There’s an epidemic affecting our 20- and 30-somethings these days. Specifically, our women. Not whorishness…no, sadly for my age group we just missed this one. No, our women are being turned into morons who can’t carry on a conversation without invoking their children.

Tigers score? “Oh, my little guy loves Justin Verlander!”

Work? “I deserve more time off because I’ve got kids and it’s hard for me.”

Sex? “We’re trying to decide if we want more but we’re having fun practicing!”

Pets? “I couldn’t handle the dog cuz the kids wouldn’t take care of it.”

There are nine people in my group at work. Of these, there are four of us that don’t have kids. If you go to lunch with any of the other five people, expect to hear conversations about school and back talk and how your husbands don’t help and ear infections and viruses and cute things they said and doctors appointments and any one of a hundred other things I don’t want to hear about.

On the plus side, one of the women is my age and had her daughter at 17, so she can sympathize with the endless child discussions. And my boss is a workaholic who doesn’t talk about her kids as much as the others, but when she does you can tell these poor kids are gonna need tons of therapy from all the pressure she’s putting on them.

But still, not great odds.

But it gets worse.

Because of the three other people who don’t have kids, two of them try to join in because they’ve got nieces and nephews who are so cute and they’re doing tea parties and they’re going to the car show and any one of a hundred other things that I’m less interested in because it’s not even your kid!

So now we’re down to two people who don’t have kids or care about joining the conversation.

Except the other person has the personality of an autistic lab rat (if you’re a lab rat and you’re autistic and you’re reading this, my apologies). Doesn’t want kids, doesn’t care about talking to people, she seems to be able to sit there and stare out a window for half an hour.

Which I can do, but only if I’m staring at one of the “adults only” pools in Vegas.

So I stare at my phone a lot. And then get criticized because I stare at my phone a lot. Sorry guys, I don’t care about your kids. Call me when they’re 18. Well, call me when the girls are 18. The boys I don’t give 2 shits about.

I once made the mistake of going to lunch with 6 of these women. Six mothers and me. Fun. So at some point they realized that I’d been staring at my phone for quite some time as they discussed their children, so one of them turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, we haven’t been involving you in the conversation. How’s your cat?”

My cat? Uh, it’s a cat.

But he’s still more interesting to me than your kids.

Look, I like kids (to a certain extent). I definitely want kids. I just want to know why parents (mostly women) turn into conversational retards after they pop a kid out of their bodies. I would presume that these were intelligent individuals before they had the kids. Some of them are good looking women, even after popping out 2 or 3 kids. Yet there’s nothing sexual about them, nothing worth knowing about them (that’s not to say that if a woman isn’t sexual there isn’t something worth knowing about them).

I know that up until about the 1950s or ’60s, motherhood was pretty much all women were expected to do. But we’re in a new age, with equality for all. I’m cool with that (really, I am).

But with equality comes some added expectations. I typically do not come into work and discuss how drunk I got the night before or the game unless I know the other person is interested (and most people typically aren’t). All I ask is the same “respect” when it comes to your kids.

Is that too much to ask?

(Yes, I know I’m an ass.)