Ron Collins
Jul 23, 2017 · 3 min read

How do you respond to, “Let’s go shopping?”

This question, and the entire tale to follow, stimulate a lot of clarity for me in dealing with the full-time chore that living without my kids around is.

You see, the everyday business of looking after them, each of them from the day they were born, was never something I minded.

All my life I have heard much of the following from supposedly aggrieved mothers, over how hard raising kids is on the Poor Dears:

“You never changed a shitty diaper in your life….”

Turns out, I changed each of their first diapers, and many more to follow after that, and never minded a bit. Starting out with a little screaming banshee in mid-tantrum and ending up with a clean-pantsed smiling little angel was never much of a challenge. I regarded it as a privilege.

“Going shopping with children is the worst; I’m so sick of trying to keep up with them running around all over the place and demanding I buy everything they see for them….”

If you say so: I never had much trouble with the activity, which I governed by two hard-and-fast rules: “stay where I can see you, and I’m here to buy what I’m here to buy so don’t even ask.” Any kid old enough to get around on their own two feet can grasp such simple and reasonable guidelines, and consequently I can think of nothing I’d rather do more, honestly, than spend a few hours running around town shopping with a child. I miss it.

Just some examples, of the sentiments expressed by mothers who decided in their own behalf to go it alone after abandoning a father, the same way their own mothers had done their fathers when they were children.

It has to be really, really hard, or there is nothing to prove.

If a man has the effrontery to undertake fathering with a smile and a jumping-out-of-bed eagerness every day to get on with being a parent, this only upsets their narrative, which is that being a parent is the hardest thing they ever had to do.

But of course, unilaterally self-appointing oneself to single parenting, is all about (it turns out every time) being able to pound one’s own chest and say, “I was always ‘there for them’ [I hate that phrase], and where were you?”

And I’m thinking, “I was here all along, you’re the ones who left, you’re the ones who had to make it look like almost more than you could manage being parents. I was just doing the job, and enjoying it, and you fired me because my making it look too easy made your schtick just look like the pretentious self-congratulation it always was…”

So to answer your question, Gordie Jackson, with my daughter’s twelfth birthday coming in a few days and our not having spoken a syllable between us in almost two years, for me to hear her say right now, “let’s go shopping” would be the richest gift ever bestowed on me. I hope you recognize what a blessed thing it is, that what you and your daughter look like together in that shot is a thing I don’t know that me and mine will ever have the honor of enjoying ever again.

Turns out me and my children made being each others’ family look too easy. We can’t be having that now, can we?

Ron Collins

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Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s