I love my kids, I just hate parenting
I love to complain. Especially about my kids.
Parenting is a never-ending hellscape of stress and headaches, and as such it offers plenty of fodder for whining. God knows I do a lot of it.
That said, even I am sick of some of the typical rants. It’s time for parents to shut up about some of this stuff.
Last week, my wife went to book club.
As occasionally happens when she (read: anyone) gets together with her friends, the night got away from her and she was out later than she’d anticipated. So I texted her for an update and learned that, due to a series of mishaps with the subway, she’d ended up far afield from where she wanted to be.
Enlightened Nice Guy that I am, I got irritated and scolded my wife for not having taken a car and for putting herself in harm’s way. After all, it was after dark, and SHE IS A WOMAN!
“Does it get better?”
That’s the question a follower asked me, in a lighthearted panic, after I posted a meme about unruly kids.
It’s just after my often-challenging eldest son’s 8th birthday, and this idea of things becoming easier is on my mind, so all (most) joking aside, I thought I’d try to answer. (But I hate being threatened by more experienced parents who warn me about the tween years or the teen years or the unemployed-and-living-in-my-basement years, so I’m going to try to answer without doing that.)
Last spring, Mom and Buried found an unopened package of rubber door stoppers on the street.
In my neighborhood, people put stuff they don’t want on their front curb, and it’s understood that it’s all up for grabs until the garbage man comes. Sometimes it’s old books and DVDs, sometimes it’s random bits of clothing, sometimes it’s a gently-used AC unit or a TV or a bookshelf.
Door stoppers are not something I would have even looked twice at, and needing them had never really occurred to Mom and Buried either. But she grabbed the package anyway.
Because the door stoppers aren’t for us. They’re for our brand-new third grader.
Mom and Buried has worked in theater – musical theater – for a long time. She’d been angling to watch Annie on one of our movie nights for months, having depleted our stores of Pixar, Star Wars, and age-appropriate superhero flicks.
Last summer, thanks to “CBS Sunday Morning,” she finally had her chance!
One day, after seeing a segment about the play on the sleepy morning news show, my 6-year-old asked Mom and Buried if they could watch Annie.