All in Parenting
The hectic lifestyle, exorbitant expenses and unrealistic expectations make being a modern parent exhausting. I won’t even mention how babies are huge assholes—oh wait, maybe I just did. But come on, they’re demanding tyrants with deplorable communication skills.
This is something I frequently hear parents say—'“my only hope is that my children are happy.” I never know how to respond to this statement because I wouldn’t dare wish this on my boys. I don’t know much, but I do know that spending your life looking for happiness is the surest way to be unhappy.
I didn’t play team sports as a kid. I didn’t really play any sports, except in PE class, which caused me so much anxiety I frequently vomited on my way to the gymnasium. Don’t get me wrong, I was a physically active kid, spending most of my days outside.
While my needs were always met as a child, my family didn’t have excess funds for frivolous things. My parents are also very conservative, so even if they had had unlimited resources, the foolishness of expensive clothing for their teenage daughter would not have been a priority.
Last week was the kickoff of my new eating and exercise habits, so I was struggling to find an appropriate lunch. As Ollie and I were prepping for our excursion, he rolled his tween eyeballs as I settled on a lunch that would make any 74 year old man proud—a packet of tuna, 2 hard boiled eggs and beets.
Most of us only think of our mothers as our mothers. We don’t take time to consider much about who they are as people—what their aspirations were before we came along and changed everything.
Among the hundreds of emails I get every day, I’m generally pretty good at keeping track of school announcements. I guess I missed one, because as we ran up the steps into school, I saw my sons were the only kids in their uniforms.
