As has been pointed out to me, the love of ones offspring is not an accurate metric of ones success as a parent.\u00a0 A kid loves her daddy if he beats her, molests her, ignores her.\u00a0 Kids just love their daddies — at least while they’re kids.\u00a0 They don’t realize how much they hated him until they grow up.<\/p>\n
I have a problem with discipline.\u00a0 That is, I don’t.\u00a0 My volume ratchets up, my cadence becomes rigid and stern.\u00a0 I attempt to manipulate with my voice, knowing it’s impotent.\u00a0 Sometimes I threaten consequences I have no desire to carry out, or back out of my ten-counts to sentencing.<\/p>\n
I’m awful at putting the girls to bed.\u00a0 Tonight took an hour.\u00a0 The eldest was full of energy and had no desire to just lie down.\u00a0 What do I do?\u00a0 What can I do?\u00a0 I tried grabbing her (not violently) and laying her beside me in bed.\u00a0 Her younger sister was ready by this time, after a crying jag because, well, we read “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” or something.\u00a0 Does it really matter?\u00a0 What boils inside these devils?\u00a0 They’re raw emotion, puppeteered by cruel whimsy.<\/p>\n
She wouldn’t lay down.\u00a0 I tried threatening a consequence, coolly explaining that when she asks for a playdate or to ride her scooter tomorrow, she needs to recall why I say “No.”\u00a0 So I start my count, and she interrupts saying she wants to explain something, so I say to explain it in bed quietly with me.\u00a0 She can’t do that.\u00a0 She does eventually come over, but doesn’t explain, and then it’s another count later when she won’t be\u00a0 quiet and I desperately want at least her sister to get to sleep so I can deal with just one of them at a time.<\/p>\n
She says she’s going to her room (she sleeps with her sister in the younger’s bed), so I acquiesce, and then she starts sobbing in there.\u00a0 Again, I just want to get one of them to sleep.\u00a0 If I can get the younger down, then I can devote attention to whatever’s keeping the older up, but they’ve got to get to sleep because the clock is ticking and their mother is going to be home soon and I’m gonna catch hell if they’re still up.<\/p>\n
I get up, try to calm her down, she vocalizes her hatred of me, I go back to her little sister and finally get her to sleep as the sobbing resumes in the other room.\u00a0 While I’m waiting for the littler one to settle into a “lift the arm and drop it” limpness of true sleep, the elder’s shadow appears at the door.\u00a0 She wants to lay down, but she doesn’t.<\/p>\n
That’s the beginning of the end, and about five minutes later, she’s asleep.<\/p>\n
What should I have done differently?\u00a0 Tell me, parents.\u00a0 Tell me, Doctor Spock and “Raising Your Spirited Child” lady.<\/p>\n
Why can’t I do something so simple as putting my kids to bed without having every nerve untwine me to raw frustration?<\/p>\n
Oh, and I also don’t enjoy spending time with them.\u00a0 That’s what I’m told.\u00a0 I take it for granted.\u00a0 Damn, I’m some kind of fucking monster.<\/p>\n
I love my kids, more than I love anything or anyone.\u00a0 Maybe that isn’t enough, since I don’t love much in this world, including myself.\u00a0 There’s no drug to fix that, and the shocks didn’t do anything.\u00a0 Am I stuck with the prospect of decades of therapy?\u00a0 Can’t I just be normal?<\/p>\n
“You are not special.”\u00a0 That’s a tenet of Recovery International, paraphrased.\u00a0 We all have these problems, and ours are not more terrible; we just feel them that way.\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 So, nobody out there experiences any joy in life?\u00a0 That problem seems a little special.<\/p>\n
Sorry, folks.\u00a0 I’m just typing tonight.\u00a0 I thought maybe something useful would come out of it.\u00a0 Nobody reads this, anyway.\u00a0 It was supposed to just be an exercise in getting a blog up and keeping my writing muscles, well, saving them from the atrophy they’ve been undergoing.\u00a0 Was I ever a good writer?\u00a0 I at least seemed to enjoy it in high school, knocking off goofy little twist-endings and macabre mood pieces in the wee hours on AppleWorks on my green-screen Laser 128 before setting off on my paper route at 5am.\u00a0 Watching the world premiere of “Like a Prayer” on MTV.\u00a0 Listening to Pink Floyd and REM.\u00a0 Calling up BBS around the country with stolen calling cards.\u00a0 Playing “Wasteland” and “Bard’s Tale” and “Might and Magic.”\u00a0 Writing virtual girls in BASIC that told me they loved me.<\/p>\n
And now I’m a bad father.\u00a0 You’ve come a long way, baby.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As has been pointed out to me, the love of ones offspring is not an accurate metric of ones success as a parent.\u00a0 A kid loves her daddy if he beats her, molests her, ignores her.\u00a0 Kids just love their daddies — at least while they’re kids.\u00a0 They don’t realize how much they hated him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[3,5,89],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-me","tag-depression","tag-parenthood","tag-raw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fazigu.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}