i got a shack of crazy people over here!

This baby I have decided recently that rather than nap, she’s just gonna scream. She stands up and shakes her cage like a speed addled death row inmate and howls like it’s a full moon and she’s # 42 on the Beavers, as though it’s gonna do anyone any good. What I think she fails to realize is that all it does is put my nerves on edge to the point where I’m a sweaty, irritable dick all day, which doesn’t serve her purposes even remotely. Right now, if I wasn’t looking at a monitor of her standing in there, were I to guess what was going on based on the sounds, I’d say a pack of goblins in terrifying costumes and masks were slicing pieces of her off and eating them. That’s how this shit sounds. But that’s hardly the only thing that’s going on here today.

My boy, the other kid, is kind of OCD. I say that in the same way that you may say that Tommy Lee is kind of a dipshit or that blowjobs are okay. He’s got certain things that he’s GOT to do, or it fucks up his whole day. One of those things is shutting the door for everyone who leaves the house. It’s actually pretty funny, because he slams that shit right on your ass the second you cross the threshold, leading to a pretty uh…brusque send off. We try to discourage it, but secretly it’s pretty funny. Anyway, one of the main people that he closes the door on is his mom. She puts her coat on in the morning and he says “mom, I wanna shut the door” and he goes and stands at the door until she leaves. This morning, however, something went wrong and he missed the ritual. This has caused no shortage of pain and malaise over here in the two to three age group. He doesn’t want to eat or even watch Diego. He just wants to shut the door for mommy. It’s a lot to deal with, especially interlaced with the soundtrack of screaming terror coming from the back room.

I hope he takes his craziness and uses it to overthrow the matrix or meticulously research and design whatever the facebook of twenty years from now winds up being, rather than ending up a neurotic wingnut in a tinfoil hat walking around with a sandwich board, screaming at tourists about aliens, taxes and cockroaches. I mean, chances are good he’s gonna do the facebook one, but you never know.

It’s funny, parenting. People, to the last, have a story about how their parents fucked them up forever. No matter if you’ve got the best most supportive parents in the world, they said or did something at just the wrong moment in your development that stuck with you forever. I mean, fuck. Anna Quindlen wrote a piece for Newsweek on the day her daughter graduated from Harvard or Yale or something and in it she talked about how after a highschool test, in which the daughter got the best score in her class, 98 out of 100, Anna, rather than offer congratulations or praise, asked what the questions she got wrong were. This, apparently was the story that this girl picked to be the example of her mom’s domineering attitude that she apparently never let her mom forget.

Pretty fucking benign, eh? I mean, ooooooooooh! That’s the worst moment of your childhood? No getting locked in the closet for a few days by your ‘new daddy’? No having to take a note down to the liquor store to pick up mommy’s gin on Sunday mornings? No being constantly told that feces is revolting and having that manifest as some Freudian weirdness that haunts you to this day?

Well, no. And that’s kind of the point. Everyone only knows their own life and no one really even realizes that they have it rough or great until they get to an age where they start recognizing what other kids went through, but regardless, they’ve got their scars, and no matter how deftly you try to parent, you’re gonna fuck em up, because the worst moment is always gonna be bad to them, even if it’s not actually bad at all.

Think about it. Think about the people you know the best. They’re totally fucked up, right? Your BEST friends, your roommates, your long term coworkers that you’ve dealt with round the clock, your parents…they’re all complete nutjobs under the surface, right?

That’s because everyone is, folks. Every single person on this earth has a huge bag of issues, neuroses, and idiosyncrasies that they don’t even recognize as abnormal and everyone has a moment or two or ten that they attribute to their own parents’ weirdness, so what’s the moral here?

You’re gonna fuck up your kids, because every person on earth is fucked up and everyone blames their parents for it, SO, uh…don’t even try? Nah…you gotta try. Just don’t worry when you tragically scar your kid for life. Everyone has those scars. Even you.

Fuck. Especially you. You’re nuttier than a sack of elephant shit.