Parenting sucks.

There it is, my first thought when the alarm went off at 5:10 this morning.

If you have never read my blog before and you are thinking of clicking that FOLLOW button based on the above statement because you can’t stand your kids and you feel like this blog will be a place to read about how much I hate mine, you’re going to be hugely disappointed when I go all warm and fuzzy tomorrow.  My kids are super amazing and I love them dearly…there you go, run along.

If you are a new parent, take notes.

If you are a parent completely in the dark that roams around spouting positive thoughts all the time and telling yourself it’s okay to be your child’s “friend”, you are most likely outraged by this statement and haven’t even gotten this far into the post.

If you normally follow my blog and are used to my warm, but often odd, banter about my life or my children, you may want to skip this post today because things are about to get ugly in the laundry room.  I understand, I’ll see you tomorrow.

Okay, with all disclaimers out of the way, as my son would say, “Shit just got real.”

Parenting sucks because there are times when you don’t get to be yourself.  You have to be some other bad jean wearing, comfort shoe walking, lecturing, yelling mess.  You try to avoid it, you remind yourself what it was like to be a teenager, but there comes a time, up against the wall, when you must be that awful jumbled thing you hate.

Why?

Because you are not your child’s friend.  Even though you probably spend more time with him or her than any other person on the planet, you do not get to be a friend.  It’s a really yucky reality.

You can’t just laugh off his dangerous lifestyle, or forget about how strange she is sometimes over a glass of wine.  You can’t hang up on your child and then go on and on to your husband about what a nut job she is and then make up and decide she’s really not that bad.  Parenting is so much harder than being a friend.

You have to call them out, you have to tell them the truth, you have to hold them accountable and put things up in their faces so they learn.  You have to tell them over and over again until they get it, until it sinks in.  No child wants to be friends with someone like that.

Friends aren’t responsible for how you turn out.  Even though you call them at the airport and tell them you made a mistake and slept with your boss, they still go on vacation to Hawaii.  If your friend becomes an ax murderer, you stop being friends.

Parenting is that thing that must be done because if it’s not, they will be damaged, lack character, they’ll get hurt or they will hurt someone else.  They will go into the world ill equipped to deal with all the other insanity outside your home. It’s not always fun, there are times it downright sucks, but you have to be a parent.

You have to pull up the waistband, that’s all ready too high according to your children, and take it like a big girl.  You’ll have to show them what they don’t want to see, in the hopes they are listening, they remember how much you love them, and it will make a difference.

It would be great if we could all be friends.  I like wine, I’d love to look the other way, but it doesn’t seem fun to have an ax murderer at the Thanksgiving table, so I parent.

My thoughts from the laundry room.  Couldn’t Sleep.

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