Sympathy For Those Who Raise Children Full-Time

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by Smitty

Mrs. The Other Smitty is on the road. A nine month old is a tremendous amount of work! Don’t let these Lefty jackwagons lie, to the contrary. Here, symbolizing power as a coffee cup, and our system of checks and balances as a dishwasher frame, The World’s Youngest Blogger empathizes with Obama’s feelings of constraint.

Update: linked by The Catholic Bandita!

16 comments

  4. I noticed the device on the cabinet doors are you using those little plastic hook thingys on the inside of the draws?
    Child rearing ain’t for the faint of heart.

  7.  Being at home raising children is harder work than many people ever do. 

    The stay-at-home mom job is harder work. Anyone who has done it, my hat’s off. Anyone who had a mom, take yours off too.

    Homemakers also make it possible for their spouses to put in the long
    hours at a career and travel when required and advance. The career
    parent’s salary is in part the stay-at-home parent’s doing because of
    that division of labor.

  8.  Hi Smitty,

    FWIW . . .

    The universe has been gifting me with handfuls of wild red raspberries lately. The flavor is sweet and intense, packed with obvious nutrition and also memories of Grandma’s pies. Sometimes I laugh out loud in gratitude. Red raspberries are like Ultimate Goodness to me.

    This morning picking and eating raspberries, I was drenched in an unexpected short cloudburst.

    Was that a good or a bad situation? Maybe we’re not so much winners and losers but participants. Participants in something incomprehensibly bigger.

    A few of us had sun parents. More of us had sun-and-cloudburst parents. And some of us had hurricane parents. The ones with hurricane parents don’t always survive.

    What makes a “hurricane parent”?

    Two people I know had mothers who would threaten to kill them. One of those mothers later died of a brain tumor. A zebra finch I had long ago would hatch her eggs, but shortly afterward she would push all the babies out of the nest and I would find them dead on the cage floor. Something, somehow, was inadequate to reproduction.  

    Raising children in the more modern, often-isolated, nuclear family is unquestionably stressful. And stress affects different people in different ways. I don’t know what makes a hurricane parent. Hurricanes just are. They’re a part of the whole that damages, and in some intricate way contributes, and the strongest ones can be just . . . incomprehensible.

    Someday soon enough, the universe will gift me not with red raspberries or even a cloudburst, but with cancer or a stroke or an accident. In the meantime, here I am, and what I do has an effect.

    My hurricane is over. I can clean up the damage and rebuild.

    What would you like to see more of in the world? Encouragement? Knowledge? Skill? Love? Other? You can create that. You’re here, as the forward edge of Life, and it’s your turn.

  9. Something else to keep in mind is that the Dem lesbian critic and her partner used a surrogate so neither of them underwent labour either.

  11. Careful with the baby by the dishwasher, my mighty son managed to grab the spinny thingy that sets under the top shelf to wash the lower rack of dishes and he ripped it right off.  Having to hand wash all the dishes till we could get it fixed made this stay at home mom’s job more stressful, especially since the nerve damage in my hands causes me to drop things so we also lost a lot of dishes before our machine could be repaired.

  12. The expression on Bitty Smitty’s face is one I saw on my kids faces many times. It says “BUSTED!”

  13. Ah, it’s a cute but dangerous age — enjoy it while you can.  Time flies, and they are out of the house.

    It is hard work, and not everyone is cut out for it (my grandma raised me; Mom loved me, but she was not good with noise and chaos, two things small children provide in abundance).  I think this may lead to something concerning the breakdown of the nuclear family (and that family being more than just two parents and the kids), but oh well.

  14. LOL — I was thinking the same thing!  

    I hand wash dishes now — last kid who pulled the tray out of the dishwasher did me in; can’t get rid of the kid, so the appliance was safely adopted out to a more suitable family.

  16. Teaching Teh Kewt One how a little house husbandry enhances the ratings with the girls.  Nice move!

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