Telltale signs

By Published On: September 13th, 2013

Remember the song “Lightning Crashes” by Live? It came on […]

Joshblog9.13Remember the song “Lightning Crashes” by Live? It came on the car radio yesterday, and as is my M.O. for any song produced roughly between 1983 and 1996, I started singing along. The kids were abnormally quiet in the back; an untrained eye might even call them captivated. I realized as I sang that I had no idea what that song was about. I think I tried to figure it out, like 15 years ago, but now it was just birth, death and angels all intersecting in ambiguity. All I know for sure is that someone’s placenta was on the floor.
Doesn’t matter. My point is that somewhere in the early second verse, I could feel tears crawling up the back of my throat. What? Why? I don’t even understand this song. Sure, the guy sounds maudlin, but this is not a normal reaction to the given stimuli.
Unless, of course, you are a parent. We do all kinds of weird stuff we never used to do. Here is a list of actions that might out you as a parental unit:

  1. You’ve re-heated the SAME cup of coffee more than once. And now it’s cold again.
  2. While your kid(s) love finger foods, they’ve just lost a certain IT factor with you, since no matter what you do or how hard you scrub, your fingers smell vaguely of poop. No no, it’s actually not poop. It’s more like the smell of baby wipes. But you know where they’ve been.
  3. You consider sleeping till 8:00 a.m. a real treat.
  4. You consider going to bed past 10:00 p.m. to be “daredevil.”
  5. You’ve said ‘I need to go to the potty’ to people over the age of five.
  6. You’ll smell a somewhat questionable butt in public without a hint of self-consciousness.
  7. Watching a couple episodes of There’s Something About Raymond together (popcorn only if someone has energy to make it) passes for date night.
  8. Despite never ever coming that close to exceeding it, you continue to put an hour in the meter at the restaurant “just in case.”
  9. More than 1 percent of the food you consume has been pre-chewed.
  10. An exorbitant amount of your daily vocabulary ends in with a long E sound.
  11. Instead of firing stinkeye laserbeams at the kid melting down at the grocery store, you feel something akin to running out into the parking lot to discover it’s NOT your car alarm after all.
  12. Instead of wondering WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT PARENT? You now wonder WHAT HAS THAT MONSTER DONE TO HIS POOR PARENTS?
  13. You are reading this list.