Grumpy Parenting (Part 1)

I am a father of three boys.  I love them all and there is nothing in this world I wouldn't do for them.  Ok, having gotten that out of the way:  My God parenting is hard.  With three kids I get to deal with three separate personalities, three sets of different problems, three different standards of discipline, and three mouths that never, ever stop telling me stuff.  One would think that since they all came from my loins that the personalities would be similar, like me.  I enjoy peace and quiet, I like to sit down be quiet and watch football or a movie, I can read by myself and be perfectly happy, and my kids share none of these same things with me or with each other.  They do everything with the volume at 11 and with total disregard to whatever my wife and I are doing. I am pretty sure they all like me to some point but I question it when my head is buried in my hands and I have a headache the size of Courtney Love's liver.  As with many things in my life, I like to document it, compartmentalize it, and look at ways to improve it or at least deal with it at a manageable level.

The Three Personalities:  Or What it was probably like living with Sybil

Gavin is the oldest, he just turned 10.  He is about as close to me in the personality department as any of them but that’s still not saying a lot.  He likes to have quiet moments and at times likes to be left alone but both of these occur at the frequency of the Full Moon.  He desires attention, constant, incessant, unflinching attention.  Everything he asks or states to anyone within listening distance is followed up with the phrase, “Right dad?” or “Right mom?”  I think “Well if you knew it was right then why are you asking me?”  He is loud and boisterous as is physically possible.  But yet he is so super sensitive.  When I was a kid, I knew that joking around and busting your buddies’ balls was part of it.  I got pissed a few times and lost my temper when kids would give me a hard time but Gavin takes everything super personal.  Every time another kid says anything to him that is the least bit sideways he gets really emotional and pissed off.  He’ll get off the bus and I can see immediately that he is mad because his face is all flared up and he is huffing dramatically and I think “Ok, someone said they don’t like him or they don’t want to be his friend.”  Sure enough he gets in the CrapMobile (my loving name for my 2000 Explorer which I would like to see one day set on fire) and says, “Dad, I don’t want to talk about why I am mad.  But I am really mad; just tell them to leave me alone.”  This is the first thing out his mouth, or there is this one, “I hate Kyler, he’s the biggest jerk in the world.”  Then I get to start the process of decoding what is bothering him for the day.  Getting clear and concise information from a ten year old makes me understand why they use torture to extract information from terrorists at Guantanamo.  It’s almost impossible.  We go round and round while his story changes to who wronged him and how for the day with constant interruptions from his brother Kyler.  Kyler usually spends this time making sure that he can either insult Gavin or make him feel stupid, it’s part of his life’s work.  Like I said Gavin is usually pissed about some fat older kid picking on him or not being his friend.  I almost always have the same advice for him, “All of these kids are idiots.  It doesn’t matter what any of them think of you or what they say because they are morons.”  Followed up with me telling him to quit being so sensitive to every time another kid farts in his direction.  So to sum it up for Gavin, he is a hyper-sensitive, attention-starved, loud, occasional quiet kid.

Next, we have Kyler he is eight.  Kyler has my sensibility of being a smartass.  He really enjoys making others feel stupid and making sure that he is absolutely right about everything.  So maybe he is a little closer to what I was as a kid after all.  I think its okay for the kids to be a little snarky but if they are going to do it I want them to at least be funny and/or witty about it.  Being able to shoot back at people with clever little quips is a good defense mechanism; it’s like a verbal punch.  However, neither of them really possesses the ability of a good comeback and the smartassedness (new word) of Kyler makes me want to throw myself on the nearest pile of used hypodermic needles.  He has something to say about absolutely everything.  I can tell them to quiet down when I’m on the phone and he will continue to jump around making monkey sounds while screaming “You didn’t say please!!!”  He has a big problem with being correct, even if he has no idea what he is talking about and he presents every argument in his favor with "I'm just sayin."   He can ask me to explain something like, how come it rains?  I will start to explain evaporation and water accumulation and Kyler will interrupt with his own theory like “Isn’t rain really just God crying?”  I’ll tell him no and keep explaining, and he’ll say, “Well it could be God’s tears you don’t know that.  I'm just sayin'”  Again I’ll tell him no and to let me finish.  I might get another word or two out explaining the science of raining and he’ll tell me, “'I'm just sayin, I think that the scientists might have  it wrong because they don’t believe in God and so they don’t realize that rain is really God crying”  “No, no, no” I say, “that is not it.  It’s all about condensation and evaporation and all of that crap.  Its proven, it’s in your science book.”  I can go home and Google it and show him diagrams and everything showing how it works, and I will still get the, “Well, maybe, I'm just sayin.”  It is like this with every single subject, he asks you but he already has his answer in his head no matter what.  You can pile all the data in front of him and it simply will not matter.  Jesus himself could fly down to Earth, take him by the hand, and explain the same rain concept to him and Kyler would say, “Well have you ever thought it was perhaps your dad’s tears?  I'm just sayin.”

Asher is the little one, he is four and quite possibly the hardest one of all.  To his credit though, he has had delays in speech and other things but he is smart and funny as can be.  He can also be a smaller scaled version of the Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker.  He thrives on mayhem around the house.  From the moment his eyes open in the morning, he is running in 5^th gear all the way.  He has figured out how to climb onto every appliance in the house and throw things from it.  I found him on top of the refrigerator one day and he threw an entire box of cereal at me.  He is like the honey badger….he doesn’t give a shit.  He, like Gavin, needs the constant attention as well which is a little more understandable since he is four but his is an extreme case.  When it is just me and him at the house, I cannot do anything alone or get anything done.  He follows me into the bathroom and will sit there until I am finished.  He will stand outside of the shower curtain while I am showering.  He’s everywhere.  If I were to go crawling on my knees through a pit of broken glass and rubbing alcohol, he would insist on following me.  He also has a big deal with sleeping, which I think is part of the whole attention thing or maybe his love of mayhem.  He will stay awake until 5 am if he knows that it will keep me from being comfortable.  Yeah, that’s the other thing; he HATES other people being comfortable.  Just last night I was tired as hell and wanted nothing more than to lay down and go to sleep.  Asher refused.  I put him in bed, he screamed and hopped up.  I put him back and shut the door, he screamed and ran out of the room and found me.  I took him back again and I hid this time, he got up screaming and ran out the front door when he couldn’t find me.  I tried sitting in the recliner and rocking him to sleep and he was literally slapping himself to stay awake.  I didn’t get him to sleep until 2:30 in the morning and to make sure there would be no comfort in the morning he woke up at 6:15 and hasn’t slowed down yet.  He is the Terminator of Toddlers.  He requires no sleep, little food, and he will not stop until he has gotten all of your attention and ensured your total discomfort.

I know that probably all of these things about the kids are typical but even though I have been a parent for 10 years now I still feel like I don’t know what I am doing.  At times I just want to shoot giant elephant tranquilizers into them and watch them sleep.