I love my kids, I just hate parenting
They say opposites attract. Mom and Buried and I aren’t total opposites, but we do have some significant differences. And we definitely parent differently.
On good days, those differences complement each other. On bad days, they cause conflict. When you have a kid who is acting up, and acting out, the bad days become more frequent.
Especially when you don’t always see eye to eye on how to discipline that kid.
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.
About once a week, I work from home. And I HATE it.
I didn’t like being a stay-at-home dad and I don’t like working from home. It’s not my forte, and that has nothing to do with my gender.
It has more to do with my kids.
Parents spend so much time teaching our kids the dos and don’ts of proper behavior that we seem to forget that we need to adhere to the same rules.
We want our kids to grow up with empathy and compassion, acceptance and generosity and more, but we often go around practicing the exact opposite, particularly when it comes to our interactions with fellow parents.
Can’t we all get along?
Stress isn’t a competition. Newsflash: We’re all stressed out of our minds!
Adulthood is stressful. Work is stressful. Marriage is stressful. The state of the world is stressful. Life is stressful!
And, of course, parenting is stressful too, in more ways than one. But parenting stress is a little different, because being a parent is both stressful in and of itself and because the presence of children adds an extra layer of stress on top of everything else. It’s fun!