It has been suggested that I may focus a touch too much on the negative aspects of this fatherhood thing. In the (I think joking) words of my sister-who-has-yet-to-have-kids-but-likely-will-soon: “Stop it. You’re scaring the shit out of [my husband.]” So lets talk about some positives.
Being a father is like being a kid again, but instead of being a regular kid, you get to have all of the good parts of being a kid with none of the bad.
As a father you will watch Star Wars movies from beginning to end and you will pay attention so you can explain them, you will make a trip to a store with the sole purpose to purchase candy, you will go to a zoo, you will go to an art museum and leave after 30 minutes because your whole family is sick of it, you will go on a vacation and do absolutely nothing culturally edifying, you will play video games for hours on end, you will read the Hobbit or the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe again, you will dress up in old, musty costumes with silly wigs, you will sprint to stop the Ice Cream Truck as it cruises around your neighborhood, you will hang out at playgrounds and go down slides (and bemoan the absence of the merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters from modern day playgrounds), and, once your kids are seven or eight, you will go to amusement parks and ride on roller coasters, and you will build forts out of afghans and you will wrestle in your living room, and you will play that game where you hit the balloon around the house where no one can hit it twice in a row and it can never touch the ground.
Are you thinking “These things sound ok, but they don’t sound all that great”?? Are you thinking that? That’s because you haven’t realized that you get to be drunk while you do all this crap. And you will resurrect all of the great games you and your siblings or cousins or neighborhood kids used to play like kick the can and tons of others that you aren’t even remembering now but that will spring out of your memory one day and you will explain the games to your kids and they will have no idea what you’re talking about, and you will make popcorn for movies with way too much salt, and when someone farts you will laugh and laugh without irony or sarcasm (children are irony and sarcasm jammers), but with joy and silliness and in a way that you haven’t laughed since you yourself were a child.
As a father, you probably can't expect to (and you probably won't) personally enjoy all these things as much your kids do – these things are not new and fresh to you (although having not done most of them for many years, they’ll be fresher than you think). But you are not reliant on your own personal enjoyment. You get to watch your kids and steal some of their joy and add it to your own.
Combined, that can add up to a lot of joy.
And the downsides of being a child? They don’t exist for you. No one is telling you what to eat, when to go to bed, what to wear, when to take a shower or bath (well, so long as your wife is gone for the weekend). No one is telling you to practice the piano or get off the phone or to change the channel. You have total freedom. And from a child’s perspective, your budget is practically infinite, as you can afford to purchase insane amounts of snack foods and Chuck E. Cheese tokens. You get to play with adult toys: use video cameras to make silly movies, go to a parking lot and swerve your car around, chase people in the back yard with the riding mower if you want. Did I mention that you have alcohol? You have swearing. You can purchase a real live honest-to-god pet based upon nothing more than a whim. You can order pay per view movies! You can have two pops in a single hour. You have it all.
As a father, you have license to, every now and again, swoop in for a period of time and take all that is good and fine about acting like a child and leave all that is bad and restrictive about it behind.
Unfortunately, as a father while you can temporarily become like a kid again without having all that is bad and restrictive about being a kid, you still always have with you all that is bad and restrictive about being an adult shackling you. Bills. In-laws. Actually, let's stop right there before I start getting depressed.
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