BAM!

Please buckle your seatbelts and prepare for a bumpy ride, I am about to spew some deep knowledge on you.

Ready?

Parents are people too.

I know, you're probably sitting there holding your hair in your hands and tugging, your face has melted to the floor and your mouth is wide open "WHAAAAAAAAAA?"

Or maybe not.

But here's the thing, I knew this for a while but I really just realized it, like really realized it. My parents are real life people with just as many flaws, dreams and ambitions as I have! They lie! They get mad about stupid shit because somebody that morning cut them off on their drive to work! They laugh about teenage angst! They think they're funny sometimes! They read books, watch reality TV, grocery shop, attempt crossword puzzles, and sleep at night. It's true, they are people.


It's this really weird feeling realizing that parents don't just automatically become the best they could ever be once they find out they're pregnant. There is no "perfect" switch that gets flicked, making them into some admirable person who is always truthful and loving and happy. That doesn't happen. What does happen though, I think, is that they are set on a path to that person, like hyper drive, because who wants to be the crappy parent - no one I think. So they're climbing up this roller coaster steadily, but slowly, until they find out they are having a child and will soon be the reality of how people are for a little person, so they are sent flying down the coaster up and over and around, leaping through experiences and ideas trying to navigate it the best they can. So now they are fast tracked on their way to becoming this person that they may have only become when they were eighty but it's happening now, that they're forty, because they have a kid who looks at them like they can conquer anything so they feel like they have to make good on that promise and they try.

Before I become a parent I want to make sure I am completely, totally, absolutely honestly ready to become that better person. To give up selfishness, to give up on sleeping in, to give up on eating ice cream for breakfast, to give up on swearing at other drivers who cut me off, to give up laying around in bed all day some saturdays and watching movies, to give up on all the self indulgent things that I allow myself because if little tiny eyes are looking at me and saying "I'm hungry" "I need this" and I am the one who is capable of providing it, I need to be there and be available and be completely theirs. I think that's what it is, it's giving yourself to someone else, that's what parenthood is. Maybe.