The Horrors of Adulting: Being a Parent

My sister Leslie and her boyfriend Kevin have been together for 25 years; they’re one of the strongest, happiest couples I know. And they don’t have kids. They don’t want kids. They in fact have a running list of reasons why they don’t want and have kids. I myself have three children. I love them, more than life itself, more than Jordan Peele’s oeuvre. But being a parent can be horrifying. Here are five things I want to gripe about.

5. School Dropoffs and Pickups

School parking lots are a nightmare. Cars, cars everywhere, impractical one-way entrances and exits, pedestrians who don’t look where the fuck they’re going. Everyone’s irritable and in a hurry. (School crossing guards: you are god’s angels. A thousand thank yous.) My eldest child Layla started at a new school for sixth grade in Kentucky when we moved there abruptly from California, and picking her up was especially difficult, as she is partially blind and had a hard time finding my car in the sea of other vehicles three rows deep. I quickly learned to come ridiculously early to get a spot right by the curb, but the first day we showed up on time like noobs. My husband tried to get out of the car and was aggressively greeted by a parking lot attendant enforcing the no-getting-out-of- the-car rule, even after my husband explained our situation. And then from there I had to pick up my middle child Orion from a different school and again had to show up ludicrously early to get a spot.

4. Lack of Sleep

Aside from India.Arie’s voice, there is no sweeter sound to my ears than the soft breathing of my sleeping children. When babies are new to about four months old, they wake up every three hours around the clock. It is, no hyperbole here, torture. My youngest, Jack, who’s four, is autistic, and he still wakes up regularly in the night. If I’m lucky he’ll just come climb on me or the husbo and settle down, but if he’s feeling feisty, he’ll roam the house looking for things to get into. Once I found him sitting in the hallway about to take a swig from a whole-ass jug of tea.

3. When They’re Sick

I never realize how much I take my kids’ health for granted until they’re ill. When once they were spirited and fun, they become listless and miserable, which is hard to watch while not being able to do anything about it. As a parent, I’m rending my clothes and crying to the heavens, “Take me instead! I’m old!” When Layla, never one to do anything half-assed, gets sick, she gets sick. Last night she went to the ER because she was coughing so violently it made her vomit, for days on end. It turned out to be a severe respiratory infection. Which leads me to my next point.

2. Kids Are Gross, Y’all

Kids will eat things off the floor, eat things that aren’t food, including the contents of their nose and the contents of their diaper, not bathe enough, poop while they’re bathing, pee in your face, pee in their own mouths (that last one is only while they’re babies, unless they’re extraordinarily talented). If you’ve ever been pregnant, your baby is peeing and pooping inside of you. Once my dog and one of the kids were coincidentally suffering from diarrhea at the same time, and I couldn’t help but think of the scene in Full Metal Jacket when a new Marines recruit at the end of his rope is reminded he needs to get back to his bunk after lights out or he’ll be in a world of shit and he roars, “I am in a world of shit!”

1. Their Toys

Kids’ toys are obnoxious and needy. Jack in particular loves toys that have buttons and light up and sing horrible, repetitive songs. He has one that if he quits playing with it, it’ll guilt trip him, sighing, “Goodbye…My friend…” The toys also sometimes have a mind of their own. Jack has an electronic reader for a series of corresponding Paw Patrol books. It’s meant to read the books aloud for him, but we had to hide the books because he was ripping the pages out. So the reader, bored and friendless, comes to life and screams things from its catalog of phrases. Except Jack, loving repeating sounds, has it trained to stick to small bits of dialogue. Last night around 10:30, it started shouting “Paw Patrol! Paw Patrol! Paw Patrol!” I stealthily removed it from the bedroom while it shrieked, and no one woke up. But the bloody thing kept whooping and hollering off and on through the night, so I had to stow it in a far corner of the house. Did I mention there’s no off switch?

In closing, this is a model of a talking Cryptkeeper head I had in the ’90s that used to cackle and waggle its jaw loudly when the mood struck it. Enjoy!