I love my kids, I just hate parenting
I only have one kid – on purpose! – so why do I feel like I have several?
Oh, right: MY KID HAS A LOVEY.
It’s a little mini-blanket with a lion head on the top of it, and my son snuggles with it all day long. At first, it was cute: “Oh, look at how much he loves his lovey lion! It’s his best friend! ADORABLE!” Soon, it got too serious to be cute. Now my son can barely function without the thing.
And I hate it.
Having kids changes your outlook on tons of things, some big, some small. For the most part, it’s positive. Life becomes better and more interesting, things you’ve long taken for granted are suddenly seen in a new light; that’s exciting and fun.
But kids are pretty stupid. And while their innocence can be refreshing, their ignorance is simply astounding. So for every aspect of life you appreciate anew when you view it through the eyes of your developing child, there are thirty mundane things that you had been ignoring on purpose that are suddenly thrust back into your life. Soon you find yourself focusing on things you’d stopped wasting time thinking about long ago.
Having children both expands and corrupts every aspect of your life. Kids change your perspective, and suddenly things that shouldn’t be important are, and things you used to enjoy without a second thought become minefields.
I don’t know how to put this, but I’m kind of a big deal.
Not only are my tweets regularly featured in the Huffington Post’s weekly list of “Best Parenting Tweets” – follow me at @DadandBuried – but they occasionally publish my blog posts, in which I put forth my genius-level understanding of the intricacies of expert parenting.
This affiliation with such a popular, influential website gets my writing a lot more exposure, which is great, in theory. The HuffPo audience is not necessarily familiar with my blog.
And, judging by the comments they’re leaving on my posts, they hate me.
2013 was the year Dad and Buried went national. I broke through on the Huffington Post and got exposed to a much bigger audience. I’m still not famous or rich, but a lot more people think I’m an asshole who hates his son, so that’s pretty cool.
Hopefully, 2014 will bring even more eyes to my blog, and I’ll continue to be as passionate about it as I was over the past year. I had more time to devote to this site in 2013 than I’d ever had before, and that allowed me to regularly write about three posts a week. I suspect that number will go down a bit in 2014 as my schedule gets busier, but I’ll do my best!
To close out 2013, I thought I’d list the year’s most popular posts (based on views). The following list contains a good mix of son-bashing, parent-bashing, Brony-questioning (the post that just wouldn’t die), and even life-loving posts. There might even be a serious one in there. But I hope not.
I guess I’m not the same as most dads. Or most dad-bloggers.
I’m a member of the Facebook Dadbloggers community (come and join us!), and through it I’ve met a lot of great dads, some with blogs big, some with blogs small, some with no blogs at all! (Seriously. There’s a guy.) I get along with all of them, give or take, but I’m not the most vocal member of the group.
I think that’s because my sensibility is a little bit different. For example, I enjoyed the following video.