One of the (very, very many) things that suck about losing your mom before forty is that I remember almost nothing about my own daily life prior to high school. And because my parents were divorced and I only got to see dad for a few weeks in the summer every year, there’s nobody I can ask. I have two sons and am constantly writing (and printing) notes and reminders for them, like, “You loved to eat oatmeal with blueberries and pineapple every morning for breakfast in my forty-two year-old Empire Strikes Back cereal bowl until you were six and decided that you hate oatmeal.” Or, “If you want to make pancakes the right way you have to use the frying pan with the blue enamel.” I would probably collapse in a puddle if I ever found even a single note like this from mom. She was a writer and left hundreds of notebooks and thousands of loose pages of things. She wrote me cards and letters nearly daily from the day I left for college until shortly before she died, but sadly I’ve never found anything along those lines.
Posts tagged “parenthood”
A great part of parenting is when your child suddenly decides to stop liking something they’ve eaten literally every day for years. So now I have four dozen boxes of Froot Loops in the garage that will never be eaten.
Thinking about introducing my 12-yo son to an Amazon Women on the Moon and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes double feature.
I love The Octonauts, although I do sometimes worry it’s giving my son an unrealistic perception of the coffee consumption rate of the average undersea exploration headquarters polar bear captain.
Every parent in the US who sends their kids to school knows that they are playing a lottery – today could be the day that their kid is shot. It could happen anywhere, any time. There’s no safe place.
It’s utterly, utterly fucking insane that we live like this.
@drvolts
I’m not terrified of inflation or student loan debt.
I’m not terrified of global warming or tornadoes or hurricanes.
I’m not terrified of nuclear war or Russia or China.
I’m not terrified of COVID or monkeypox or salmonella.
I’m terrified of dropping my son off at kindergarten.
I still can’t believe they spent weeks hyping first ever live performance of We Don’t Talk about Bruno so every kid convinced parents to let them stay up late on a school night and then they performed that weird We Don’t Talk About Bruno (Oscar 2022 Version) instead. Kids hated.
We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies.
Great New York Times Opinion article by Ross Douthat but it misses 2 biggest reasons:
- fear of always-armed, gun-toting public and
- tix + dinner + babysitter + $12 popcorn = car payment
There’s got to be some way to harness the energy produced by a 6yo spending 20+ minutes to chew a single fish stick bite. Is someone working on this?