5 Well-Meaning Rules New Parents Will See Blown To Hell

Anyways, because it takes so long, and their disobedience will occasionally catch you at a moment of complete exhaustion, you will sometimes let it slide. A threatened punishment becomes an angry stare becomes a collapse into the couch. This is bad, the kind of inconsistent pattern which confuses your kids and breeds terrorism. But being tired is actually worse, so ... this'll happen.

Just don't kid yourself in advance is my main advice. On some days your child will be a shitlord and you'll be basically OK with it.

Now, that's not nothing! You can still do fun regular-person activities with that time, or find ways to fold your kids into those activities. But you won't be able to do a lot of it. Watching entire seasons of television will seem incredibly exotic. The movie industry will leave you behind like a rotting corpse (are zombie movies still big? I sincerely don't know.) If drinking beer and yelling is important to you, you'll still do that; but you'll be home before seven, or only do it twice a year, or almost never steal a cop's gun anymore.

There's a bigger issue beyond just time. Regular-people activities will simply be less attractive to you in a way that's hard to understand before you become a parent. You will be entirely happy spending days on end reading very short books and fighting about underpants. Ok, not happy, just con- no, it's not content either. It's something though. Huh.

Huh.

I think this is called Love but I can't claim to have reviewed all the literature on the subject, seeing as I haven't read a book more than 12 pages long in a couple years. Let's put a pin in Love for now though.

I do that in the toilet, like my father before me.

Why You're Lying To Yourself

Have I mentioned the exhaustion yet? FOLKS, IT'S A FACTOR, FOLKS. Because you'll be working and parenting a solid 63 hours a day, and pizza tastes so good and it's so easy, yeah, your grand plans about diets and home-cooked meals every day will occasionally evaporate.

In truth, this is kind of a broad category, because it can apply to so many decisions you make about how you'll raise your kid. The amount of screentime they get, or active play they're forced to do, or length of time they can wear pajamas; you've got well-founded ideas about what's reasonable or legal for all of those things, and you will cave the fuck in on at least one of them nearly every day, simply because children are relentless and you're fat and slow from all the pizza.

I guess the main thing is to do the best you can, and maybe get the pizza company to block your calls. And stop beating yourself up so much. Parenting's tough. Because of that, you truly mean it when you say ...

Why You're Lying To Yourself

You will judge the shit out of every parent you see. The parents who give their kids way too much sugar are deadbeats, but the ones who don't give their kids enough sugars are bound-up assholes. The parents who let their kids climb up the slide, or the parents who don't let their kids climb up the slide -- one of these groups will irritate you out of your actual skin. The parents who take their kids to nice restaurants are monsters, but so are the parents who take their kids to breweries.

I take my kids to breweries all the time, actually. It's fine. They're cool.

The breweries, that is. The kids aren't too cool yet.

The problem is that every decision another parent makes which isn't identical to yours is effectively a refutation of your parenting techniques. It suggests this person doesn't think you are raising your kids the right way. Can you believe they implied that? About MY delightful boys?

Vayse, Cromwell, put down your sugar right now. We're going to the brewery.

And for many years, we're right. We're not like our parents! We do cool things like drink beers and yell. And even if that trails off a bit when we have kids, there's no way we'd actually become them. Right?

Why You're Lying To Yourself

Parenting involves a lot of situations you're not going to foresee, things no parenting book or nature documentary about baby penguins will prepare you for. Small things, mainly, and not even bad ones. Like what you'll say or do when your kid makes something cool out of Lego, or throws some food against the wall, or praises ISIS. You will find that in these unexpected situations your immediate, instinctive reaction will spookily mirror whatever your parents did with you. You'll catch yourself giving the same nicknames or praise your parents gave you, or delivering the same punishments. "Attaboy, tiger," or climbing up on the counter and jumping down on them just like mom used to.

You weren't able to see this for most of your adult life to date, having defined yourself by your familiarity with technology, or your deeply sexual nature: aspects you never saw in your own parents. Clearly you were a different person from them! But once your own kids roll along you'll realize that your very idea of what it means to be a parent comes from one very specific source: your own parents. You are them, and they are you, and you are about to become very, very lame as a result.

You can remain deeply sexual though; that's fine. They always hid that from you.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and if proud of all of you, tiger. As the author of the amazing novels, Freeze/Thaw and Severance he thinks you should definitely go buy both of those now. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.

For more check out 5 Parental Dick Moves You Hate (Until You're a Parent) and 5 Mistakes Made by Every New Parent.

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