“There are days where it’s tough, and there are days where it’s incredible … and you’re like, how could I have ever thought that this wouldn’t be amazing?” – Mike Krahulik, on fatherhood
I found myself re-watching this video quite late last night, somewhat ironically because no more than two hours later I was back up begging Christopher to go back to sleep with little hope in sight!
Truth be told, watching this episode of Penny Arcade: The Series back when it first came out (circa 2010) played a pretty big role in helping me to come to terms with the idea of parenting and actually becoming a father. I mean, it’s always been something that I knew I wanted to happen – off in the distance – but it was still equally terrifying to sit down with my wife and seriously talk about making it happen … and this was even before all of the infertility stuff really came to light! 😯
Now having about a year and a half under my belt as I re-watched this tome of parenting inspiration, it was kind of rewarding to see their words click with me on an entirely new level, both quite specifically through Mike’s quote above as well as this great quote of perspective from Jerry…
“The idea that parenting is built up of these major moments when they’re all completely suspended in hundreds and thousands of individual experiences that have tremendous value.” – Jerry Holkins, on parenting
As we find ourselves inching closer to the infamous terrible twos, we’ve definitely been experiencing more outbursts and tantrums and generic crying recently than the previous few months have bestowed upon us, and some of them in the last week in particular have been very trying, to say the least. I told Sara just today that it often feels like my world is a light switch, and one minute it’s awesome and then the next minute it’s suddenly shit again, and throughout the course of the last couple of days it’s like somebody’s just been flipping that thing on and off like a son of a bitch.
But I try to remember the other moments – the ones that admittedly are just as frequent, yet tend to get easily washed out by the chaotic ones – where Christopher is making me laugh out loud as we’re walking around Walmart at midnight to get him milk, or when he’s cuddled up on my lap watching Sesame Street videos on YouTube, or when he brings one of his books over for me to read to him.
It can be so tough to conjure them up in the moment because sometimes those toddler tantrums can just be brutal to a grown man’s psyche, and yet afterwards once the dust has had a chance to settle and we’ve drifted back down to earth, it’s those silly moments … those giggly moments … those moments packed with so much tenderness it just about makes you sick – those are the things that make you take a time out to remind yourself, “Yeah, this IS pretty amazing.”