“Rain is a very special blessing,” my mother says. Even when I was little, she’d already been saying it to my sister and me for as long as I could remember. Just as my grandmother had said it to her, when my mother was not my mother but only herself, in the dry Texas summers of her own childhood. Eons ago and continents away, as children reckon these things.
It’s summer now. It’s been cloudy all day, but they wait until the thunder starts to clear out the pool.
Continue readingIt’s hard to say what the most difficult part of parenting is overall; there are so many challenges to choose from. I don’t think I’d trade anything I’m dealing with now for having to change diapers again, but with my oldest not too far from entering her tweens, I’m not sure how long that sentiment will last.
However, I think I’ve been a parent long enough to know what the most intellectually difficult part of parenting is–by which I mean, the part where the difficulty lies in making the right choices, as opposed to having the patience or energy or foresight or experience to do things the right way.
Based on what I’ve heard from other parents–as well as what I’ve seen from my own!–I’m also pretty confident this is one challenge I’ll be wrestling with for the rest of my life.
Here’s the dilemma: your child needs something and is refusing it, or they’re about to do something they’ll regret, or they’re not doing something they’ll wish they had, etc. What should you do? Well, that depends on the answer to this question: Do you and your child disagree because you’re more experienced and know better? Or do you disagree because they’re a different person with needs and priorities so alien to you you can barely imagine relating to them?
You would think this question would get easier to answer as your children grow and you get a better understanding of who they are. You would be dead wrong! For every genuine difference in personality you manage to internalize, a totally new one will get a chance to make itself known. For every genuine mistake they regret making, there’ll be another “mistake” that they only feel bad about because it bothers you. Oh, and by the way: your kids can’t always tell the difference between those last two. Good luck trying to figure it out yourself!
And yes, this really is a life-long challenge. Your kids, like all other humans ever, will keep making mistakes their whole lives, and it will continue to be difficult to impossible to guess the difference between stuff that just seems harebrained because your children have different priorities or context you’re missing, versus stuff that seems harebrained because it actually is and your children are the ones lacking experience or perspective.
I’m not sure how to end this essay; it ended up being a bit of a mess. I guess I’ll just say…parenting is really difficult, and I think my own mom and dad tried their best? I think they got this problem right most of the time, or at least most of the time when it really mattered. Thanks, Mom and Dad! You’ve been doing a great job. I love you!
Filed under Essays
Happy birthday, USA! Please don’t die.
Here’s an idea: you know how the US Revolution started with “No taxation without representation?” Why don’t we try enforcing the inverse, too? I mean, if someone doesn’t pay what they’re worth in taxes, they shouldn’t be able to lobby or vote either, right?
…Right???
Filed under Essays, Microblogging
Me: *chewing*
Me: *slightly distracted by literally any other thing*
My food:
Filed under Microblogging
I just found out this morning that my prediction for Deltarune Chapter 5’s release date was partly right: it was indeed announced last-minute. Fifteen days prior, to be exact.
That was fifteen days ago, by the way. Meaning it releases today.
On– My? BIRTHDAY???
So… Happy birthday to me, apparently! Best birthday surprise ever! I’m just gonna go turn off the internet for a couple months to make sure I don’t see any spoilers.
…Bye!
Filed under Microblogging, My Life
Unfortunately, I still don’t have the polyamory flag colors. Better luck next year?
Filed under Microblogging
Me: “All right, feeling good! Looking forward to locking in and getting some serious work done 😎”
My coworkers: *immediately gather around my cubicle to loudly socialize*
My family: “When are we going to see you again??”
My watch: “It’s literally 4:30 pm, bro”
Me: “FFFFFFFFFFFFffffffffff”
Filed under Microblogging
I do my best to be self-aware, but it’s kind of hard to tell whether it’s working.
Self-improvement has always felt important to me. Growth mindset and all; if there’s something I can do to make myself a better person, why wouldn’t I do it? Maybe there are some improvements that wouldn’t be worth the difficulty, or that I’d have to put off for later, but I’d at least want to know about them.
So I try to self-assess regularly. But how does one judge their own judgements? I can’t rely on self-assessment to tell how effective my self-assessments are–that’s just pointing a mirror at itself. I need some evidence that comes from outside my own head.
I can (and do) ask my friends and family, of course, but although I can certainly count on them to be honest, I can’t count on them to be unbiased. Who else could I ask?
People who don’t know me very well? Less likely to be biased, but also less likely to have deep insights. Their opinions may be useful for ensuring I make a good first impression, but they’re not much help for deeper self-improvement.
Enemies? I’m sure I have at least a couple, but I don’t know who most of them are, and they probably wouldn’t want to give me any useful advice anyway.
What about former friends? This seems more promising. They liked me and knew me well at some point, but as time passes and we grow further apart, they’re less likely to feel the emotional attachment that leads to strong bias. On the other hand, that also means their insights might be out of date.
I think the best people to ask would be my exes.
In my case, I’m no longer close to any of my exes, so I wouldn’t be too worried about strong positive biases. In most cases, we parted on more-or-less good terms too, so I wouldn’t be that concerned about negative bias, either–but even if I were, criticisms from an ex have an interesting feature that makes them more valuable than feedback from a close friend or even an enemy.
In most cases, your ex isn’t likely to have known you for as long as your closest friends, and that means that whatever criticisms they may have are more likely to be based on things you actually did. This doesn’t guarantee they’ll be fair criticisms, of course! You don’t have to tell me that exes can harbor irrational grudges. But those grudges–especially if you were together for only a short while–are more likely to at least stem from things that actually happened, as opposed to the positive or negative traits people who’ve known you longer have inferred.
And there’d be other advantages, too: when you’re romantically involved with someone, they often see parts of yourself that no one else gets to see, not even your closest friends. (This can be especially true if you lived together.) My exes might have insights into parts of my character that nobody else has had a chance to judge.
There’s just one problem with this idea:1 it would be really awkward to re-contact an ex just to ask for self-improvement advice. Maybe we could make exit surveys for relationships a thing? If any of y’all want to try becoming my ex, let’s test it out.
Oh, and if any of my actual exes happen to be reading this–what do you think?
Filed under Essays
In Search of Secrets 
That Feel
When you leave a comment on one of your favorite webcomics and the author drops a “like” on it:
Leave a comment
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Tagged as comments, funny, webcomics