People Like Us...
Should be made to live in China where they limit you to one child per couple.
But! We are not alone! There are other people in the world who belong over there with us. Like Steve Martin in Parenthood, which came on tv the other night and I had never seen it before. Shaun saw it before he had kids, (which is like never seeing it in the first place,) and we really enjoyed watching someone else, someone like Steve Martin, try to raise a high-strung and sensitive first-born while his third-born ran around with his head in a bucket, head-butting things, getting dizzy for the high of it, and beat kids up at a school play. This kid IS JACK. It's downright eery, and this is going to happen in about another month, listen to what people are saying, they will be saying that about us, if they aren't already.
It is all too familiar, watching this movie, and yet! We were just enough removed to be able to laugh instead of cry.
Steve, Steve. Tsk, tsk. He thought if only he could be a better parent, his kid might be more well-adjusted. (So easy to leave that whole "born under a curse to sin and be sinned against" thing out of it when you come up with your parenting philosophies, isn't it?) Poor Steve kept forgetting. He kept thinking if only he tried harder, parented better his kid would be wholly confident and complete, not lacking anything... wait, why does that sound familiar? Oh right, that's what JESUS can give them. Not me? Not me, not me? Pretty please??? Let me help??
I have NO idea what that sort of anxiety is like as a parent. NONE whatsoever. (I'm telling a bold-faced lie, OF COURSE.) But it's funny how someone else being crazy in the same way you are crazy makes you somehow feel more normal. (You know, a normal kind of crazy.)
Anyway. This blog title came to mind when I was browsing friends' blog sites and found a consistent theme throughout- a particular child repeatedly unsupervised on various blog-sites, left to poke at babies, climb on machinery, and rub candy in chairs just like the third-born Justin on Parenthood:
Labels: dumbhead parenting, Jack
