I love my kids, I just hate parenting
I am not ashamed to admit that I sleep on the couch sometimes, and it’s not always because Mom and Buried is mad at me!
Sometimes it’s because I’M mad at HER! How about THAT?!
Most of the time, though, I sleep on the couch because it’s the nice thing to do…
I am not the world’s best gift-giver. Not by a longshot.
But one Christmas, when we were still dating, I got my wife the perfect gift.
It’s been downhill ever since.
I love to complain. Especially about my kids.
Parenting is a never-ending hellscape of stress and headaches, and as such it offers plenty of fodder for whining. God knows I do a lot of it.
That said, even I am sick of some of the typical rants. It’s time for parents to shut up about some of this stuff.
“Does it get better?”
That’s the question a follower asked me, in a lighthearted panic, after I posted a meme about unruly kids.
It’s just after my often-challenging eldest son’s 8th birthday, and this idea of things becoming easier is on my mind, so all (most) joking aside, I thought I’d try to answer. (But I hate being threatened by more experienced parents who warn me about the tween years or the teen years or the unemployed-and-living-in-my-basement years, so I’m going to try to answer without doing that.)
There’s a running joke among parents that any vacation you take with your kids is not actually a vacation, it’s a trip. God knows I’ve leaned on this joke myself from time to time. Because it’s true.
If you ask most parents to name their best vacation ever, odds are they’ll cite one they went on before they had children. Or on which the kids were left behind. I would have said the same thing; both of my favorite vacations – my big fat Greek honeymoon, or our trip to Tuscany – took place pre-kids.
That changed last month, when I went on my new best vacation ever. And surprise surprise, I even brought my kids along! It was the best of both worlds.