This picture says it all. Children age us, they break us and they make us insane. The only reason we have children it is said, is to have grandchildren. This grandparent phase of life is great. You get to watch your children age, go broke and insane, and you high-five your grandchild. Your kids come to you with all the horror stories of the day and how tired they are from the little sleep they get, how much and how far their child hurled Gerber haggis that morning, followed by neeps at noon, and tatties by dinner time. They tell you of the lost video game playing time they are suffering. Oh my poor, poor deprived child. They reenact with facial expressions the sight and smell of the fully loaded poopie Pampers or haggis Huggies. We grandparents try to act as though we are concerned and sympathetic by nodding our heads lovingly. As soon as our kids leave, guess what we grandparents really do?
We laugh our asses off! That’s right! We howl and cry with laughter about your child raising sob stories. Been there and done that. That’s when we go to our knees and give thanks to God that the circle of life has come full circle, the prophecy of revenge has been fulfilled – can I have an AMEN!
Recently you could see the agony in my son’s eyes when he could no longer just take off and go see the Hobbit at will. Welcome to parental prison my son (snickers). We explained we had already seen it twice. Oh how sweeeet was that? I recall my first house had sheets on the windows and I stomped on aluminum beer cans to buy savings bonds for my kids education. So what happened to the bonds? Repairing auto accidents, that’s what. We were insane for caring about our kids. We never spent on ourselves until they were taken care of first. This why I suffered for a decade eating macaroni and cheese, which I swear has child addiction chemicals added in the processing phase.
We had a curfew for our son who kept exceeding them. We kept extending, until we finally said 2 a.m. was enough. So what does Einstein do? He drives home from his girl friend’s home some 30 miles away and arrives at home and on time, and shows us how he accomplished this task with a ticket for going 110 MPH in a Chevy Lumina. That’s right a Chevy Lumina that wasn’t made to go 110 MPH, let alone 55. Holy cow, he’s lucky he’s alive. The Lumina is a short name for a cheap auto made from aluminum beer cans supplied by yours truly. When I questioned him about the speed he said, “I am very confident with my driving!” That’s great, I hope he was very confident his bald tires could handle the speed. It was at that very moment I could hear the gray hairs popping from my pores, or others falling to the ground.
His greatest intellectual and most frequent comment was, “Let me live my life!” Easy to say when the parents are footing the bills and buying the large bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos that he devoured in less than 30 minutes. He even licked his fingers and the bag clean before I could get near them. I recall a time when he met a 14 year old girl on a chat room, over at his friend’s home, the one where his parents were the unconditional type. She lied and said she was 16, which makes all the difference in terms of maturity. His friend would have nothing to do with her, so my Einstein again shows his logical reasoning skills, as she wants him now, and he willingly accepts like a hound dog on the scent of a murderer. So Einstein was willing to defy me and drive the Lumina from Dallas to Missouri to visit this mature woman he had fallen in love with at his ripe and wise age of 16. How romantic! Except he had no job and no means of getting past the Texas state line, unless he somehow learned how to make the Lumina run on Doritos Nacho Cheese gas. So being the cruel parent that I am, I called said mature girl’s uncaring, unloving, immature and conditional mother, who was aghast at her daughters online habits. I was now a heart breaker.
Then there’s my lovely daughter who wrecked her car before she could make it out of our block. All she had to do was shift to reverse and BAM! She is the reason automotive engineers toiled with those rear vision cameras and detectors, or AAA – Automatic Accident Avoidance. She totaled the next car too and more AAA testing was ordered by the universal society of safety engineers. Drivers on Mars weren’t taking any chances. I am certain she is also the inspiration for the next era of self driven autos by Google technologist. I am sure one of those engineers she dated and was with her in the car screaming for dear life as she switched on the ignition and screamed, “We are all gonna dieeee!”
Then there was the self-piercing episode in which she claimed she had the “never ending” pimple. She wanted a tattoo, a sore subject with me, to be a conforming nonconformist and be sooo different from all the other tribal members at the high school. Even more hilarious was the MySpace era where kids had multiple personalities. The one you see, the one her friends see, and the one the wild, wild, world-wide, wide, wide web of strangers see. I swear people open up more of their intimate details online than in the mirror. Here, my lovely Einsteinette of a daughter changed her name and age hoping I would never find her. All you had to do was look at her friends page and see that that friend had a new friend named Kiki DeFrounge from France and she was 99 years old, but still in high school and bearing a striking resemblance to my lovely daughter. She was just way too clever for me, for sure, whatever.
My children wanted unilateral unconditional love. You know the kind. Where if they get what they want, they love you, if not, you were some creepy cruel demon spawn, meant to do only one thing in life and that was to torture them. So after all the late nights of sleep and 401(k) savings lost to raising our children, when I hear their sob stories I try so very hard not to laugh, as I tell them we are going to Hawaii for some R&R. You can see the want in their tearing eyes, because they are about to burst their eye sockets. You might think this is rather selfish and cruel of me to be so vengeful. You know what, you are right. This is very selfish and cruel of me to want revenge, but you know what else?
I plead guilty by reason of insanity.
