parenting
If you want to feel like a fat failure every day. Have kids.
If you want to spend every second of every day yearning for some time to yourself but not knowing what to do with it when you finally get it, have kids.
If you want to juggle laminating rewards charts with mopping up piss and peanut butter only to have the chart scrunched up and sitting in the piss *and* peanut butter, have kids.
If you want the most delicious cuddles and kisses and whispers of sweet love in your ear, swiftly followed by kicking and scratching and screaming “I DONT LOVE YOU YOURE A WICKED WITCH” in same said ears, have kids.
If you want to be perpetually exhausted and yet obsessively and unconditionally in love with said source of perpetual exhaustion, have kids.
If you want to feel like a failure. Every day (no counterpoint to this one, sorry writers out there). Have kids.
If you want to feel like a fat failure every day. Have kids.
If you want to do lite n easy and then go to bed and eat a block of caramilk, have kids.
If you want to feel like your parents, have kids.
If you want to understand your parents, have kids.
If you don’t want to fuck your kids up like your parents, have kids.
If you do want to fuck your kids up like your parents, have kids.
If you want to spend between the hours of 9.17pm and 6.32am every day wondering if you’ve fucked your kids up like your parents, have kids.
Their teeny hands get bigger, more gross, less cute. Their emotions follow same suit. They become more transparent and then less so and then finally more so again when they have their own. Maybe.
They ask if they can marry you, you melt a little and then realise there’s a whole lotta other ‘work’ that needs to be done now that the toilet training mountain has been climbed.
Some nights they won’t sleep. Most, they will. Some nights you’ll sleep. Most you won’t. The west wing and every DIY show and sitcom post 1974 will become the friends you never knew you had. Because all your actual friends - the ones without kids OR the ones with kids at a similar but not similar enough age to mean that they’re awake at 4.37am on a Saturday - will be sleeping.
You’ll hear “tomorrow is a new day” so many times you’ll want to stab the person saying it and throw their lasagne at them. Then you’ll hear your baby monitor rev into gear and will instantly regret not eating the lasagne.
There are so many questions and so few answers. So much advice and so much just outright bullshit.
You’ll never know what you’re doing. You’ll never think that you do either. But also, after a bit of time, you’ll realise you don’t need to know. After a bit of time, and a lot of tears, you’ll realise that actually, all you have to fucking do is love. Not know or buy or train or wean or nurse or teach or guide. Just, love.
All you need to do, is love. Hugely and unconditionally and ginormously and massively and also, all. The. Fucking. Time.
All you need to do is love.
If you want to love, and you want to know love, and you want to be love, and you want to bleed love, have kids.