Flashbacks in Parenting

A weird thing happened to me when I had children that some, but not all of you, might be able to relate to. For me, becoming a father has occasionally caused intense flashbacks to my childhood. No, I don’t live in the house I grew up in or anything like that. For me, it’s the fact that I come from a family of 6 and now have my own family of 5.

I am the oldest of four. After I was born, there came a sister, a brother and another sister. If you look over on the sidebar, you should see where I’m going with this. I’ve got the same thing going on now, two girls and a boy, even in the same order. All (obviously) younger than me (but this time substantially younger). I’ve never called them by my siblings’ names, but I’m sure it’s coming.

Something really bizarro happened nearly two years ago, when my wife and her mother went on their dream vacation to England. Instead of simply staying home, the 4 of us left behind went on our own vacation down to the Great Smoky Mountains with my parents. The bizarre part was that there were 6 of us on vacation, my parents, then me, then three young ones, exactly like it was throughout my childhood.

Having these flashbacks forced into my face has brought home for me one of the downsides of parenting, which is that it contains a lot of the bad elements of being part of a family: the same elements that made most of us want to move out of our parents’ houses the minute we turned 18.

Once I did finally get out of my folks house, I, like most people, did not follow any one single person around obsessively as if I were required to be with them by law. I did not try to take the exact same college classes as any particular person. And, best of all, when someone was pissing me off, I immediately and happily dropped them as a friend. But when you’re a kid, you’re bound to your entire family as a unit on most days in some way, even if it’s in the car to and from school or on other family events. No dropping allowed. By law, even.

But it turns out that the freedom that you yearn for, the freedom you grasp with two hands at age 18, is not freedom at all. It’s only a hiatus.

For me, a 10-year one, because it all comes back.

Once you’re a father, you eventually have to go to restaurants that you don’t like 4 times out of 5 because “it’s someone else’s turn to choose,” just like when you were a kid (a friend that chose poorly would simply have no accompaniment). Someone being annoying in the car? You'll just have to deal with it, not only for that day, but for the next week or month or however long that person decides to be annoying (you can’t just not invite the loser next time around when "the loser" is your 4 year old).

And the feeling that’s most come back is the raw emotion of frustration mixed with resignation that you get when you realize that, just like you were stuck with your brother as he went through his moronic childhood phases, the grating traits of your children are going to be with you. You get to watch your child pick their nose and wipe it on the floor, and you realize that there’s no chance that you’re going to be able to get them to stop doing this (just like with your brother back in the day). But now it’s worse, because you can’t just roll your eyes and walk out of the room. Now you’re actually supposed to do something about it.

If you’re a youngest child, like my wife, then, like my wife, you probably have no earthly idea what I’m talking about in this blog post. Youngests have no recollection of a smaller sibling doing idiot things in their house; they have no experience with it.

They are horribly unprepared for parenthood.