I love my kids, I just hate parenting
If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you may have noticed a bit of a controversy last week, just before Mother’s Day.
I posted a meme that generated some passionate responses, and for once it wasn’t about Trump or gun control or vaccinating your kids.
This was about pet moms – more specifically, why they’re not actually moms.
Full disclosure: I’ve done it myself.
Years ago, in my cynical pre-fatherhood stage, I compared babies to pets. Unfavorably, because at least pets have, as I wrote at the time, “furry upside.”
I stand by that, as I enjoy my still cynical mid-fatherhood stage. In many ways, pets are more rewarding than babies. Obviously, babies evolve, and eventually having a child has advantages over owning a dog or a cat (don’t even talk to me about birds and fish and gerbils and hamsters). Eventually.
Right now, I have a toddler. And sometimes I might rather have a puppy.
Every once in while my wife is seized with anxiety about how quickly our son is growing up.
I can’t deny that it’s moving fast. He went from being two months old to holding conversations in the blink of an eye. He’s grown from the size of a turnip to a little person almost too big for his stroller in what felt like three weeks. That’s just the way it goes, I guess. One of the most accurate stereotypes regarding having kids is how quickly time passes, and it’s a stereotype for a reason: mental laziness. But it’s also true.
But whereas my wife gets sad about seeing her son develop, I see things a little bit differently.
Read more about My Son Is Growing Up Fast, But That’s Okay …
When my wife and I moved in together, one of the first things we did was get a cat. (The next 500 things we did were have arguments about what we would name the cat.)
The cat and I were best buds. The cat and my wife were frenemies. The cat and the world-at-large were chilly acquaintances. The cat and my son? Unfortunately, they never had a chance to get to know each other.
Now that he’s getting a little older, that’s something I want to correct.
Can someone please tell me the difference between a dog and a two-year-old?
This is a serious question.