I love my kids, I just hate parenting
My instinct is to joke about it. To make fun of the whole thing, to poke fun at the people who fall for it, to bemoan the dumb victims and their bad parents.
But he whole thing is so twisted it makes my stomach churn. These are little kids.
No matter how desperately I wish it were funny, the Momo Challenge isn’t a joke. Real or not, the prospect is terrifying.
Parenting is hard.
Everyone knows this. Parents know, the child-free know, even kids know. They don’t care, but they know.
Caring for and raising and protecting and molding and teaching another human being, from scratch, is mentally taxing, physically exhausting, expensive, boring, and stressful. Even if you think it’s the greatest thing in the world, you can’t deny how challenging it is.
So why do we lie about it?
Last fall, in the aftermath of the most recent “deadliest shooting in U.S. history,” this time in Las Vegas, I Got Mad Online. Upset, angry, and frustrated at what happened keeps happening, I posted a variety of tweets, links, and images to social media.
In response to one such item – the Instagram image of an old tweet (meta!) that reads “NRA = No Rational Argument” – someone commented, “DadandBuried- Not a Real American.”
Cool.
Last spring, Mom and Buried found an unopened package of rubber door stoppers on the street.
In my neighborhood, people put stuff they don’t want on their front curb, and it’s understood that it’s all up for grabs until the garbage man comes. Sometimes it’s old books and DVDs, sometimes it’s random bits of clothing, sometimes it’s a gently-used AC unit or a TV or a bookshelf.
Door stoppers are not something I would have even looked twice at, and needing them had never really occurred to Mom and Buried either. But she grabbed the package anyway.
Because the door stoppers aren’t for us. They’re for our brand-new third grader.
Mom and Buried has worked in theater – musical theater – for a long time. She’d been angling to watch Annie on one of our movie nights for months, having depleted our stores of Pixar, Star Wars, and age-appropriate superhero flicks.
Last summer, thanks to “CBS Sunday Morning,” she finally had her chance!
One day, after seeing a segment about the play on the sleepy morning news show, my 6-year-old asked Mom and Buried if they could watch Annie.