I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Like many parents, I always kind of hoped that my kids would absorb decent human values through osmosis.
That just by being around average, decent people who enact and embody basic human decency on a daily basis – like me and Mom and Buried! – they’d eventually become imbued with those intangible qualities we expect good people t have.
But if my 7-year-old’s lack of gratitude is any indication, it hasn’t been working.
No one likes to discuss politics, or religion, or gun control, or any other hot button issue with strangers or acquaintances or extended family.
But as parents, we’re often forced into unpleasant conversations in order to care for our kids, and in 2017, there’s something new I want to know:
“Where do you stand on Trump?”
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.