I love my kids, I just hate parenting
It’s rare to find a parent who didn’t measure the passage of time by juxtaposing pictures of their kid’s first day of school in September with their kid’s last day of school in June.
And then, with a mixture of pride (“He did it!”) and petulance (“He’s growing up too fast!”), they bemoan the passage of time, whine about how fast it’s all going, and bitch about how quickly kids grow up.
I call bullshit.
Parenting is an experiment.
You keep trying new things, seeing what works (nothing) and what doesn’t (everything), and shifting your techniques accordingly until you land on the perfect (read: imaginary) combination and tend to your impressionable child until he sprouts into a flawless adult.
Unfortunately, that’s all a waste of time. Not only because parenting is impossible to game plan, and because it turns out we’re the test subjects.
These days, parents have it easy. Stop laughing. I just mean we have it easy when it comes to introducing our kids to our favorite shows and movies.
I don’t have a lot to pass down to my son. There’s my sense of humor, my inexplicable collection of Garfield books (the same seven jokes reprinted over and over for 40 years = PRICELESS), and a complete and utter inability to build or fix things.
But I do have opinions, and many of them center around pop culture: Superman is better than Batman; Die Hard is the best action movie ever made; “The Wire” is required watching; Han shot first; etc., etc.
You better believe I’ll be passing those down.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe how quickly your kid is growing up.
Detective Munch has his last day of preschool today (he can have the ceremony, he can get the diploma, but I’ll be dead in the cold cold ground before I refer to it as graduation!) In September he’ll start Kindergarten, and he can already hold actual conversations and ride a bike and dress himself and brush his own teeth (each with varying degrees of success, but with enough general success that I’m counting them all). He’s still far from being a young man, or even truly independent in any way, but he’s definitely getting there.
At least I thought he was, until I watched him play tee-ball. Because guess what? Turns out there may be no crying in baseball, but there’s plenty in tee-ball.
God is pretty much the most famous dad in the world. Even if he hadn’t had a son, he has a fatherly presence in many people’s lives, offering them support and guidance in their times of need.
The famous “Footprints in the Sand” poem, in which a man sees only one set of footprints in the sand when formerly there were two and subsequently asks God why He abandoned him, is a great example of this. And people love it. It’s a great way of conveying the love and support religious people feel that God provides them.
Of course, if that poem really were written by a dad, it might be a little bit different.