I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Today’s Wordless Wednesday (with some words) revolves around my son’s current obsession: superheroes.
He’s constantly pretending to be one and frequently enlists me in exciting battles, during which he’s usually wearing a costume and always jumping on my private parts.
While I may occasionally sport a mask or two during these games, he almost always wears a cape.
He has a lot of capes.
I was raised Catholic, took Communion every weekend for the first seventeen years of my life, attended catechism classes, got confirmed, went to Catholic high school, spent four years at a Jesuit university… and then almost immediately stopped believing in any of it.
Despite my atheism, Mom and Buried and I have considered raising our son with some kind of religious background, and letting him decide for himself if he wants to run with it. Because having a foundation in something can be a positive thing, and for all its faults, religion can instill positive values that needn’t always be married to harmful dogma or bizarre myth.
So maybe we’ll teach him about the guy who was born from a virgin and rose from the dead and knows everything about everyone. But we’ll never teach him about the Easter Bunny. Talk about absurd!
April Fools’ Day is idiotic.
For one thing, most people – in desperate attempts to join in but without the wherewithal or imagination to do something elaborate enough to be deemed an actual prank – just end up lying instead, which isn’t exactly an April 1st phenomenon. After all, you don’t need to prep for that, or wait for the perfect date; all you need to tell a lie is a functioning mouth and low morals!
Besides, actually formalizing and setting aside a day for pranking people defeats the entire purpose; even the least skeptical person on earth cloaks themselves in disbelief on April 1st, preferring to play it safe than be played for a fool.
These days, about the only people you can get away with fooling on April Fools’ Day are little kids. And I happen to have one of those, so let’s get on with it.
Every year around this time, a million different websites do some goofy version of a March Madness competition. So far I’ve seen brackets for beer, TV shows, bands, even junk food.
But has anyone done one about parenting? Probably! But now I have too! Introducing March Sadness: Dad and Buried’s Tournament of Complaints!
Where even the winner sucks!
Parenting has a lot in common with sports. Raising a child requires the energy and stamina of an athlete, the vigilance of a referee, the devotion of a die-hard fan and the patience of a coach.
Being a parent is basically like competing in a daily, year-long, rest-of-your-life tournament in which your endurance and your wits are constantly being tested, usually by someone much smaller who has to constantly be told what to do while even though they’re a lot more important than you.
Coincidentally, except for the fact that your kids go to college after you’ve (mostly) finished, instead of not really going to college at all (because the NCAA is corrupt!), parenting is a lot like March Madness.
Let’s count the ways…