Being a good parent means your kids’ comfort, health and happiness always supersede yours.
Parenting is about sacrifice, and that means more than giving your son the last piece of bacon, or being forced to stop listening to Kanye when your daughter is in the back seat. It means letting your kid think he told you what Superman’s one weakness is, or why the dinosaurs went extinct.
You have to sacrifice a little ego, and sometimes you have to sacrifice a little dignity. Just make sure it’s worth it when you do!
Everyone knows having kids takes away sleep, and money, and free time, but it’s worse than that. Despite your best efforts, it also steals whatever cool you had left, and whatever pride you were holding onto.
For example…
I don’t remember when the term “butt paste” became a part of my vocabulary, but sometime around Detective Munch’s birth, it did. And thanks to The Hammer, it remains one. Throwing the phrase “butt paste” around doesn’t exactly earn you cool points, but when you’re a parent, that stops mattering in a hurry.
If you have kids, odds are you have some Boudreaux’s Butt Paste® in your house, and while using that term may initially give you pause, once you use the actual paste to erase the painful diaper rash on your squealing baby’s bottom, you stop caring pretty quickly. Especially when the cream starts #kickingrash and s/he stops screaming!
Your dignity doesn’t stand up next to your kid’s discomfort or pain or fear. When you’re a parent, put your game face on and do what you have to do.
The same way you give up worrying about what you wear to the bus stop in the morning and you stop being self-conscious about singing along to “Let It Go” in the elevator and you’re no longer concerned about looking goofy in a cheap plastic mask as you chase your kid around the toy store, it doesn’t take long before you don’t much care about saying the term “butt paste” – or about getting it on your fingers.
Especially since just about every parent has gotten much worse on those fingers! (Let’s just say I’d rather deal with the stuff that’s 40% Zinc Oxide and comes out of a jar than the stuff that’s completely natural and comes out of my baby.)
If it makes your kid feel better? That’s pretty much all that matters.
Sure, maybe you lose a little dignity, but you gain a superpower: that of making your kids happy. Whether it’s by unabashedly playing dress up, losing all inhibitions during a dance party, or smearing some new Maximum Strength Butt Paste all over their delicate little tushies to erase their diaper rash in as little as three hours, you’re saving their day.
And in so doing you’re transforming from someone who cares about something silly like pride and turning into something much more important: a superhero.
Just make sure their butt is clean before you start rubbing it. Nobody wants to be saved by someone with poop on his hands.
I’ve partnered with Life of Dad and Boudreaux’s Butt Paste® for this campaign, but all opinions, and loss of dignity, are my own.
