Thursday, March 9, 2023

Slice of Life: Day 9: Not Anymore


Distraught Smiley Weary Face Expression Emoji — Stock Vector

·      Returning from Africa

·      Sitting the bench my senior year

·      Earning my MA

·      Dealing with ego from so-called “leaders”

·      My dad dying from a brain tumor

·      High school breakups

·      Watching the first years of American Idol

·      Bouts of constipation

·      Running up a mountain

·      Suicides in basketball

·      Walking past homeless people

·      Algebra 2

·      Spiritual battles

·      Watching Batman and Robin

·      Mike Schmidt retiring

·      Reading To the Lighthouse

·      Having memoirs about my dad ripped away

·      1986 Phillies

·      Being grounded from TV for two weeks

·      Watching anything with Nicholas Cage or Topher Grace

·      Seeing pets dead on the road

·      People believing things happen for a reason

·      People thinking just because something happens, it’s God’s will

·      My wife hemorrhaging after our second daughter was born

·      Grandparents dying

·      Onions in otherwise perfectly good food

·      Not getting my $600 security deposit back b/c an azalea dry-rotted

·      Migraine

·      All four impacted wisdom teeth extracted

·      Plantar fasciitis

·      Victim of bullying

·      Having my neck grabbed by a teacher (I was 10!)

·      Having an adult put me in a choke-hold (I was 12!)

·      Being forced underwater by a (different) adult (I was 5!)

-   cracking my head open and asking in all seriousness if I was going to die

-   having my tooth knocked out and all the needles in my gums that followed

-   not being able to take our treehouse to our new home

  -teaching twenty-two years

-throwing my back out multiple times

-strange, random shoulder injury

-big toe injury after using barefeet to stop swinging (I was on blacktop)

-ramming my toe into the leg of a kitchen table chair

- bad sunburn

-hateful emails from parents

-eczema


You get the point. Some silly. Some serious. Most everybody can relate to. Here’s my point: Of all the difficult/annoying things I have dealt with (or am currently dealing with), nothing…and I mean, NOTHING is more difficult than parenting.

 

I used to be good at it. Great, actually. Not anymore.


rg




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