Toddlers Suck

There is no reason to side-step the issue and pretend like your toddler doesn’t suck. Many parents do and it baffles me. “Oh, Johnny is such a blessing”. Fuck you, I just watched Johnny intentionally spill his juice, pick his nose, take a shit, stick his hand down his ass crack, eat the shit, then punch my dog in the face. Blessing my ass. Their contrarian existence infuriates everyone except their grandparents and your attempts at marketing your toddler as an angel is disingenuous at best, obnoxiously assholic at worst. Do I love my toddler? Absolutely. Does she piss me off at least twice on her best day? Absofuckinglutely. They positively cannot do what the fuck you tell them. It just isn’t coded in their DNA. Even if what you tell them is directly related to saving their own life or keeping them from great bodily harm. They don’t care. Fuck you mom, eat a bowl of shit dad, I’ll fall down these steps you told me not to descend and I’ll blame your shit for it in the end anyway. One of my daughter’s many New Things is to gag for no reason. Not fingers down the throat but just start making gagging noises and convulse your stomach until at minimum you scare the ever-living-shit out of the nearest parent and at worst, barf. Yesterday morning she asked for breakfast. The exact breakfast she requested was quickly provided. She consumed it, then began the gagging. The part that really, truly fills you with murderous, English nanny baby-shaking rage is that she’ll look you dead in the goddamn eye while she’s doing it. I watched as my wife told her to stop gagging, or she’d choke (choke being the child’s word for “puke”). Toddler locks eyes, continues to gag, boom, Yarmouth. Puke spewing from her mouth onto her clothes, the high chair, the floor, everywhere. And of course according to script she gets pissed and seems to blame us for the fact she made herself puke despite being explicitly told to not make herself puke. They’re just assholes; no two ways around it. You can tell everyone at Thanksgiving or your next couples party that everything is “going great, no problems at all” until you are blue in the face, but we all know that at some point in the past 72 hours you’ve said under your breath, directed at your own toddler, “You little fucker!”. And that is okay. Nothing wrong with, on occasion, wanting to shake the little bastard to within an inch of eating meals through a tube. It is what makes you a human, a parent, normal. To live in denial makes you comical, and not Chris Rock comical but Carrie at the prom comical. You yoga breathe, you drink, you smoke, you’re mean to your dog for no reason, you pray (if you’re into talking to the air), whatever it takes to get you through without resorting to physical or emotional violence, knowing that someday in the future little Jake or Jane will grow up, go to school, and leave you the fuck alone for 7-8 hours every day. That is what you pay taxes for. Property taxes are nothing but indirect babysitter fees. And if you don’t have kids it is nothing but blood money. You are paying someone to babysit other people’s kids so they’ll stay the fuck off your lawn. Last night our little angel was refusing to be toweled off after bath time, which is her custom. She was furiously fighting against my drying of her hair, which I was doing very gently. I explained that if she continued to thrash about like a crackhead being hit with a taser, she would hurt herself. She promptly broke free of the head massage and smashed her own head into the rim of the bathtub. Despite my warning her this very end would materialize should she continue to fight, she began screaming and wailing for “mommy hold you” as though daddy had just slammed her head off the corner buckle ala King Kong Bundy. I know the drill by now and simply inhaled a deep breath, walked into the bedroom a defeated man and tried to lay down on the bed and lick my wounds. Nope, dog already beat me to it. The dog knows the score and he isn’t sticking around for the inevitable ending in tears. Retreat to calmer waters and ride out the storm. Just this week he fell victim to her tyranny in the kitchen. The toddler had just been handed her daily vitamins (our society has now regressed to gummy vitamins). Scout was minding his own goddamn business, keeping ample assured clear distance. Out of thin air her face turned the color of steamed lobster and she began screaming at an unacceptable volume, “NO Scout those are MY vitamins!!!” Scout looked in my direction, beseeching me to intervene on his behalf. The look on my face must have betrayed our mutual defeat and he meekly walked over to me, tail between legs with a look that said, “How do we survive under this regime?” We drink little buddy, we drink. Well, not so much you. I drink. You’re fucked and you can’t even throw medication at it. Sorry about your luck. And so go the days of our lives. I’ve read the psychology explanations of why toddlers suck but I don’t find it to be salve. They’re miniature assholes and you’ve no choice but to cope, wait and hope. Commiseration with your peers who are also cowering beneath the same despotism in their own homes is therapeutic. So don’t sit there and pretend your toddler is the exception to the rule and blow your blessing smoke up people’s asses. Confess your sins of frustration and be saved. The brotherhood of the damned is large and strong.