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.
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.
Mom and Buried can’t get enough of the seasons.
In winter, she’s all about snow angels and sledding and hot toddies. In summer she treats every sunny day like it’s her last one on earth, and when spring arrives she… mostly bitches about how terrible the weather is because spring is a hoax created by the Chinese to sell air conditioners!
But fall is the worst, because fall means foliage and pumpkin farms and apple-picking and other objectively boring and terrible things that get reclassified as “family traditions!” because without a little rationalizing, we’d all go insane.
I’ve been turning into my father for years now, probably since I was born, actually.
But nothing accelerates the transformation into your parents like becoming a parent yourself.
The best evidence that I’m becoming my dad, besides increasing back pain and deepening bags under my eyes, are the things I yell at my kids about. Like money.