Being a parent is pretty awesome. Raising a child, getting to mold them and watch them grow can be immensely satisfying, if it’s your bag. My daughter is just over a year old, and while it hasn’t been easy, it has been incredibly rewarding.
But that’s boring, let’s get negative.
There are a lot of hard things about being a parent, and you would think any one of them might be the worst. Almost all of the following have been, when relayed to my single friends, cited as reasons to never have kids:
- Child doesn’t go to sleep
- Child doesn’t stay asleep
- Child wakes up absurdly early
- Child is teething
- Child cannot vocalize needs
- OK, child can vocalize needs FINE, but not elucidate the specific needs
- Hard to go out anywhere with no family around to babysit
All these and more are, yes, difficult, but mostly amount to lifestyle changes. And really, they’ve been easy enough to deal with.
Not like the nursery rhymes.
For a solid year, that child doesn’t care what’s on the TV. I can watch Scrubs all day and hell, she won’t know the difference! The light and sound are enough to entertain her, she cares more about mommy and daddy (but mostly mommy) being close and that’s about it.
But at a certain point, she starts caring about those sounds. Maybe your wife finds a series of YouTube videos with awkward animation set to nursery rhymes. Maybe your child becomes enamored with it, to the point where it’s the only thing that distracts her from her teething pains.
You might expect that the awful animation is the worst part, but it’s not. There is far, far worse out there.
You might think that it’s the repetitiveness. Well, it can be frustrating, but it’s solvable- just put the videos on a tablet or laptop and the rest of the world is free!
No, the real terror comes in the middle of a one hour video. You’ve cycled through multiple versions of the same songs, heard pandas sing their ABCs and learned how to brush your teeth for the tenth time. You think you’ve seen it all, and that nothing more can phase you.
Then you see this:
There is no sane explanation for what they have loosed upon our world.
Ignore the fact that, for Mary Had a Little Lamb, they had forgone any additional verses to just repeat the first one four times.
Ignore the fact that London Bridge is Falling Down has plenty of other verses that could have been used.
Hell, ignore the fact that the song probably was not written with a snot monster in mind.
Super Hero Pig. He is the source of my madness. He is the source of my gibbering distress, and ultimately my salvation.
I see him when I sleep now. He gyrates across my blasted dreamscapes, beckoning me to join him, and I fear I must submit.
I find myself wondering why I was so excited about Spider-man joining the Avengers. Surely, it would have been easier to acquire rights for Super Hero Pig. His powers of booger-pushing and bridge repair would have well complemented the God of Thunder and that one with the green grumpies.
And his clothing choices- clearly the cape grants his flying ability, while his galoshes serve the ever vital purpose of keeping his feet dry in the rain. Cosplayers will be mimicking this for years.
I guess he’s not so bad. Surely, my mind first felt the sting of such an oddity being relayed to it, but eventually it just becomes comfortable and warm. You stop feeling the pain, and a gentle numbness sets in. I think I’ll just take a little nap in this cool, comforting patch of snow…
