Kids

Hooray for Sunday, day of rest. The end of the weekend, when you can lie in bed until sheer embarrassment finally drives you from your sheets, and the coffeepot stays warm all day long as you dawdle over the paper. What to do with the long, lazy hours stretching before you? Maybe make some french toast out of croissant bread, maybe take a little stroll around the neighborhood, maybe curl up on the couch and plow through a good book from beginning to end?

Go ahead and open your eyes from THAT pleasant little dream, dipshit, because you’ve got CHILDREN now. Hop to, because just like Lionel Ritchie those diapers have been partying all night long. Perhaps you should have spent more of your pre-parenthood Sundays reveling in the fact that your mornings never included pre-dawn scrotal fold poop-shrapnel mining duty, but NO, you were too busy ramming croissants in your french-hole to appreciate your sweet, sweet, feces-free freedom.

Ah well. Hindsight, 20/20, etc.

The hardest thing for me about parenting Henry has been the sense that every time I get my feet under me, the ground moves again and I am left struggling to get my balance. I think Henry is doing well, I can see that he’s doing well, but now I am worried all over again, and I am worried that maybe I’m not really helping as much or as well as I could be.

One of the things that I am trying to let go of is that constant worry; I’m trying to look at my children, both of them, and see not what might go wrong but what is going right. But I worry that with Henry, if I’m not ready for the disaster, I will be completely overwhelmed when it comes and will not be able to help him. And so I wait for the next bad thing, which is never — ever — the bad thing I was waiting for but always something I am completely unprepared to deal with on the fly.

My only hope, honestly, is that Henry will look back one day and realize that even when I had no idea what the hell I was doing, I was still right there, trying to do something. Or just loving him for who he is.