this is just the bedtimes struggle session again

Being a communist and a dad is one of the difficult experiences. It makes you acutely aware of how everything exists to ground families into hyper-alienated individuals. If I wasn’t doing good at my job, every expenditure on my kids would engender resentment. Parents are supposed to be caretakers, tutors, teachers, disciplinarians, coaches, best friends, and…busy adults with productive lives…all at the same time. Everything costs so much fucking money. Want to teach your kid how not to drown in pools, 80$! Want to enroll them in gymnastics, 80$! Daycare, $299 a week. Your kid’s grandparents are working 9-5s and they can only see them every once in a while. Your siblings and cousins, are too young and broke to be of any help and live in some other shitty state.

Then there’s the constant bombardment of “research”. Kids are behind, they are not reading enough, doing enough math, writing enough. Their literacy is in the toilet! They are obese, they are rude, they wanna kill you. Your kids are doing marijuana, or coke, or blowing random dicks on the internet, they renounce christ and worship satan, they have pink hair and go by they/them pronouns. They’ll never find a job or will have to work 3 jobs at once. If your kid is an angel or an asshole, they will get kidnapped either way and be sold to Epstein-like child rape islands.

It’s enough to make you go insane.

The only thing a parent can do is their very best. And that’s dragged down by the sometimes insurmountable amount of trauma you have had heaped on you by your own parents, and their parent’s parents. I yell, I get really loud and agitated. Even when I’m not mad, I’m loud as fuck. Because that’s how my mom and dad dealt with things; they also spanked and beat the shit out of me, but I made a point not to ever do that to my kids.

So when I yell, even if unintentionally, at my children. I feel like a humongous piece of shit. I think the only saving grace is that they behave well enough the vast majority of the time, that I’ll never have to get really really mad at them.

But have you tried learning how to be a “good parent”? Learning programs cost hundreds of dollars. There’s a million different books on how to be a parent. And you read them, you try them out.

Do you know how difficult it is to go about this on your own, often times without even the support of your own spouse? You read books like “How to talk to kids so they’ll listen and listen so kids will talk” and you feel so stupid. Acknowledging emotions, while the child is still bawling his eyes out. “Yeah, it makes you upset?” yah “you are really mad dad said no to extra cookies” yaaaaah “Oh what a shame, it just makes you want to yell real loud and scream and bawl”. You sit there, trying to do your best when every traumatized fiber in your body just wants to smack them in the face for being a mewling little baby. It sucks so much fucking shit. But you don’t lay a single hand of them other than to comb their hair or wipe their tears. And you look deep within yourself to give them the very type of love and nurturing you wish you had as a child. You try very hard to be patient and understanding, and joyous, even when there’s nothing to be happy about. Because your child is your child, he is your heart outside of yourself. Why would you be mean and nasty to your love made manifest?