 2000s, out-Marveled Iron Man and Thor combined. Those movies had nothing on this four-minute confection of perfection, at least in terms of lizard-brain-stroking joyful genius. It’s a dumb song, to be sure, but it’s perfect in its stupidity, kind of like microwave pizza or young adult fiction.

It’s also the sheer hubris of “hella” that really pushes it into the big leagues. If this Honda-van-driving genius had applied a sticker that had sedately stated “Hell Of A Lot Of Kids Up In This Bitch”, I would have heard a sigh of resignation implied in the phrasing. “Hell of a lot” is something your mechanic says to you, just before “scoring on that number one cylinder, we’re going to have to do an engine out”, and then he’d start licking his lips in anticipation of the bill. It’s a phrase used by a tired uncle when talking about the alimony he owes Aunt Sue, now that she left with that biker from Spokane.

But “hella” is the defiant hiss of a Millennial mom pushing back against the encroaching wall of middle age. It brings up images of a California beach, where the cigarette smoke doesn’t fully ruin the fresh smell of the sea. Saying it right now like you did, in front of your spouse and God and the universe, made you feel both defiant and young, and it felt good, didn’t it?

I guarantee that Hella Mom didn’t stop the defiance train at Bitch Station, either. I would bet my house - no, my liver, my daughter’s liver, and my entire guitar collection - that she is the possessor of not just one tattoo, but at least three. Waiting awkwardly for my daughter to finish school or other events has provided me with many fruitful hours of observation concerning the Modern American Suburban Mother, and there is no greater catnip for most of these people than the generically executed tattoo. It’s a trite observation, but it holds up in court: once reserved for the outcasts and rebels of society, tattoos now seem to be an essential accessory, like yoga pants or quiet misery masquerading as curated kitchen appliances.

Let’s take a quick detour down tattoo lane, though. I think it would be pretty reductive of me to denigrate Bad Mom and her ilk for acquiring painful skin art. Honestly, even if they’re common, that’s not a bad thing. Mr. Hipster Author man here can’t look down his Artisan Crafted Shade Grown spectacles at a trend simply because it is a trend. Such things are popular because they are fun, and fun isn’t anything to throw in the compost. I’m not going around dissing on sunshine just because the neighbors are into it too, so why would I do so with tattoos? I'm just saying that my years of observing humans has left me with a few truths, and one of them is that people like skin ink, especially when the rest of their existence may be pleasantly normal.

Like a good pasta dish, the individual ingredients of our Up In This Bitch stew are not particularly unique in and of themselves, but it’s the whole salad of the idea that makes it so delectable. (Pasta salad? That metaphor got away from me.) I’d like to dive into another part of the recipe here - the metaphorical plating.

This sticker could have been rendered in a simple font, maybe an Arial or Times New Roman (yuck). It could have been laid out simply, with maybe two or three words per line. But no, like a true nouveaux cuisine artist, the owner of the van took her time to choose not only a sticker with several fonts in it - a more common looking psych-out of a san-serif (I think!) for the majority of the sticker, followed by a gut-punch of a floofy, flowery “BITCH” to cap it off - but a layout that also included different sizes, with the ornate BITCH quite a bit bigger than the rest! Such genius!

It took her some time, too! This is a woman who does not wait for things to just hove into view, and then merely repeat them - oh no. Searching for such a sticker online shows us, dear reader, that this was not the first, nor the second, nor the tenth option. It took me several hard-earned minutes to find a comparable sticker. This is not a one-off flight of fancy. This is someone putting sparkles on the megaphone before she shouts through it.

We need more people like Bitch Mom. We need people willing to conceive of an idea, and then not just execute it, but execute it with style, with passion, with verve. It is not merely enough to live; we must live with purpose and style or cease living at all. All of our “BITCH”es should be so flowery and ornate!

I have to wrap this up. Let’s snap back to the story.

The light turned green. I saw the van bearing the duo of transcendental stickers begin to waft away, and it came to me all at once: this is a woman who knew what she was, how she was, but most importantly, when she was. It is inconceivable that such an individual would be allowed to persist in such a manner fifty years ago. Imagine it! 1974 - a family of Smiths or Youngs or Steins are coming home from the after-school pickup and they see “Hella Kids Up In This Bitch”. Would they take it literally, worrying for the rest of the night that a female dog had borne too many pups?

Heck, even thirty years ago such a pairing of profound vulgarity and naked self-awareness/loathing would be seen as alien.

This woman continued on her way, and I was left with profound internal change. Whereas I might have once found such a combination abhorrent, I have now found myself in a new, non-judgmental aftermath. Why should I be angry at one bearing hella kids? Not only is child-rearing one of the world’s most difficult tasks, being a bitch full-time must be wearing beyond belief. Yet this hero found the time not only to bring me joy, but to do so with style.

So I salute you, Hella Bitch. You know who you are. We should all be so lucky.