Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at [email protected].
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Dear James,
I love my kids more than life itself. My 6-year-old boy is funny, sensitive, smart, and beautiful. My 3-year-old daughter is a riot; she makes everyone around her scream with laughter. She’s also freakin’ cute. But lord help me if either of them asks me to play dress-up, a board game, or Legos.
I’ll give myself some credit. My husband and I both work full time as schoolteachers. During the winter, my husband coaches sports on the weekends, so I’m cooped up alone with the kids, which feels like a cruel human experiment. Yet even when the weather gets nicer, I’d rather sit on a deck chair with my laptop than play soccer or tag with my darling cherubs. Sure, it gets easier as it gets warmer and brighter in the evenings, but I’m still bogged down by endless laundry and dishes, and I rarely get a break, because my kids are too little to venture out in the yard on their own.
Every afternoon, I’m riddled with mom guilt, knowing I’m supposed to be savoring these moments. My husband regularly sings Trace Adkins’s “You’re Gonna Miss This” to me, mockingly. I’m not looking to get rid of the guilt; I’ve read enough parenting blogs to know that eventually, I’ll probably be managing the crippling feeling that the kids are growing up too fast. What I want is to want to play with my kids. I want to pick them up from school and be excited to play Zingo, hide-and-seek, and fairy princess. I want to want to play a family game of Monopoly instead of watching Frozen for the 1,896th time on a Friday night. How do I get there?
Dear Reader,
You’re absolutely right: This is a cruel human experiment. The psychedelic locusts who run the universe, nine feet tall and grinding their forelegs together like violin bows, surpassed themselves in horrid ingenuity when they designed the nuclear family. They get high on the clouds of shame it produces; the drone of its neurosis delights them. Three or four or five humans of different sizes in a closed space, fatally attached and working up new varieties of stifled misery, for years … Perfect.
But there are ways to beat the locusts—ways to short-circuit or break out of the experiment.
I’m not going to presume to give you tips on how to enjoy your children (for example, make them play with you, according to an entertainment syllabus designed around your interests). You’re a schoolteacher; you know all of this already. I’m not going to tell you about my friend Tom, who once said to me that most of his life as a parent seemed to be spent “fobbing off” his children in one way or another. I’m not even going to preach about the concept of fertile neglect and the ecology of the imagination—which must be allowed to renew itself, without interference, without parents. (In other words: Get your kids settled somewhere sort of safe, and then guiltlessly clear out. Leave them be.)
No, the core advice is this: Let yourself off the hook. Completely. Confound our insect overlords by simply refusing to emit the fumes of parental angst that they enjoy so much. Shut yourself down as a shame-producer! Extend to your trying-very-hard self the same compassion you would offer to anyone else in the same situation. Why should you have the faintest interest in board games or Legos, for God’s sake? You’re an adult. Not only that; you spend much of your working life attempting to engage and instruct children. When you get home, and when you get a minute to yourself, it’s time to luxuriate in some minor grown-up vices. It’s time to smoke rank cigarettes and watch films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the dark.
Wishing you hours of private naughtiness,
James
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