Raising a daughter and watching her blossom into a confident, beautiful young woman has truly been a spiritual experience.
Parenting, on the other hand, completely weirded me out. When you're 47 years old and just having your first kid, the myths about raising children you'd believed your entire life are surrendered to a harsh new reality, an actual kid.
Other people's children are not real kids, they're cartoon characters that drift in and out of your life. At the end of the day, you send them home with their mom and dad, grab a beer, turn on the TV, and think, “Hell, raising kids is not that hard”.
Then you have one, it's an actual kid, and it's not going anywhere. And now you begin learning what parenting's all about. Lesson number one? The kid has a side gig manufacturing excrement, so much excrement that periodically the baby emits odors so foul that starving hyenas will not attack it. And who gets to deal with that? Parents.
And what about parents who had, say five kids, one right after the other? Those guys have been changing diapers for seven years straight and prolonged exposure to their kids’ toxic fumes cannot be healthy
.Lesson number two? It’s the big lie, having children late in life keeps you young. Well, it didn't keep me young, it kept me tired.
There's a reason that time between age 20 and age 30 is considered the prime breeding age for humans, You've already had practice drinking and staying up all night, now you just stay up all night and change diapers, you're already in the groove. When you're 47, it's been like 15 years since you stayed up all night, and this is not going to go well.
Still, you do it cause she's not a kid, she's the Princess. Stay tuned to this space cause I got waaaaaay more lessons for you.