I love my kids, I just hate parenting
I wouldn’t expect you to understand. If you’re not from here, it must seem alien to you.
Around these parts we do things differently, and if you’re not born and raised in this culture, you’re probably never going to get it. We eat different foods, we use different slang, we wear different clothes, and yes, we discipline our children differently.
So I can’t condemn Adrian Peterson for what he did. It’s a part of his culture.
Tomorrow is my birthday. (No gifts please, just Facebook likes. Trying to hit 10k!)
I don’t really worry much about my birthdays. Despite my steadily increasing amount of grey hairs and my steadily decreasing amount of all hairs (REVERSE JINX!), I’m not one to panic about my age. At least not yet. (Ask me again in two years, when I’m hitting 40.)
Of course, having a kid forces one to reevaluate the passage of time, and having a kid whose birthday is a mere six days after mine isn’t helping.
It’s almost like he’s chasing me.
The other day, during a particularly stressful endurance test at the dinner table, Mom and Buried chided me for getting so frustrated at Detective Munch’s eating (or lack thereof) habits. She told me that I needed to step back and realize that as hard as parenting can be, it’s pretty tough to be a three-year-old too.
My inadequacy as a father notwithstanding – although I would argue that no parent should be judged by their reaction to a toddler’s dinnertime hi-jinks – that’s some bullshit right there.
For reasons that make little sense to my readers, my wife, or even myself, I often refer to my son as Detective Munch. But that’s almost exclusively online; I never call him that to his face.
No, to his face I call him all manner of things, some of which rhyme with his actual name (there aren’t a lot of options; his actual name is Pantry), some of which rhyme with grass-pole, and most of which are just nonsense words because I’m more of a child than he is.
Aside from causing some identity-confusion that could come back to haunt us both and the occasional scolding from Mom and Buried, the nonsense nicknames I give my son are harmless. They’re just a way for me to be affectionate with him when I can’t remember his real name and don’t want him to know I’ve forgotten.
But since I don’t use his real name online, I’m starting to run out of ways to refer to him, especially as he gets older.