Some of My Greatest Fears as a Parent

(Or: The Return of a Flabbergasted Father’s Rants)

Sure, there are the typical fears of parenthood like your child getting hurt at the playground, lost at the store, or forever psychologically scarred and damaged by my ineptitude and bungling as a parent trying to explain things like where babies come from. But other than those big fears, I also have a few smaller, what some may consider petty concerns. Nevertheless, these are some of the things that keep me up at night. Terrors such as…

Milk

I’m pretty sure that it’s a normal thing for people to become more sensitive to dairy as they get older. And as such, I recently began complaining to my wife that milk products just aren’t settling well with me anymore. I told her, “I think I’m becoming lactose intolerant because it hurts my stomach now when I eat two large bowls of ice cream at midnight.” Her response was, “Umm, no, I think it’s because you’re eating an entire quart of ice cream in one sitting.”

So insensitive those wives.

Anyways, our kids pretty much survive on milk, cheese, and yogurt alone. It’s about all they’ll consume. Well, that and donuts. We’re pretty health-conscious parents. But all that means is lots of partially eaten, leftover lactose gleanings. My wife, again always the paragon of reason, tells me that I don’t have to eat everything. Silly wives. Of course I have to eat everything! But it doesn’t mean that I’m any less afraid at the end of every mealtime.

Monkey Swings

If you don’t know, monkey swings are these single-rope swings with a circular seat (why am I explaining this to you? Just look up a picture online). They seem like a fun idea, but so are many of the devil’s temptations. Basically, these swings are very difficult to control and not at all designed for most children. If your kid doesn’t fall off mid-swing, then they’re probably hitting a tree or another child. The random chaos is so prevalent that the term “monkey swing” has basically become a euphemism for all things that were “made” for children but clearly not “designed” for children. You definitely know when someone else doesn’t have kids of their own. Infamous examples include:

• A waiter/waitress bringing a scalding hot plate of food and placing it directly in front of your grabby-hand child so that they burn off their fingerprints.
• A dance recital that takes place right in the middle of dinner time, lasts three hours too long, requires that the whole family stays in attendance the entire time, and in which your child is only in one number towards the end of the second act.
• Rubber bath toys that don’t allow air circulation and start to grow mold after just one bath time.
• Slime. While we’re at it, let’s just add Play-Doh, Kinetic sand, and all molding clays in general.

These are all “monkey swings” and they are just the worst. Also, when I was a kid, I once got in a fight with a monkey swing. Don’t ask me about what was said. But the swing took a cheap-shot at me in the mouth as I was turning around. It chipped my tooth pretty badly and knocked it up out of alignment, so I had to get braces and the tooth synthetically filled. You may be tempted to think that now I’m simply projecting my own childhood trauma onto my kids and thus perpetuating a vicious, multi-generational cycle. To that, I would say, isn’t that what parenting is all about?

Barbies

WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS NAKED‽‽‽ Can someone, anyone, please explain to me why these humanoid dolls are all constantly laying around the house without any clothes on? It’s like I live inside some sort of weird plastic, twilight zoney, Korean bath house. I know when we bought these dolls, they had clothes on. Sometimes, they even have extra apparel items. But inevitably, all the garments come off, and the rooms and hallways and byways are filled and cluttered with nudist, sun-bathing Mattel models. I mean, does this make anyone else just a wee bit uncomfortable? Can these Barbies and Kens not be designed in a more modest affirming fashion way? The worst part is that my kids are constantly asking me to put the clothes back on the dolls. So, I do. I awkwardly dress those anatomically incorrect miniature mannequins, and then not one minute later, I inadvertently and painfully step on their naked, prostrate corpses again. Why so easy to undress, yet virtually impossible to redress by the known laws of physics. It’s like some sick, psychological power game inside a control vortex.

And when visitors come over, how am I supposed to explain the embarrassing life choices happening all around? My eighteen-month-old son seems to have picked up on these bad influences because he too just wants to constantly run around the house without any clothes on. Oh, what it would be like to feel no shame.