I love my kids, I just hate parenting
When you have kids, you sacrifice a lot. Is all that sacrifice worth it? Is parenting worth it?
I’m not sure I can answer that.
Both because there is no definitive, universal answer, and because I don’t know yet.
Parents and children have different perspectives.
This is obvious when you’re a kid, particularly a teenager, because parents just don’t understand. But it becomes even more obvious, blindingly obvious, when you become a parent. Suddenly, parental guidance isn’t just a hassle, it’s your daily responsibility!
We usually don’t want the same things that our kids do. There is some overlap: we want them to be happy, to have fun, to be healthy, and they, presumably, want those things too. But we have different definitions of those things, and different methods for achieving them.
Which means that some of the things that make us good parents also make us bad ones, in our kids’ eyes.
Christmas is coming, which gives us all a chance to show our families and friends how much we love them through the joyful act of giving, and receiving, gifts.
It also allows the cruel and vindictive people in our lives to torture us by gleefully providing our children with terrible, terrible toys, whether they’re loud, include hundreds of tiny pieces, require hours of manual labor to assemble, or are just plain annoying.
Sometimes, we parents even do it to ourselves, because indulging our kids is part of the deal. But even so, that doesn’t mean we can’t hold a grudge against the people who created some of these infernal toys to begin with. Which is what I’m about to do.
You think the worst is over.
You got the kid home from the hospital, you (or your wife) managed to survive labor, you endured the first couple of months of constant wake-ups and middle of the night feedings, and you’ve finally reached the point where the kid is sleeping through the night.
You did it! Success! This baby stuff is a breeze! You start getting a little more sleep, and you finally start feeling like yourself again; you actually, somehow, inexplicably, start thinking about having another baby. After all, you can take two to three months of no sleep. It ain’t no thing!
Right?
My parents live in Connecticut, about two hours away. We often take a family road trip to visit for the weekend, especially in the summer, because they have a pool — and also because my six-year-old prefers Grandma to me.
My wife and I dread those trips. Not as much as we dreaded them when we lived ten hours away, but at least back then we only had the one kid to worry about. Sure, two hours is a lot shorter than ten, but that eight-hour difference is more than made up for by the nightmare that is a screaming baby in the backseat.
We had a family road trip or three over the long Thanksgiving weekend. And, thanks to the approach Mom and Buried and I take, we survived them all. You can too!