I have one pet peeve that drives me nuts and it’s what I like to call The League of Judgy Pants Parents. They are a special breed of parents who like to sit around on their high horses feeling all superior and passing judgment on everyone else.
Like this open letter to Moms on the iPhone going around on Facebook, which sums up what I’m talking about.
Why do some folks feel like it’s ok to look at a microscopic fraction of someone else’s life and immediately decide that they’re a lousy parent?
I bring my kids to the playground fairly frequently and do you know how boring it is to watch kids mucking about at a playground? VERY. They climb up the stairs, whizz down the slide, climb up the other way, back down the slide, and again and again and again. The first day I do this, i’m all “Good job!! Nice sliding there, buddy! WOOOOOT!!!” for all of 5 minutes. And then after a while, even the kids get bored with all my woo-ing so they look at me like “Ok mom, just relax and go chill out by that bench aight, I’m hanging out with my friends here.”
Imagine doing this 3 times a week for a couple of years. The woo-ing gets considerably less enthusiastic as time goes by.
When I’m excruciatingly bored, my mind learns to adapt and do this this thing called paying selective attention. Every few minutes, they wave or run over to give me a hug or yell for me to look at this new trick they learnt and I reciprocate by being interested in what they’re doing. Which takes up about maybe 30% of the time. The rest of the time, I have my trusty iPhone to save the day. I get to reply a few quick emails, do a bit of work, read some blogs, browse cat pictures, watch a couple of youtube videos, that sort of thing.
It’s a nice romantic notion that we should cherish EVERY SINGLE SECOND of our time with the kids. But I’m here to tell you that it’s a load of horse bollocks.
I spend in the region of let’s see, 24 hours with the kids (at least one kid at any given time) in a day and I would go batshitcrazy if I had to be cherishing every one of those moments.
See, in an average day, I have about 2 hours max of ooh-so-sweet kind of precious moments, which include singing to the kids, story time, tickle sessions, family chats, snuggling on the bed with lots of hugs and kisses. Another 5-6 hours are spent on functional maintenance type chores like driving them around, cooking, feeding, cleaning up, bathing, putting them to bed. Maybe an hour or so where the baby is asleep and I have some me-time to get some work done, write a blog post, edit some photos.
I have the privilege of working from home so I get to be around for the kids and manage my time around them, for which I’m immensely grateful. But that means that while I’m physically around for the kids most of the time, my brain has to be at multiple places at various times throughout the day. Sometimes when they’re at the playground, I have to be on Facebook (for work, y’all). Or when I have to take an urgent conference call, I put on Disney Junior and tell them to be quiet while mommy’s on the phone. It’s not pretty all the time but it’s something that works for us.
Maybe I’m not giving them my undivided attention 100% of the time, but I get to carpe the crap out of the moments that matter. When they discover a dead lizard by the pavement, I can put aside my work for a moment and marvel at the grossness of a lizard corpse with them in the middle of the afternoon.
So excuse me for not getting on the guilt trip bandwagon when The League of Judgy Pants Parents decide that being on the iPhone at the playground is a cardinal sin.
And if I see someone giving me the stink eye the next time I pull out my phone with the kids in tow, someone is going to get punched in the face.
