
I Am Part of the Resistance Inside My Own House
I live for my children but my wife and I have vowed to thwart parts of their agenda and their worst inclinations.
(It would probably help to read this first)
My wife and I are facing a test to our parenting like those every other modern parent faces on a daily basis.
It’s not just that the terrible twos are in full-swing. Or that our house is bitterly divided over the prospect of a Zelda-themed birthday party for my third-grader. Or even that we both may lose our sanity to an opposition hellbent on perpetual screen-time and nonstop snacks.
The dilemma — which our children do not fully grasp — is that the adults inside their own house are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of their agenda and their worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the super-parent. We want our kids to succeed and think that many of their qualities will make our family more fun and more prosperous. Especially once we get that YouTube channel up and running!
But we believe our first duty is to ourselves, and our children continue to act in a manner that is detrimental to our mental health and our social lives.
That is why my wife and I have vowed to do what we can to preserve ourselves while thwarting our children’s more misguided impulses until they are no longer our responsibility.
The root of the problem is the children’s amorality and inexperience and ignorance and impulsiveness and inconsideration and…
Anyone who has children knows they are not moored to any discernible first principles that guide their decision making. They are chaos incarnate.
Although they were borne out of love, our children show little affinity for ideals long espoused by their mother and I: good manners, peace and quiet, sleeping in on the weekends. At best, they have invoked these ideals while visiting Grandma. At worst, they have attacked them outright, often literally, by climbing into bed at the crack of dawn on Sunday mornings and jumping on my crotch.
In addition to his loud trumpeting of the notion that school is the “enemy of all happiness,” my 8-year-old’s impulses are generally anti-authority and and anti-civility and anti-dinner and anti-bedtime.
Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of parenting fails to capture: morning snuggles, weekend movie nights, an impressive penchant for sarcasm, adorable sibling bonding, a robust vocabulary, and more.
But these successes have come despite — not because of — the children’s behavior, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
Family meetings veer off topic and off the rails, my toddler engages in repetitive babbling, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and almost-always reckless decisions that have to be walked back. Like the time he ate a dirty, long-discarded Oreo off the playground pavement.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” my wife complained to me recently, exasperated by a bedtime meeting at which the 2-year-old flip-flopped on the stuffed animal he wanted to sleep with, despite having had her carry several of them into his room just minutes earlier.
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the home. My wife and I have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to our home, though they are clearly not always successful, like the time my toddler ran cackling from a farmer’s market without paying for a pair of cider donuts.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but my fellow parents should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when our children won’t.
Given the instability that is obvious to anyone who sees our children in public, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the Fire Station drop-off, which would start a complex process for removing the children from our home. Unfortunately, they are far too old for that.
So we will do what we can to steer them in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over and they are either away at college or living in a tent waiting for Burning Man.
The bigger concern is not what our children have done to themselves but rather what we as parents have allowed them to do to us. We have sunk low with them and allowed our lives to be stripped of enjoyment and relaxation and larded with crumbs and play-dates and hand-foot-and-mouth disease.
There is a quiet resistance within the ranks of parents choosing to put ourselves first. But the real difference will be made by everyday moms and dads rising above competition, reaching across the playground and resolving to shed the judgment in favor of a single goal: boarding school.
