Always going further than most fathers
Parenting is frustrating. And sometimes it’s not even your kids’ fault! Sometimes, you’re your own worst enemy.
Detective Munch loves to swim. He’s had lessons almost every year since he was a baby, but he’s always been scared to dunk his head. Despite several summers spent at Grandma’s pool and on the beach, he still wouldn’t go under.
It bugged me. To a fault.
Read more about Just Keep Swimming …
Parenting makes you feel a lot of things: happiness, frustration, surprise, boredom, anger, joy, exhaustion. (Is exhaustion an emotion?)
But no one really talks about how sad it can make you.
Sleep. Money. Silence. Peace of mind. Snacks.
These are just a few of the things you sacrifice when you decide to become a parent. (Don’t worry, they are replaced – by exhaustion, debt, headaches, scraps, and stress! Yay!) A lot of that is a side-effect of getting older – most of us accrue responsibility with age, whether we have kids or not – but there’s one thing that having kids takes away from you that you can never get back:
Solitude.
Stress isn’t a competition. Newsflash: We’re all stressed out of our minds!
Adulthood is stressful. Work is stressful. Marriage is stressful. The state of the world is stressful. Life is stressful!
And, of course, parenting is stressful too, in more ways than one. But parenting stress is a little different, because being a parent is both stressful in and of itself and because the presence of children adds an extra layer of stress on top of everything else. It’s fun!
Kids are dumb. Everyone knows that!
It’s not their fault, at least not at first. Everyone is born a blank slate. Kids don’t know anything. It’s our job as parents to clue them in to all of it. Even the obvious stuff.
This isn’t news. Not a single one of us has ever met a baby who could hold a conversation worth a damn.