Retaining Metalhood Through Dadhood: October 2012

Sometimes my blog entries are harsh. Like the last one.

But my intention is to tell it like it is--in the moment. And to do some reporting from the sidelines like you don't normally get to see.

What single people don't experience is the day-to-day kid raising. It entails much more than that, but it can all be boiled down to--a change in everyday routine--you either have a kid and take care of it, or you don't and you have only yourself to take care of.

What parents don't usually do is talk to people outside of their home, during those day-to-day moments. Parents work, it's true, but it's coupled with kid-raising.

And in these moments of kid-raising, things can get pretty hairy. Kids make parents want to pull their hair out.

Do you know any parents? Do they say kid-raising is easy?

I want to give people a look inside the madness, from the trenches, by writing down exactly what I'm feeling, when I'm in the moment. It helps me self-medicate.

Right now in my life I've got a lot going on. School full-time, and raising kids. So shit is stressful and it's a perfect time to vent, right?

Giving myself the hour and a half of tv every night seems selfish; irresponsible. I feel that I'm abandoning my duties.

It's shitty to feel that way. So most of the time I just block it out. I've got to decompress at the end of the day.

Every (four) day (s out of the week) I get up, take care of kids till the second Megan comes home from work, then it's off to school, where I've got to catch up on homework and go to class. If I don't spend the weekends totally devoted to study, and just abandon Megan to the kids, I don't get all the reading done.

And I'm taking reading-intensive classes. And homework's piling up. I'm officially behind. (I don't need to do all my reading, do I?)

So it's 10:55, and instead of typing more, I'm going to go to bed, so's I can get up early and take care of my kids, whom I love and adore, my beautiful babies, all mine.

Seriously, did you see BB's hair in that last picture of my last entry? Fucking flock of seagulls, man. Just a flowing curly blonde fairy mop on top of that little head of hers.

It's not vain to say she's got a beautiful face, is it? Both my kids are beautiful, wonderful, magical, primal, primitive, conniving, antagonistic things. And they're stuck with me. I'm around for life. I didn't just dip into this dadhood thing to leave a job half-finished.

I can't imagine what it will be like they're older. 10-year olds, young to late teens, young women, middle-aged women. I'll be dead then, when they get middle-aged. I won't get to see them elderly and get to point and laugh at them and go, "Ha! See how it is!"

I'm really looking forward to seeing both what they'll look like and what their personalities will be.

And they won't be a total reflection of me because of the gender difference, so I can disavow any responsibility! Ha! Isn't that how that works? Oh, I'm getting word that experts are saying that gender is merely consequential and not a determinate for the passing on or not passing on of personality traits?

Right.

I know I got some of my mom's traits. Which is good, cause any more of my dad's, and I'd just want to kill myself. Wah! Waaaaah! Hi dad!

My girls will probably hate me for a while in their teenage years. I'm bracing myself now.

But.. I mean, how can they hate me when I give them all the metal and video games they could ever want? ..oooh, right, I'll have to buy them stuff.

Goodnight. It's 11:13, you bastards, keeping me up.

I'm wondering when BB is actually going to get down off this step stool she got herself up on.

Got herself up on.

When I wake up in the morning, I take a little time to wake up. I don't move super fast.

My kids do. They are ready to rocket off to the moon the second they wake up.

The past month or so has been an easy routine, however--BB (17mo) wakes up in her crib and starts vocalizing. Oh, and by the way, my room shares a door with the kids' room, so it's no problem to hear her loud and clear. Megan and I keep the door open at night for safety reasons.

So I'm usually sleeping, and the BB voice wakes me up. Today it was at 7:45. Sweet, sweet sleep. Thank you, kids. They've been sleeping till almost 8 a.m. lately. That means dada can stay up later at night in front of my warm, blessed, bright friend, my bigass widescreen plasma television.

Lucy (43mo) has been staying in bed while BB makes her noises. BB's so excited to be able to talk and express feelings and communicate, and I think Lucy understands, so she's fine just laying there and listening. It's probably part of her wakeup process, just another day with the alarm-clock-little-sister.

Back in the day, when we still lived upstairs, Lucy used to get up and get in bed with me and cuddle in the morning. I always liked that. She doesn't do it anymore, she just lays in bed listening to her sister, up high in the crib next to her bed.

So when I get my sorry carcass out of bed and get in there to change BB's inevitably full-beyond-full, all-nighter diaper extravaganza, sometimes with poo that's creating a lovely rash, the first thing Lucy says to me is, "Dad, I want (X)."

Today it was graham crackers and milk, the usual. When that kid was 24mo old, she was just starting that trend. Yep, still going. And the demanding tone she takes is something mama and I have to get her to work on eliminating.

She'll also tell me, in the morning when I'm half-naked, cold, changing a shitty old diaper, with a 17-mo-old laying on the bed in front of me, kicking her legs, smiling and babbling, that she wants to watch Dora the Explorer, and that she wants vitamins.

See, her vitamins are these sugary candies, so it's a high point in her day to get them.

Sometimes I ignore her. It's not the College Rule way to address one's kids' demandings, but I'm tired of saying that she has to ask me politely for things, and motherfucker, she knows.

She just doesn't care. Or she still doesn't get it. Or a combination of the two.

For those times I've given in, not wanting to argue, when she runs into the kitchen, interrupting whatever I'm doing, to say, "Dada, I need X," and I give her X, she takes those experiences to mean that I'm bendable, malleable, that I don't always mean what I say, that I'm inconsistent.

Criminy. You give kids an inch and they take a mile. And you know what she fucking does when we tell her to ask politely for something? She says, "May I have me some X."

And we go, "No, it's not, 'May I have me,' it's, 'May I have some vitamins please?'"

"Dad, may I have me some vitamins?"

This usually continues for about way too long. She's just fucking with us, and we have to try not to get mad. It's impossible to keep everybody happy when your kid's fucking with you--she's asking for a fight, for trouble, for drama, for anger and sadness.

Fucking kids. Motherfuckers. Nothing can ever be jolly and happy unless they have every fucking thing they could ever fucking want. And they're too short to grab anything, and they have almost no motor control, and they also don't realize what pestering is, what it entails, or why people don't like it, so they turn to it.

What do you do? Take time out of your day, that's what. You stay calm, you say the same fucking thing for the eleven thousandth fucking time, knowing that your kid already knows what you're going to say, and, though she's sick of your voice, she wants to see you suffer this annoyance. She just wants to see you lose a little part of yourself. Just that little explosion that leaves a tiny hole where your character used to be.

Kids do things that adults would get punched for, but you can't punch kids. You've got to be calm and explain to them how not to get punched. You've got to use words. Oh, and those words also have to be delivered in a mindset that is not what you're feeling at the time; you have to push down your true nature and act in a way you don't feel.

I suppose that's called self-medication. In short, the more I self-medicate, the more they self-medicate.

Thusly, we bring about an evolution to the species: children who aren't raised to yell at people when confronted with obstacles, and who seek out other solutions to enduring the day-to-day madness of everyone's life.

«ææœæœæœæœ»

So it's one and a half episodes of Dora, and BB still hasn't gotten off the chair-stepstool combo she's set up. I tried to help her get down. I've told her to just step on the step stool, put one foot down, and then walk away. I'm not doing it for her. It's driving me nuts, but I'm staying strong.

See, that's the whole thing about being a parent, one who doesn't hire nannies and shit--one who's a real dad or mom--your life is a constant struggle to not let things that drive you nuts, drive you nuts; a constant struggle to stay calm in the midst of stimuli you never would have known existed if your primitive-minded (and justly so) kids had not put it in front of your face; a constant struggle to convert anger into teaching moments, red-hot anger into the calm, blue, rippling water of mutual understanding and friendship; a constant struggle to be that good guy I want to be, the guy who can constantly get mentally punched by his kids and yet react rationally and come out stronger in the end.

I mean, I love my kids and everything, but ... shit, why do I have to feel like I have to say that? Fuck these kids. It's obvious I love them--I've changed my life around just to make sure they're healthy and happy.

When it's good enough, it's good enough, but when it's not, it's really not.

This all makes me want to apologize to my parents for being a kid, but the thing is--we all choose to have kids. We bring it onto ourselves. In this day and age, there's birth control options. The only thing stopping breeders from breeding is a love of fucking to completion. And the amazing feeling of condom-less penetration. Mmm. Delicious. My male testosterone hormones rage like a saber cat.

But then you get a baby out of it. Fuck. 18 years of your life are no longer fully yours.

Almost two episodes of Dora gone by, and BB's still in the chair. I want to just nudge her off, but she'd invariably fall on her fucking face, even though she's got two hands to stop that from happening. Then I'd be the Dick Dad and she'd have her drama moment.

I need her to stop relying on me to get her out of the sticky situations she gets herself in. I know she's only one and a half years old, but it's not like this is an advanced problem. If she was legitimately hurt, you can bet I'd come running. But being too scared to climb down off a chair, something she's done many times, is a less-than-elementary problem. It's a 1.5-year-old non-problem. It's a drama-creation engine.

I'm not fucking helping her. She can stay up there all spelunking day.

"Dad, I'm hungry for vitamins," Lucy just said. Then she walked away. See! She knows she's asking in a way that I always tell her not to. What is she, testing the waters? It's like she's running up to a door, ringing the doorbell, and running away. An innocent prank, but gets old fast. You can poke someone softly into complete fury, you know that, right? All it takes is a little patience and a lot of repetition.

Two episodes of Dora down and BB's still in the chair. I'm not getting mad, I'm not getting mad, I'm not getting mad... these kids really know how to push my buttons.

*3 hours later

You know what happened? I grabbed her by the arm up by the shoulder, I pulled her off the chair, and then when her feet touched the floor, her legs went limp. She wouldn't stand on her own. I had to stand there holding her up. She wanted to fall. She wanted the chance to cry. She wanted to fight with me. She was just sitting there, waiting.

Like a coiled snake.

In other news, for the past two days she's been napping in the big-girl bed. Check it out. Awww, kyoooooooooot.