I love my kids, I just hate parenting
Until you’re a parent (or a sports fan), it might be hard to understand how you can love something with all of your heart while, at the exact same time, it drives you so crazy you want to run away and live in a log cabin.
Kids have an infinite capacity for inspiring both your awe and your annoyance. Based on my son’s recent behavior and burgeoning intellectual development, five-year-olds are right smack in the sweet spot.
When it comes to parenting, I don’t buy into gender stereotypes or biological imperatives or how they feel on “Mad Men”.
It’s 2015! Parenting tasks are no longer divided solely by gender, at least not in my house. It’s a team effort, a total 50/50 proposition, and moms and dads both have to go all-in to make it work.
That said, there are definitely some things my wife does better than me, and most of them aren’t gender-specific. (Unless you count being sick. Women totally dominate there.)
She had her birthday last week, so I thought I’d share a few of them. Better late than never!
Everybody likes a good hero, right? Especially kids.
Back in my day, I searched the skies for Superman, pretended I was a Jedi, and even wrote a school paper about how much I admired my dad. When I became a father, I was excited for my son to find his own heroes.
I just didn’t expect them to be the bad guys.
Back in the summer of 1986, my older brother and I attended a sleep-away camp. He was twelve and going with a friend. I was only nine, but after going along on a reconnaissance mission earlier that year, I had decided I wanted to attend the camp too.
It was two weeks long, in some far off part of Connecticut (as far off as you can get in a state as small as Connecticut) and for some reason we would be joining the camp in the middle of the summer session.
It was my first time, and for reasons that will quickly become obvious, my last time, at sleep-away camp.
When you’re a parent, you take on a lot of roles.
You’re still the person you were before you were a parent (to varying degrees), but now you’re also the person your kid knows as Mommy or Daddy. And then you’re the million different things your kid needs you to be over the course of the day.
If this were a resume it would 30 pages long.