Parenting Kinda Sucks On the Low

Hello my name is Jean DeGrate and I’m dad. Yeah… me
 
Off top let me scratch most of those black parent woes from your mind. My child wasn’t an “Oops” baby (and if you and the person weren’t intentionally attempting to have a kid that baby is an Oops baby). I’ve never had to sacrifice anything more than a few hours of sleep and some vacation days for my child. I’ve never had to choose between Gucci shoes for myself or summer clothes for Madi. I’ve never found myself trying to scrape up some extra cash to provide her with Christmas. (Even though I fully plan on pretending like I went without food so she could get that Angry Birds app on her iPad.) I don’t have any baby momma drama and the courts aren’t garnishing my wages for child support. I take care of my kid and spend time with her all of my own doing; please hold your applause.
 
She’s a decent kid
She’s a pretty little girl (not just because she’s my kid) and she rarely embarrasses me in public. I’m totally not the parent that has to jack my kid up in the cereal aisle of Safeway because she’s been spiking cans of evaporated milk to the ground when I wasn’t looking. (That really happens I saw it just last week.) She has ten fingers and ten toes, can survive on hotdogs alone and only ends up on the red team at school like once a month. Nobody’s perfect.
 
She has everything
You know how people say they want to give their kids everything they never had? I’m not one of those parents. My daughter has everything I never had but that’s mainly for my own selfish reasons. The play kitchen sitting in my living room, the Wii, the PS3, the iPad, the stupid little toys she picks out on every Target trip, and all this other shit she has is exclusively to distract her from fucking with me. It’s that deep. I love her but she has no chill; none what so ever. She’s a spoiled brat as a by product of her having everything but those 20 to 30 minutes that go pass without her jumping on my stomach when I try to kick back after a long day of work is well worth it. I know parents that give their children cough syrup and shit when they aren’t sick just to put them to sleep and yeah, I judge but I still feel them. (Maybe they can’t afford iPads.)
 
She won’t stop calling my name
I factually hear her say daddy at least 30 times an hour. It doesn’t matter if I’m driving, cooking, shitting, showering or juggling hand grenades while disarming land mines my name will be called. Yesterday on the ride home from the Washington Monument she literally screamed daddy for like 4 straight minutes over the music to hand me a lollipop wrapper (I hear “daddy” so often I thought it was part of the beat). This is an everyday thing and I can’t even get mad. I just laugh because I remember my mother telling my brother and me she was going to change her name and not tell us what it was. I know exactly where she was coming from now.
 
Pretending to be amazed
Madi discovers 1 million new things a day and in the good parents by laws you must be amazed every single time. Just as astonished as she is you must be equally or even more flabbergasted. This is incredibly hard for the sarcastic douche bag in me to not say some shit slick. The setting sunlight makes her shadow long. AMAZING. The tricycle moves slower up hill. AMAZING. All bugs don’t go “crunch” when you step on them. Let me get a team of MIT graduate scientist to get to the bottom of this shit I mean AMAZING. I’m amazingly bored to death for real.
 
Parenting isn’t without its actually amazing moments and the milestones that make you proud, like tomorrow morning when I’m watching this dressed rehearsal for her ballet class recital. (Worry not; I won’t post 1000 pictures on FB and Twitter.) These highlights are just further apart than people make them appear to be. Welp, 4 years down and only until I die to go because you never stop being a parent.
 
I love my child but I understand why rich people get nannies and shit
Jean DeGrate is a parent