quitcher cryin!

My baby is crying. It’s been a while since I sat down to write a blog only to discover that my brain was being hijacked by my young offspring’s incessant wail. It’s a fucking bummer is what it is. Kids are, as a rule, selfish and kind of shitty to their parents. This becomes completely obvious during teen years when I can’t remember a friend or acquaintance that wasn’t a complete turd to their parents. My kids now are great. They’re nice and they genuinely want to be around me, but they’re demanding and capricious and have no fucking concept of patience or allowing someone else to enjoy something. Take right now for example. My baby could very easily be lying quietly in her crib thereby allowing me a little fucking peace and quiet, but instead she feels it’s her duty to register her disdain for what’s going on here at the top of her lungs. No one’s happy about it. It’s a lose/lose situation, but what the fuck are you gonna do?

The funny thing is that even though everyone has an idea of what a pain in the ass they were to their parents, no one REALLY gets it until they have kids of their own. However, by then they’re too constantly pissed off and sleep deprived and on the ropes to really give a shit that they were assholes to their parents. It’s one of the many ultimate dick punches that life doles out to us sentient beings. But it’s funny, the second you have kids, the relationship with your parents flips completely upside down. Here’s what I mean.

It was not long ago at all that the notion of my parents coming to town signified a major pain in my ass. I was gonna have to put my plans of going out every night and sleeping all day and having tons of fun on hold to go to boring dinners or breakfasts where my accomplishments would be scrutinized. I was gonna have to clean my house and take showers and generally pull it together and though I love my parents, this was, to a young and unencumbered man, a complete pain in the nuts.

Now, it’s the opposite. My parents come to town and I suddenly CAN take a shower and go to dinner and breakfast and I sometimes even get to go out at night and my accomplishments are now these little people running around and my parents can scrutinize the shit out of them while I take a nap or run to the store. In short, what used to be the yoke that marked the one weekend a month when I couldn’t just fuck off and act like an asshole is now my tiny, spindly little lifeline to normalcy. To put it another way, my social life now sucks so badly that what used to be the worst part of my month is now the absolute best. What the fuck does that tell you?

I don’t want you guys to misunderstand me here. I love having kids and I truly appreciate the changes they’ve brought about in my lifestyle. I don’t want to be the old guy at the bar until 2 every night. It’s gross. However, I’m not rich. I can’t afford babysitters all the time and shit like running to the grocery store to get a jar of pickles that used to be something so easy that it wasn’t even a blip now involves packing a diaper bag, getting six shoes and three coats on and herding all these monsters into a car, strapping them in, and then doing it all in reverse once we get to the store, then putting them BACK in the car, then pulling them out of the car again and back up the stairs where I suddenly have to get all their shit off and put away before I can even open the fucking refrigerator to put the pickles where they belong.
That’s why there are no pickles in this house.

God. I’m sweating.