I mean, of course my kids make me miserable.

Like, right now, all I’m trying to do is leave my home to take my children on a magical trip to the children’s museum, which is the exact place they begged me to go, where they will eat Nutella sandwiches and Cheetos, which is the exact lunch they asked for.

But we can’t do that. We can’t go to the fun place with the good food.

Because nobody will put on their fucking shoes.

I close my eyes and say it again: “Guys. Put on your shoes.”

Sure, sure sure sure sure sure sure sure OBVIOUSLY parenting is misery. I’m exhausted, terrified of Chinese factory chemicals, and I get one haircut a year, usually as a Mother’s Day present which would be nice except what I wanted for Mother’s Day was… wait --

SSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Hear that?

Yeah, that’s what I wanted for Mother’s Day. That, and to never, ever have to tell a child to put on SHOES. Ever again. Slap a bow on THAT, ZALES, and you'll REALLY take my breath away.

Parents are miserable, HASHTAG FACT.

Kids are the worst. They’re a special kind of hell. The most special kind of hell, really. The kind of hell that you’d cut a bitch if she fucked with it. That kind.

When my kids wake me up at 3 am with whatever unexpectedly-colored bodily fluid that has just leaked out of some heretofore unprecedented orifice, it’s miserable. I’m miserable. I’m so fucking miserable that it’s just like, FUCK, I just want to scratch my misery’s back until it falls asleep again, and sit next to it listening to it breathe for a minute. Like, BALL SACK, I should probably make chocolate chip pancakes tomorrow morning, you know? Like, SHIT I think we could all really use some post-traumatic SYRUP, right?

I want to sniff my misery’s hair. My misery makes me put on its shoes even though we all fucking know that MY MISERY KNOWS HOW TO PUT ON ITS OWN FUCKING SHOES and this whole “help me with my shoes” game is just a sad little dance that my misery makes me do in order to earn tantrum-free passage out of the house.

Then, when I put my hands on my misery’s heel to slip it into its shoe, and that heel fits in the cup of my palm like the perfect pestle in the just-right mortar, I smile down at my misery and say, “Oh love, I remember when you were a baby, your whole foot was as long as my thumb. Can you believe you were that small?”

And then I look at my miserable little misery and wonder when it got so big. And later I watch old videos of that miserable little misery gurgling/giggling at me while I fucking NAILED a gorilla impression and I cry because shit, misery gets big fast.

There are days that I’m so godforsakenly salt-flats dust-bowl DMV miserable that I imagine what my life would be like if I’d never made the choices that led me to this place where I pour my first glass of water of the day at 4:45 pm and my miserable child wanders over and drops a Hot Wheel into it, and not a nice new Hot Wheel. I’m talking about the one we found on under the Taco Bell cup on the beach. AND THEN I DRINK THE WATER ANYWAY.

WHAT HAVE I BECOME.

I imagine what my life would be like if I weren’t miserable, if I lived the kind of bougie, decadent, coastal elitist lifestyle where I could fill a water glass and then just walk away from it with reasonable certainty that I would not return to a cup full of jam-crusted pennies or whatever the fuck. I imagine it and it’s so fucking wonderful to imagine it, all the way up until I burst into tears.

This house would be so quiet without my misery. And someday, sooner than it seems, it will be.

GOD DAMN IT CHICKEN I SAID PUT ON YOUR FUCKING SHOES I KNOW YOU KNOW HOW.

You know what’s miserable? When you say the same thing seven times nicely and on the eighth time you scream SHOOOOOOES and your child’s like woah mom you don’t have to yell.

Don’t I? DON’T I THOUGH?

Did you even hear what I said, kid?

I said, I am so miserable that I would merrily decapitate baby animals with a hacksaw to ensure that this particular brand of misery will continue without any scary diagnoses or drug addictions until the end of my days. I am so Baby Shark, bad haircut miserable that I would bite down on a leather strap and saw off my own right hand if it would guarantee that I could be this miserable forever.

I KNOW! IT’S FUCKED UP! BUT BABY, A MOTHER’S LOVE IS A LITTLE FUCKED UP!

You know what mamas tell babies that they LOVE? They say, “I’M GONNA EAT YOU UP.” That’s some fucked up shit! We love you so much we feel the impulse to DESTROY YOU WITH OUR TEETH. We’ve BEEN fucked up on you, babies. We love you so inexplicably much that people who don’t have kids look at us with pity and mild alarm, but people who have kids know without asking, and that’s why we only eat at Red Robin now.

Because at the ‘Rob, every person at every sticky table is dead-eyed like a shark watching their shark uncle’s vacation slideshow, and they’re miserable, and we’re miserable, looking at all of our children who have all, just this second, taken off their shoes in the deadass middle of Red Robin, and we are all thinking, “All I want in this life is someone to promise me that you will be here to make me miserable forever.”

Yes, my children make me god damn miserable every single day and if they ever stopped I would pray to bleed out, but only after I hunted down the motherfucker who stopped them from making me miserable, and beat that motherfucker to death with a pair of SHOES, which are RIGHT HERE. CHICKEN.

I AM STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR SHOES.

POINTING AT THEM WITH MY FINGERS.

SHOES.

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