I love my kids, I just hate parenting
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.
I love to complain. Especially about my kids.
Parenting is a never-ending hellscape of stress and headaches, and as such it offers plenty of fodder for whining. God knows I do a lot of it.
That said, even I am sick of some of the typical rants. It’s time for parents to shut up about some of this stuff.
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.
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.