Humor | Parenting
My Six-Year-Old Won’t Dance With Me at a Bar Mitzvah, So Then What Was the Point of Having a Kid?
Do I have regrets? Maybe.
There are many good reasons to bring a child into the world.
Maybe you wish to experience the dizzying affection one derives from staring into eyes that look uncannily like your own. Maybe you feel a sense of obligation, a kind of biological imperative to reproduce and perpetuate the species. Perhaps you see raising children as a celebration of the love you share with a life partner. Or maybe you see the decision as an expression of hope in a profoundly broken world, a way of pushing back against a creeping sense of nihilism by producing a new generation, one that might find heretofore unseeable solutions to our seemingly intractable problems.
None of those appeal to me.
I had a kid so I could dance with her at catered events and inspire strangers to marvel at how cute we are.
Preferably, this dance would just be me and my six-year-old. Perhaps some complicated choreography would be involved. I could spin her at unexpected intervals. We could do a dramatic dip. That sort of thing.
And if she wasn’t up for learning choreography, I’d be okay with a classic daddy-daughter dance in which she puts her head on my shoulder as I sway, the way I used to when she was a baby, and she was less into choreography and more into suffering neck injuries when I’d forget to support her head, which was often.
Look, I’d even settle for a group dance in which a bunch of us, all clad in those annoying styrofoam hats and glow-stick necklaces, form a circle and awkwardly gyrate to Kool & the Gang’s, “Celebrate.”
It is a shitty song and a shitty way to dance, but I would take it.
But no. After years of sleepless nights and poopy diapers, my fucking kid won’t even hold my hand during a hora.
I’ve tried everything. Bribes. Offering, when my wife is out of earshot, “There’s a My Little Pony in it for you if I can pick you up over my head during ‘I’ve had the Time of My Life.’”
No dice. She just wants to spin in circles with her older cousin who barely knows her name.
I lay the guilt on thick, whispering, “Daddy might get cancer if you don’t dance with him.”
Nothing.
Instead, she chooses to tug on my wife’s dress, asking her for their twelfth dance of the day. Which is obviously bullshit.
I know what you’re wondering, a question so upsetting you hesitate to say it aloud: Do I regret having a kid?
If you were to ask, I’d respond by saying nothing but blinking in a suggestive way.
Then, after an uncomfortably long pause, I’d say, “That is ridiculous.”
But clearly, my heart would not be in it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to partner with her older cousin during Coke and Pepsi and absolutely obliterate my daughter.
Because for all her many positive qualities, as cute as she is, as kind and sweet and funny as she is, as much as she’s taught me how to love in a deeper, more profound way than I’d ever thought possible, she is not very fast.
