You know those Ze Frank videos?

(If you don’t, what is wrong with you? Go click now. Then come back here when you’re done in the rabbit hole.)

Please imagine this blog post read in Ze Frank’s voice.

Here are true facts about Parenting.

Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a teeny tiny bebeh from infancy to grown ass adulthood.*

This means parents are basically responsible for absolutely every aspect of another human being for at least 18 years and probably more like 25 years, because we now know that’s the age when people’s brains mature enough to stop doing idiotic things every other bloody minute. And even though we know people don’t stop doing idiotic things until the age of 25, we are still convinced all those things they do before then are somehow the fault of their parents. Maybe because of what parents do, maybe because of what parents don’t do. It’s really a crap shoot.

Parenting takes all the stress and anxiety about your daily life–paying your bills, going to your job every single day (yes, every day), cleaning your house, occasionally scheduling a dentist appointment or changing your oil–and adds to it all the stress and anxiety of someone else’s life, a wee person who relies on you for literally everything.

Because of this, parenting is the highest paid profession in our world.

Just kidding, people are crazy enough to do this for free.

You see, one of the dirty parenting tricks is to convince the next generation–those teeny tiny bebehs–their life will have no meaning unless they, too, someday become parents.

Parents do this as payback for the 18 to 25 years of stress, responsibility, and agony they endured as they watched their child grow, especially during middle school and high school. Parents gather in secret support groups and plot how to get back at their children by ensuring they, too, become parents.

Intensive parenting for 18 to 25 years is a human construct, which makes you wonder which species is really the most intelligent on the planet. The cuckoo bird tricks other birds into raising her bebehs by sneaking her eggs into other nests. Mother hamsters often eat their own offspring. The Hooded Grebe takes care of the first chick to hatch, but leaves the others behind. Perhaps multiples are too much trouble.

If you ask a human parent what they like about their all-consuming, anxiety-provoking, completely-unpaid job, they are likely to spew some words about unconditional love and fulfillment.

But next time someone goes on and on about the intangible rewards of parenting and how they pity people without bebehs, remember: parenting is not for the weak. Although it might be for suckers. And masochists.

/JK

(NK)

1. When someone makes specific plans with specific dates that are agreed upon in writing, and then claims that it was a different plan with different dates and gets really annoyed with you and acts like you’re the mistaken one, as you sit there with a written text record. I’m gonna call these people Plan Gaslighters.
2. When someone who is a grown ass adult and should be able to control themselves instead drinks most nights and decides to send nasty texts.
3. When you have to deal with Kindness Sharks. You know them. They’re like loan sharks, but with kindness and/or gifts. They do something nice for you. They give you something. You say, “Thank you!” and then they act like you owe them immense paybacks and try to guilt you into doing everything they want. A gift’s not a gift when it comes with strings! Don’t act like you think you’re so generous, you Kind Shark! You just want people to feel obligated to you!
4. When you randomly start to feel bad for demeaning actual sharks in a list of frustrating things. Like, poor sharks. They’re just being themselves, just being authentic sharks swimming in the ocean and eating stuff and why do we have to be terrified of them and then use them to label jerky people?
5. When you have to sit and be socially pleasant and cordial to someone that grates on your every last nerve. At a doctor’s office or in a work environment. Somewhere you can’t be rude and Every Nerve is screaming with irritation. Like…how could this person ever have been someone you chose to spend time with?
6. When you drop a coin and it rolls waaaaaaay back under the vending machine and you can’t reach it and therefore can’t get the drink you really wanted to settle an irritated stomach. A stomach that is probably irritated from all of the above.
7. When your Outlook mail intermittently doesn’t work correctly, but it’s always working when IT looks, and then it breaks for good and won’t even open and you’re waiting on IT. And waiting. And waiting.
8. When you’re so aggravated you can’t focus on your Really Exciting Writing Project, because of all of the above. And then you wonder: why am I bothering with Exciting Project, when it’s about all sorts of liberal things like gender equity and apparently no one in this country gives a shit?
9. When your country seems headed for complete fascism and all the work you’ve done in your life to increase social justice seems to be meaningless and without purpose, because awful people possess too much political and judicial power.

Helpful Things:

1. Writing a list of frustrating things. Thanks for putting up with my public therapy.

(hahahahaha, I mis-typed that at first and wrote “pubic therapy,” which actually made me laugh and feel somewhat less frustrated.)