Here is What Fatherhood Will Do To You

Right now, if you are single (or married without kids), there are probably things in your life that you don’t like to do. But if you take on those unpleasant or loathsome tasks, maybe you reward yourself with something you like better. If you don’t like going to the gym, you tell yourself that if you go and work out, then you can eat eggs and bacon for breakfast at the local diner the next day. If you hate mowing the lawn, you tell yourself that when you’re done you can take a nap or have a beer and watch the Buckeyes. Or maybe you just suck it up without a reward.

Those unpleasant or loathsome things you don’t like doing? Once you have kids, they are now your reward. You’re LUCKY if you get to go to the gym. In fact, to get to go, you have to watch the kids while your spouse watches her reality TV show, or you have to fix lunch on Saturday and build up goodwill for the privilege and honor of going to the gym in the afternoon. At the end of the day you will think back on the high points of your day and you will think of how great it was that you got to go work out.

There will come a day when you’ll find yourself finishing mowing the lawn, standing in your driveway, leaning up against the upright part of the mower. And you’ll look up to the house, and you … well, you won’t actually be able to see them through the walls … but for just a moment it will be like you have x-ray vision, and you’ll in some weird way be able to see through the walls and see your children scattered about the house, running in doodle-patterns, yapping and screaming, with foods and sauces dripping from their faces, hanging there, defying gravity, and you’ll see your harried wife’s mouth screaming at them, and having something to do with the x-ray vision, her mouth will be moving in slow motion. And you’ll think to yourself “I think it is very important that I double cut my lawn today” or "wow those bushes need trimmed," even though just six years prior you mocked men who were obsessed with and spent hours-a-weekend on their yards. A silly man you were back then, thinking that a yard obsession had anything to do with what the yard looked like.

That is what having a kid is going to do to you.

You will begin striving for the privilege of doing the crappy things in life.