I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Over the weekend, professional golfer Rory McIlroy won the Open Championship. In the process he netted $1.66 million.
His father, meanwhile, scored big himself, having placed a bet in 2005 that his son would win the Open Championship by 2015. Daddy McIlroy collected (approximately) $171,000 merely for having confidence in his son’s golfing ability.
Which got me thinking…
What would I bet on my own son to accomplish within the next 10 years?
Many people don’t like giving advice, but not me. I don’t like giving directions (the only person who has a worse sense of direction than me is Mr. Magoo) but I love giving advice. Especially when it’s unsolicited. Which, unfortunately, it’s not. Because I asked you to ask me questions.
Despite having no training or authority or expertise in any arena aside from Movie Pong and The Kevin Bacon Game, I think I’m pretty good at the advice game. I’m a good listener and have given some friends some pretty good objective advice in the past, helpful, thoughtful advice that has (presumably) improved their relationships and (obviously) elevated my status in their lives.
But that’s not what I do here, with my “Parental Advisories”. No, here I play God with other people’s families.
Come and join me!
Read more about Take This Under Advisement, Jerkweed! – Vol. 10 …
About a year and a half ago, we moved to North Carolina. It was fun while it lasted but, as of tomorrow, we’ll be back in Brooklyn.
I guess, despite being a Red Sox fan, I’m a Yankee at my core. But, more importantly, Mom and Buried and I are city folk, and Raleigh just didn’t satisfy that part of us. So we’ve come to the end of the (tobacco) road.
It’s (not that) hard to say goodbye.
Most of the fears you have as a parent involve unlucky things, unfair things. Accidents and disasters, illnesses and tragedy. Most of the fears you have as a parent involve things that aren’t supposed to happen.
But the scariest nightmare of all is neither an accident nor unlucky. In fact, you’re lucky if it does happen. It’s what you want to happen. It’s how life is supposed to go. Your children are supposed to live healthy lives and grow up and become teenagers.
Too bad it sucks so much when they do.
I’ve written about my son’s whining before.
Of course I’ve written about it before. It’s such a large part of my day-to-day existence, the presence of the whine, the powerlessness to do anything about the whine, the desire to drink lots of wine because of the whine, that how could I not have written about it before?
But that was foolish. Because in the time since I wrote that post, things have taken a turn. And I’ve learned that whatever whining that I was, ahem, whining about back then was hardly whining at all.