I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Like many parents, I always kind of hoped that my kids would absorb decent human values through osmosis.
That just by being around average, decent people who enact and embody basic human decency on a daily basis – like me and Mom and Buried! – they’d eventually become imbued with those intangible qualities we expect good people t have.
But if my 7-year-old’s lack of gratitude is any indication, it hasn’t been working.
When you have kids, you don’t become just a mother or a father. You become a teacher, a doctor, a cop, a waiter, a maid, and a referee if you have more than one kid. (Here’s hoping you don’t have a daredevil kid who requires you to be a firefighter also!)
On top of all that, on top of suddenly having to do a bunch of lame stuff like discipline your kids and clean up after your kids, and on top of your office becoming a nursery, your Netflix queue drowning in cartoons, and the car you once loved becoming a breeding ground for Goldfish crumbs and spit-up stains, the real horror hits: Not only have you become a dad, you’ve become your dad!
It’s already happening to me.
Father’s Day is next weekend, apparently.
That’s right, I don’t pay much attention to the date, because I don’t care too much about Father’s Day! Don’t get me wrong, Mom and Buried is an amazing gift-giver, so it’s always exciting to see what she comes up with, but I’d trade every gift she’s ever given me for never having to get her anything because my gift-giving abilities pale in comparison to hers and the stress is KILLING ME.
It doesn’t have to kill you, though, because I’m going to help! This year, I have some gift ideas for the dad in your life, with the First Annual Dad and Buried Father’s Day Gift Guide!
Disclosure: This post is in collaboration with DIYZ. All opinions of apps and companies that help me complete DIY projects are my own.
When we moved to Raleigh in 2012, we bought a dining room table which came with a bench. But, the only bench the store had available was the display model. It wasn’t without some wear and tear, but we needed it. Obviously, a mere year and a half later, when we got back to Brooklyn, it broke.
The wood splintered on one of the legs and it was no longer stable enough to use. It seemed fixable, at least for someone who can fix things (read: not me), so we kept it in storage for when Mom and Buried got remarried.
To her chagrin, we’re still together, and the bench is still broken.
I’ve written about my father before, but I’ve never really written about my mom. Not because there’s nothing to say, but because there’s too much to say. It’s scary to write about her! How can I do my mom justice? How can anyone?
I don’t know that I’d call myself a “mama’s boy” because I’m too much of a jerk for that – and every time I go home I revert to being a teenager again, which means I’m even less nice to everyone than normal, no matter how long I was in your womb! – but moms are pretty special, and it’s hard to capture every reason why. In the case of my mom, it’s particularly hard, because she’s so nice.
It’s hard to praise niceness. Niceness can seem bland. But there’s nothing bland about my mom.