I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Sleep. Money. Silence. Peace of mind. Snacks.
These are just a few of the things you sacrifice when you decide to become a parent. (Don’t worry, they are replaced – by exhaustion, debt, headaches, scraps, and stress! Yay!) A lot of that is a side-effect of getting older – most of us accrue responsibility with age, whether we have kids or not – but there’s one thing that having kids takes away from you that you can never get back:
Solitude.
Last spring, my wife’s sister and her boyfriend came to join us on our trip to the beach, and they brought their kids.
Except they aren’t *their* kids. Not yet, at least.
They’re foster kids.
So A Wrinkle In Time hits theaters this weekend. The book is a big deal to a lot of people, but I’ve never read it (blind spot!) and my 7-year-old hasn’t gotten to it yet, and as such the movie isn’t really on my radar.
Well, it wasn’t on my radar, until I came across a little bit of controversy over the poster. It prominently features the female lead and the mostly female cast (does Oprah even have a gender? I feel like she’s singular), all bathed in pastel colors, and it ignited another discussion about gender stereotypes.
Apparently, someone thinks the poster doesn’t appeal to boys. To which I say: who cares? It’s a poster!
They say opposites attract. Mom and Buried and I aren’t total opposites, but we do have some significant differences. And we definitely parent differently.
On good days, those differences complement each other. On bad days, they cause conflict. When you have a kid who is acting up, and acting out, the bad days become more frequent.
Especially when you don’t always see eye to eye on how to discipline that kid.
We all have big plans for what we want to teach our kids, the values we want to instill, the pop culture we want to pass down. We all have big plans for molding out children into the kind of people we want them to be.
And then we actually have the kids, and life intrudes.