I love my kids, I just hate parenting
In a lot of ways, kids make Halloween more fun. But, like everything else, they also make it much, much worse.
For example, last night, as part of our month of scary movies, instead of watching something legit like Let The Right One In (the original FTW!) or The Conjuring, we watched Hocus Pocus. (Which was much scarier, for totally unintentional reasons.)
Because parenting.
Kids are dumb. Everyone knows that!
It’s not their fault, at least not at first. Everyone is born a blank slate. Kids don’t know anything. It’s our job as parents to clue them in to all of it. Even the obvious stuff.
This isn’t news. Not a single one of us has ever met a baby who could hold a conversation worth a damn.
Bored kids are the worst.
Kids hate being bored so much it makes them blind. Blind to the hundreds of toys staring them in the face, blind to the dozens of books within arms reach, blind to the open space and fresh air in the backyard.
They hate it so much it makes them deaf, too. Deaf to their parents reminders of all those toys and books. Deaf to their parents’ threats that if they don’t stop complaining about being bored, all those toys and books will be given to someone who will actually use them!
About the only thing it doesn’t make them is mute, because bored kids literally never stop telling you about it.
Over the summer, Meredith Ethington of Perfection Pending shared a list of the anxieties that plague her – and moms in general – every day, like having enough food in the house, cleaning messes, making it to appointments on time, etc. I stumbled across “Thoughts Moms Have After A Long Day of Work” again recently, and have some thoughts of my own.
The punch line to her post is that dads aren’t troubled by such things, and only think about naps. It’s all in good fun -in the comments she included a disclaimer that her husband is great and that the list was merely meant to showcase “the mental load” women have that men often don’t – but she’s not alone.
The idea that moms are the only ones who deal with this kind of anxiety is pretty common. I beg to differ.
This morning, my wife texted me in a panic because she couldn’t find her membership card to the Staten Island Children’s Museum she wanted to visit with our kids.
Later, she texted me a photo of my 7-month-old at a museum, putting some filth-ridden toy in his mouth, the goofy idiot. I texted back, both to insult my son for being a goofy idiot and to ask at which museum she’d ended up, because I knew she’d never found her membership card.
I also knew that didn’t matter. Because we live in New York City.