I love my kids, I just hate parenting
I never thought I’d say this, but thank god for parenting! Sometimes, it can be a respite.
Regardless of where you stand on the Great Pumpkin President, these are some harrowing times. North Korea, neo-Nazis, Harvey Weinstein, geostorms (and also Geostorm). Things are fairly tumultuous.
We’re often told to not sweat the small stuff, but when the world serves as an enormous sauna, sometimes the small stuff is the only way to cool yourself down.
Kids are walking disasters.
This is nothing new. There’s nothing that they can’t/won’t/already have destroy(ed). Every parent already knows this. And we also know that it’s our job to protect them from themselves, as difficult as they can sometimes be, because we know better.
But just because we know better doesn’t always mean that we do better, which is why Mom and Buried and I keep insisting on having taco nights despite the fact that the aftermath looks like the front row of a Gallagher concert.
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.
A friend of mine recently published a book about fatherhood. It’s called “Man v. Child” and it’s both the funniest dad book I’ve ever read and the only dad book I’ve ever read!
Relax, this isn’t a book review. I don’t do book reviews, because I don’t read parenting books and because I don’t feel qualified to review books and because I don’t need every yahoo out sending me their book. But very early in this one, the author, Doug something or other, raises an interesting question.
He asks the reader to consider what their dads were like as parents, and then asks the following question, based on their dad’s track record: “What can you fix?”
What if the answer is nothing?
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.