Do the Right Thing

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Ah, parenting.  Things sure are different when all you have to worry about is yourself.  The days of sleeping in, drinking hot coffee (as opposed to coffee that used to be hot but has been sitting on the counter for 155496388297 minutes while you clean up barf/wipe an ass that isn’t your own/dig Cheerios out from between the couch cushions and has morphed into lukewarm sewer water, sewer water that you DRINK ANYWAY because caffeine!  CAFFEINE IS MAH BEST FRIEND!  I’ll take you any which way I can getcha!), and not thinking twice about watching trash t.v. at 11 a.m. are GONE GONE GONE.  Things really change when you decide to spawn off other humans.  Suddenly, you are responsible for one or two or, in the case of Jon & Kate Plus 8, eight other lives.  And you know while you are pregnant that it’ll be a big change.  In your head, you know this.  But you don’t REALLY know.  And I can’t think of one thing that I could say to an expecting first-time mom or dad that would ever prepare them for that change.  “Oh, heh, you’ll be fine,” I’d lie.  “Just make it through those first few weeks, Newborn Boot Camp as I call it, and you will be fine.”  Ha.  Ha, hahahaha, HAHAHA, bwaHAHAHAHAHA!  Right.

Don’t get me wrong, parenting is awesome.  The smiles and giggles and drunk-frat-boy first steps and silly things they say, the clever We Should All Take a Tip From the Three-Year-Old things they observe, the hugs and the kisses and the kiddie art that will collect on your fridge and make you smile every time you go to get a glass of milk, and the LOVE!  Ah, the love.  You will never know another love like this. Still, the fact remains.  You have choices to make, decisions to drink yourself into a frenzy over, and they NEVER FREAKING END.

Take this flu shot thing, for example.  This lone subject is enough to make my head explode like a watermelon being dropped on hard concrete.  Do it!  Don’t do it!  They’ll die from the flu!  They’ll be fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine!  Back and forth and back and forth.  We finally decided that the entire family will get a flu shot, but that doesn’t mean that I feel 100% good about it.  It means that 51% of my decision-making self was for the flu shot, and 49% of my decision-making self was against it.  We’ve made our decision and I can’t think about it for another minute.  I’ll go through this all again next fall.

I guess I just wish that people would chill the frick out about everything.  You might think that we’d all be in this parenting thing together, collective members of a secret society where we listen to each other, nod our heads and shout,  “Dude!  My kid does that too!”  None of us really knows what we’re doing.  If my gut is telling me to do one thing and your gut is telling you to do a different thing, that is okay with me.  Formula feed!  Breastfeed!  Vaccinate!  Don’t vaccinate!  Natural birth!  C-section!  Cloth diapers!  Pampers!  Circumcise!  DO NOT CIRCUMCISE!  Even people who do not have kids are starting to form strong opinions about these things.  Which is fine, until they start telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing.  I remember being at a friend’s house while I was pregnant with Ethan.  We were just hanging out in the backyard and somehow I got into an argument with their neighbor over the fence about the fact that I was undecided on whether or not to circumcise E.  It is WAR.  Unfortunately, parenting is one thing that we can never seem to agree to disagree on.  It doesn’t seem like that is going to change any time soon.

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