I love my kids, I just hate parenting
So last week was kind of shitty.
Taxes screwed us. The New York City public school system lottery screwed us. I got sunburn. I went to the dentist. My landlord raised the rent. I got spoiled on “The Americans”. I thought Harrison Ford kind of ruined the Star Wars trailer. It was pretty lame all around.
As a result, I found myself in a bit of a funk for a few days. Thank god I have a kid.
My kid is smart… maybe. It’s still hard to tell; he’s only four years old! Even Mozart was eating Play-Doh when he was four.
Kids are stupid. It’s one of the reasons they’re so annoying and stressful. But it’s also one of the perks.
I’ve said before that I can’t wait for my son to grow up, so I can see who he becomes. But lately I’ve been reconsidering.
I kind of like him dumb. Stupid kids are better!
I was raised Catholic, took Communion every weekend for the first seventeen years of my life, attended catechism classes, got confirmed, went to Catholic high school, spent four years at a Jesuit university… and then almost immediately stopped believing in any of it.
Despite my atheism, Mom and Buried and I have considered raising our son with some kind of religious background, and letting him decide for himself if he wants to run with it. Because having a foundation in something can be a positive thing, and for all its faults, religion can instill positive values that needn’t always be married to harmful dogma or bizarre myth.
So maybe we’ll teach him about the guy who was born from a virgin and rose from the dead and knows everything about everyone. But we’ll never teach him about the Easter Bunny. Talk about absurd!
My son’s impending entry into Kindergarten is causing a whole host of problems in my life. (Not the least of which will be his eventual ability to read the channel guide as I try to quickly scroll past the names of his garbage programs.)
It’s still six months away and yet it’s already negatively impacting my life. There are all sorts of schedules, and schedules mean planning, and I don’t like planning. I’m supposed to know what I’m doing six months in advance? I don’t even know what I did two days ago, and that was two days! Ago! (I went on a bar crawl, so what did you expect? I’m surprised I’m awake right now.)
But I’m a parent. Of a soon-to-be kindergartener. Planning has become an unavoidable part of my life. I mean, it’s even part of “planning” an escape.
It’s like I’m being mocked.
On Friday, I wrote about our tendency, as parents, to overvalue our impact on our kids.
We wring our hands over every little thing we do wrong, terrified that the slightest misstep will set our kids on the wrong path. But once you consider how many other influences are out there, you realize that such micromanagement – of our parenting, of their lives – is impossible.
I can’t get my son to do the littlest things right now, why should I think I have the power to get him to do big things when he’s older? I’m all out of control.