Look, I love my kids. Do I regret having them? No. Are they the best thing that’s ever happened to me? Also no. Kids are great but they’re also a lot of work, a lifelong commitment and frustrating as all hell. I’m sick of people not being honest about what it’s like to have kids. People pretend that having kids is the best gift in the world because they’re afraid of what people will say if they tell the truth. I want to stop the stigma and let parents speak freely about what it’s like to have children. Then maybe less children will get abandoned because unsuspecting parents were led to believe that it’s the easiest thing in the world.
What brought all this on, I hear you ask? Long story short, my frustration has been brewing for a while. What sparked this blog post was the fact that I trusted my three kids to be by themselves for ten minutes and I came back into the room and I caught them drawing all over the walls. My kids aren’t overly young either, they’re eight, eleven and twelve. They’re supposed to know better than that, and they were well aware of the fact we had just gotten an interior painter in the Melbourne CBD to come and paint all our kids’ bedrooms.
I’m pretty furious. I kept my cool because that’s what you have to do as a parent, but they knew what they were doing was wrong. When I caught them red-handed, they weren’t even remorseful. They were laughing and saying that they are painters too and that they made the walls look better. The walls were covered in scribbles.
Now I’m going to have to get professional residential painting services for the second time this year. I hope the kids realise that my wife and I aren’t a bottomless pit of money. The money we’re going to have to spend to get the kids’ ugly scribbles covered up is going to come out of their Christmas presents.