Tag: Humor

Posted in Everyday Life, Life With Kids

Maybe I’m The Screen Time Problem.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Here’s a short list of common sentences that, when said, doom the speaker to spectacular failure:

“That looks easy enough.”
“Instructions are for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
“When I have kids, they won’t spend all their time just staring at a screen!”

Every new parent has declared that last one with the kind of foolhardy confidence that would make Florida Man proud.  It’s the “Hold my beer,” of childcare.

I started with high aspirations around screen time and failed miserably, too.  A single cartoon per day just so I had a moment of quiet slowly expanded into 2 per day, then 3.  Then Covid happened and the official household policy became “No, we still can’t do anything.  Go watch 17 hours of ‘Octonauts’ and try not to think about it.”  Between remote work and cabin-bound boredom, everyone in our house started living with a screen from dawn til dusk.  I’m pretty sure my dogs were binging old episodes of “Lassie” after I went to bed.

Eventually we got to go outside again and the screens started controlling our lives a little less. That is, they controlled our lives less until a few months ago when I did something idiotic that restarted the whole problem: after a thousand requests, I finally caved and bought my 9-year-old daughter Sloan a small tablet for her birthday.

I expected her to fall face first into it, which she did, but I was also expecting her to eventually stop using the thing as much once the novelty wore off, which she didn’t.  Not even close.

In fairness, it was a really rough summer for kids activities, so I wasn’t too hung up on her spending all day with the tablet at the time.  Like most of the country, Tulsa was dangerously hot, and no one was spending much time outside.  It’s not like there was a plethora of better outdoor options for her, particularly since Sloan shares my DNA and is therefore able to get sunburnt at night under a heavy cloud cover.

…But now we’ve reached the point where I’d prefer she chance it on the sunburn, because this new screen has introduced a deluge of just the worst content.  Stuff that made me realize that the half-hour toy commercials masquerading as kids’ TV that I grew up with never went away, they just changed shape. Also, they moved to YouTube, which feels way worse, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

I’ll admit there’s great content for a kid to find online.  There’s art apps that really bring out a kid’s creativity, science shows that put Bill Nye to shame, games that teach while still being fun, and more.

…But there’s also the other stuff.  Once you have a kid with a tablet you learn just how much digital detritus is out there that see kids as an audience with poor sales resistance and low standards for quality. 

Endless games designed to trick kids into making microtransactions?  We’ve dealt with those.  Unboxing videos funded by toy companies?  Yup, those too.  Reaction videos TO reaction videos?  Nobody at any age needs that in their life. I don’t know what the sales gimmick of terrible kids’ songs with sped up vocal tracks is, but can’t imagine the intentions of whoever made “It’s Hailing Taquitos” are anything less than sinister.

If I have to have this in my life, you do to.

So between the unhealthy amounts of screen time and the influx of low quality media, I think the only thing that’s keeping me from just yeeting Sloan’s tablet down a well is that I’m absolutely no better about my screen use than she is.

I’m not proud of that confession, but yeah: everything she does, I do too.  Head constantly buried in a screen?  I do that.  Playing mobile games designed to show me commercials every few minutes?   Gonna plead guilty to that one, too.  Watching reaction videos to reaction videos?  No…but reading think pieces about other think pieces probably doesn’t put me in any position to be critical of their video equivalent.

Plus, unlike Sloan, I’m on social media, which my wife and I at least had the forethought to prohibit.  Comparing a few kids’ mobile games to Twitter and Facebook is like comparing the energy you get from a sip of herbal tea versus chugging a Big Gulp cup full of cocaine.  It’s digital addiction on a whole other level.

What kind of position am I in to tell her to put down the tablet if I’m saying it with a smartphone in my hand?  When I was a kid, a favorite saying of adults was that TV and video games would “Rot your brain.”  If I say that to Sloan about her tablet, what am I implying about myself?  Clearly, so long as she sees me with my nose buried in my phone, I don’t actually believe what I’m saying.  That’s no way to teach positive habits.

Maybe the problem isn’t clickbait videos or shady apps; maybe the problem is me.

I don’t intend to give up my smartphone, and I’m not implying that you should.  What I am admitting, though, is that my kids are going to take a lot of their cues about how they interact with technology from me.  Teaching my kids about healthy limits probably involves a lot more teaching myself healthy limits than I’ve wanted to admit.

…That and maybe issue a blanket ban on songs with sped up, autotuned vocals, because if I hear any more of that chipmunk voice I’m gonna be ready to dismiss all of recorded sound as a failed experiment.

Posted in Life With Kids

Maybe Supervising Kids Isn’t Possible.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

“Dad the TV doesn’t work!”
“Did it just turn off? Did you check the plug?”
“No, it’s still on. There’s just a big black circle in the middle of the screen.”

I think every parent has a moment where they feel completely inadequate because the kid has just done something so pointlessly destructive you feel that any halfway competent adult could’ve prevented it. This moment was one of those times for me.

I went upstairs to check the alleged malfunctioning TV and there was, in fact, a big black circle about 3 inches across right in the middle of the screen, like a black hole halfway through devouring Clifford and pals.  This was not the way a television looks because of an electrical malfunction; this is the way a TV looks because it has been hit by something.

For Christmas that year, Sloan had received a kit for making blanket forts. It’s a great toy: a mix of 18” plastic sticks and balls full of holes that the sticks fit into, like gigantic Tinker Toys. Combine them the right way and you can make the framework for the kind of epic blanket forts that the kids go crazy for. Each of the joints is a little smaller than a baseball, or, coincidentally, about the size of the big black spot sitting at the center of my television.

Sloan had taken a single stick and ball from the fort building kit and cobbled them into something resembling a medieval mace. She hadn’t even bothered to set it down before calling me upstairs, and was fidgeting with her makeshift TV destroyer as she claimed complete ignorance of how the damage had occurred.

The perfect toy for destroying electronics and/or reenacting the Battle of Hastings.

“So you have NO IDEA what happened to this TV?”
“No.  None. It just stopped working.”

I honestly couldn’t decide whether to be angry or impressed with the sheer audacity.  She must’ve known that I knew what had happened. This had all the gall of somebody visiting a police station to report their spouse missing while still soaked in blood and clutching a shovel.

“Sloan, I think you took that mace you’re holding and hit the TV with it.”
“OKAY BUT IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!!!”    

Honestly, I wasn’t really all that upset about the broken TV. It was a Walmart clearance set that was already crumby when I’d bought it a decade before and got hot enough to toast a marshmallow if you left it on for more than an hour.  I wasn’t gonna mourn its loss.

Even the lie didn’t bother me all that much. We expect a lot of honesty from kids that we don’t from other adults.  I might have panicked and claimed ignorance, too.  Most people don’t learn crucial life skills like “Hide the mace!” from a childhood marked by excessive honesty.

What really bothered me was the fact that the whole event made me feel completely incompetent.

Occasionally videos of stuff like this happening go viral. Some kids are running around and they knock over a TV or break a window, and the commenters all immediately shout the same conclusion: “BAD PARENTING!”

I try not to respond when I see videos like that, mainly because nothing riles up the angry internet hate machine quite like videos of unsupervised kids behaving badly and I don’t want a thousand angry replies, but also because you can’t do parenting forensics from 30 seconds of nanny-cam video.  I yearn to get into one of those comments sections and scream “Maybe mom had to go take a dump!!  Does that make her a bad parent?  Did she not have YOUR PERMISSION to take a dump?!”

There’s this spreading narrative that responsible parenting means constant, round the clock vigilance and I don’t know how anyone doesn’t immediately see the logical flaw in that.  Any accident, injury, or chaos, no matter how minor, must be the result of lax parenting to satisfy the narrative. 

There must always be blame; nothing just happens. 

A favorite chestnut of back-seat caregivers is “If mom would just put down her phone, then [destructive childhood behavior #47381] wouldn’t have happened!”  Does she also need to put down her toothbrush?  That’s 9 minutes per day of split attention.  Does she need to put down her lunch?  Should she put down the soap and comb?  Does she need to put down the toilet paper and just hold it all day to appease you, internet?!  At what point is a parent allowed 4 minutes to meet their own basic needs without gaining your ire?!

Sorry: I got a little hot there.  That paragraph had been fermenting for a while.

The overall point I’m clumsily stumbling towards is that tireless supervision is probably impossible (especially in an era of increasing at-home work) and I think parents are carrying a lot of guilt over it. 

Broken TV?  Guilt, even if you were busy doing something responsible at the time (for example, doing the dishes, like I was when Sloan destroyed the set).  Child hurt themself?  Guilt, even if your attention was only split because you were remotely working to try and keep a roof over the kid’s head.  God forbid they break something while you were taking a moment to relax.  Guilt for days even if you fully understand that time to rest is critical to your health and sanity.

I guess my big takeaway is that there’s no real point to feeling guilt over all the chaos kids create because their chaos is unavoidable to a degree we’re uncomfortable admitting.  I don’t know that it’s helpful to you or them to carry every chipped tooth and broken knick-knack as a badge of shame.

…What I do know is helpful, however, is getting one of those TV mounting kits and putting it out of reach of any improvised battle clubs.  Possibly behind a sheet of inch-thick lucite; you know kids.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Kid's Books/Movies/TV

My Kids Are Ruining My Nostalgia.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Recently my eldest daughter, Sloan, idly mused that she might like to watch a superhero cartoon.  Having grown up in the glory days of cartoon violence myself, my eyes lit up like runway beacons and I told her I had just what she was looking for.  We kicked up a streaming service and I, with the care and reverence of a sommelier decanting a 1961 Bordeaux, loaded up “Batman: The Animated Series.”

I selected an episode purely at random and settled in to enjoy a timeless classic of kids’ action TV.  She liked the noir opening, but after about 10 minutes came the dreaded phrase:

“This is kind of boring.”

…and all you middle-aged guys might want to get a fainting couch ready, because I agreed with her.

Put the pitchforks down, fellas.  On some level I suspect you know that it’s true.  “Batman” holds up better than most, but like everything else from the era, the shine is really starting to dull.

Thanks to the internet, anyone with a phone and a relaxed view on copyright law can revisit any television show, movie, song, book, or video game from any time basically since the dawn of recorded media, often for free. I brought up an episode of “Dinosaucers” on YouTube while I was writing this just to prove that I could, and as anyone who has tried to revisit their own childhood favorites online can attest, it sucked to a shocking degree.

Go back to anything you loved as a kid as a middle-aged adult and you’re in for disappointment.  Forget bargain-basement relics like “Dinosaucers,” even the popular stuff you loved was terrible.  When I was a kid, “Ninja Turtles” was the biggest childhood brand in the world.  Produce that show today and the rock bottom quality would be instantly meme-worthy.  When I told my friend in third grade that his drawing of Donatello looked “Just like the show!”, maybe that was saying a lot more about the animators than it was about my buddy, Brett.

Pictured: the flagship product of a billion dollar media property.

The movies I loved were full of bad scripts and editing mistakes.  The great music of the time was buried under a flood of easy listening white noise.  I bought one of those sketchy little retro video game consoles recently, and it might as well have advertised itself as containing “Over 5,000 preloaded disappointments.”

So why am I ranting about old cartoons on my parenting column?  Because having children has been absolutely terrible for my nostalgia.

I want to share with Sloan all the things I loved at her age.  In my mind, it’s always a great bonding experience for the two of us and, bonus, a chance for me to dunk on the modern world with how great everything was in 1992…except that when I try anything like that, Sloan gets bored and it becomes ABUNDANTLY clear that 1992 was hot garbage. 

That’s a curated look at the early 90s, too; if the kid knew just how much line dancing we all did to “Achy Breaky Heart” that year, Sloan might never look at me with a glimmer of respect ever again.

Did my parents experience this?  I remember my mom trying to sell me on an episode of “Beany and Cecil” once that was airing at dawn on some static-y UHF station.  The look of confused disappointment that crossed her face when she sat to watch a few minutes of it with me makes a lot more sense now than it did when I was 8.  That was a show good enough to stay in syndication for 30 years, too; she didn’t even have the option of watching any of the bad stuff from her own childhood.

This whole experience of having my nostalgia shot down has been surprisingly humbling.  More than just being vastly mistaken about the merits of 80’s television, what else about being my daughter’s age have I forgotten?  What am I viewing with rose-colored glasses, and what awful experiences from childhood have the last 30 years made me forget?  How much of my kids’ lives am I misjudging because of selective memory?

I use phrases like “That’ll matter less to you as you get older” pretty often as a parent, but that only seems like a good response to me because I am older.  Today, for example, Sloan told me that she sometimes felt embarrassed because she’s one of the slowest runners in her class.  That’s a problem I empathize with.  I’ve got slightly uneven length legs, and I ran like a tortoise with a hamstring injury all through school as a result.  My response?   “Being able to run fast matters a lot less to you as you get older.”

What possible help is that to her?  Is she going to stop feeling stress on the promise that her current problems won’t matter several decades from now?  Maybe next week someone can tell me that I shouldn’t waste my money on Rogaine because having hair doesn’t matter as much when you’re 102.

Maybe it’s a stretch to say there’s something meaningful to be gleaned from terrible 80s cartoons, but realizing that my memories of my own childhood are so flawed is humbling.  At the very least, it’s a great reminder that when I try to compare my kids’ lives to my own childhood, I might not always know what I’m talking about.

…It’s also a great reminder to let the shows I loved as a kid remain unblemished in my memories instead of buying the boxed set.  Just leave it on the shelf, 40-year-olds; your kids will not enjoy “Thundercats,” and neither will you.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Everyday Life

Is Middle Aged Second Puberty A Thing?

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

There have been plenty of things my kids have done that have upset me. Messes they’ve made, things they’ve broken, money they’ve cost…but there’s one thing that upsets me more than I can even put into words:

They’ve turned me into a person who wakes up early on the weekend without an alarm clock.

I was always a night person.  I still am.  Half the time I write this column long after everyone else in the house has gone to bed, and only finish up after 2.  Then I lay down, doze for what feels like 4 seconds, and wake up in time to watch the first light of dawn pool in the hollows beneath my eyes, because I can’t NOT wake up with the sunrise anymore.

It’s not that I’m even getting up to do anything. I don’t spring out of bed and start my day on a high note.  I’ll stagger to the kitchen for a coffee or an energy drink, sip it bleary-eyed while leaning on the kitchen counter, and ignore my children (who are already wide awake and yelling for my attention) as my cells fight to be first in line for every micro-gram of caffeine coming into my body. 

I will not start my day with a morning workout, I will not prepare a healthy breakfast, and I absolutely, positively will not seize the day.  Carpe DENIED.

…and yet, for all my laying in bed willing myself towards another hour of sleep, I just can’t seal the deal, and there’s more to it than just the fact that my kids start shouting while the moon is still up.  It’s because I’m not Matt anymore; I’m Dad now, and dads my age get up early whether the kids wake them up or not.

I’m becoming a middle-aged male stereotype, and don’t know how to feel about it.  I mean, I REALLY hit all the bases: I wake up early, wear cargo shorts all the time, love to grill, and bore my kids with advice on the importance of maintenance.  I tell dumb jokes, worry about my hairline, grumble about the thermostat, and even smoke a pipe like some sweater-vest clad dad from a 50s sitcom.

I didn’t want any of these things, they just sort of happened.  You own a home for a long time, so eventually you begin to care about how it’s maintained.  Your kids want you to spend time outside with them, so you spend more time outdoors grilling and mowing the lawn, and put on cargo shorts to store all the acorns and weird rocks they want you to hold.  It’s not a change you intentionally set out to make; you build this new version of yourself slowly, one sensible New Balance sneaker at a time.

So looking at all those changes in myself, there’s a question that really worries me:

Is there a second puberty you hit around 40 that no one tells you about beforehand?

I know that sounds like a joke, but it’s the closest comparison I can draw.  I’ve changed in both my mind and body; I’m not the guy I was in my 20s and 30s anymore.  It’s everything about the first puberty, but reversed: instead of raging hormones turning your emotions up to 11, you finally start to chill and not take things so seriously.  Your drives for money and sex relax and shift towards family.  That “Hair in new places” thing happens again, except now it’s more “Hair starts disappearing from places you’d prefer it stayed put.”

I have new priorities, and my old priorities are starting to seem kind of hollow.  It feels like looking at your old toys about the time you turned 13: you still remember why you liked them originally, but just don’t feel it anymore.

Just one example: I don’t need to be the first to know about trendy new pop culture anymore, and I don’t feel like not knowing about it first is shameful.  That ate up so much of my energy as a young man.  I felt so cool every time I knew about some indie band or Sundance movie before my friends, and like a complete loser every time I came late to that party.  Now I have no idea why I cared.  All I have to show for all that spent energy is a box of scratched CDs I never enjoyed that much in the first place and an old Maximo Park T-shirt that aged as well as leftover guacamole.

Ever since I passed 35, it feels like I’m shedding those sorts of impulses, and growing up all over again.  I wasn’t expecting to go through a second puberty, but it’s becoming abundantly clear that’s happening, whether I want it or not.

…I guess if I’m gonna do this, I might as well do it right: time to put on some Dashboard Confessional and get out my mopey poetry journal.  If any of you need me, I’ll be in my room.

Posted in Everyday Life

It’s Time We Admit That Kids Are Kinda Gross.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I’m tired of pretending my kids are something they aren’t.  Every social media post, every family photo, every adorable little toddler outfit…they’re all trying to use cuteness to cover up the same basic truth:

My children are gross.  Yours, too.

Babies?  Gross.  Toddlers?  Gross.  Kids?  Gross.  Teenagers?  I don’t have a teenage kid, but based on my own experiences at that age, EEEEEWWWWWWWW.

It’s just a reality of being young: you have no idea what the social norms around cleanliness are yet.  Kids don’t understand that leaving a half-drunk cup of milk in the back of a closet just isn’t done.  All they know is that taking that cup to the sink costs valuable seconds that could’ve been spent fingerpainting, and that time spent washing their hands after fingerpainting costs valuable seconds that could’ve been spent touching all the clean laundry.

I’ve mentioned how hard it is to keep a house clean with kids before.  I’m beginning to realize it isn’t a failing on my part, and it’s not really a failing on the kid’s part, either.  It’s nobody’s fault.  There’s just a span of time where kids have enough mobility to make a serious mess and no idea how to keep their living space hygienic or why it matters.  From 10 months up until they get their first apartment, kids might as well just be some form of unusually tall racoon.

For example, while I was writing that last paragraph, my 2-year-old, Penny, who had been quietly playing on the floor behind me, started giggling.  I didn’t think much of if until a pattern emerged: laughter, 6 second pause, laughter, 6 second pause, etc.  So I turned around to see what the joke was.

She was taking big sips from her spill-proof cup (a detail that will be funny in 2 seconds), waiting a moment, and then opening her mouth to let huge mouthfuls of milk spill all over herself.  The kid looked like she’d just gotten out of a pool.  Drenched in milk from head to toe.  Kids love to laugh at a milk mustache; Penny had milk leg hair.

How do you even address something like that?  A 2-year-old can grasp the idea of “Don’t do that!”, but how would you even go about preventing that kind of event?  What instruction could you give ahead of time?  “Don’t marinate yourself in milk over a shag rug,” isn’t the kind of instruction I ever expected to come up.

(…I don’t even know what I’m gonna do about that rug.  There’s no cleaning product in the world that’s gonna stop that thing from smelling like a bowl of feta cheese that’s been left out in the sun.  Right now my plan is to just let the dogs lick it nonstop for the next hour and hope for the best.)

I’m beginning to wonder if the idea of dealing with a future mess is too abstract for a kid’s sense of cause and effect.  Granted, Penny is still too young to understand that milk becomes disgusting when it soaks into shag carpeting, but it’s not just toddlers that do this kind of thing. 

A year ago my older kid (7 at the time) had to have all of her snack-times restricted to the dining room table.  I had assumed that, so long as she was bringing her dishes to the sink, it was ok for her to eat a snack on the couch while watching cartoons.  That was before I learned that when she had a bite of food she didn’t want, she was stuffing it between the couch cushions.  I had no idea until I went looking for a lost television remote and instead found two banana peels and a dozen rotting grape tomatoes.  The rest of that evening wasn’t fun for anybody.

What stuck with me, though, is that she seemed shocked that they were still there.  The kid understands object permanence, but seemingly had this idea that the area between the couch cushions was like ejecting her trash into another dimension.  Surely, reality doesn’t persist there.  It’s the kid’s version of dumping trash into the ocean: once it’s out to sea, it’s gone forever!  …right up until you’re eating a tuna sandwich that contains as much plastic as a G.I. Joe.

I’m trying to take a long view of all this and see it as a potential learning opportunity.  It’s never too early to learn that a small mess left to fester now becomes a disgusting ordeal to deal with later.  The attitude that would rather cram a mess under a bed than pick it up is the same attitude that turns a credit card debt into a quagmire of late fees or lets a minor cavity grow into a root canal.  Better to try and instill an understanding of long-term cause and effect when the stakes are just a gross mess to clean up and a lingering smell to live with.

…but in the meantime, I might need to start tracking milk in this house with the kind of tenacity that the  UN uses to keep tabs on plutonium, because I am DONE will half full sippy cups of curdled yogurt under the furniture.

Posted in Life With Kids

I Am Drowning In Childhood Keepsakes.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I’m no stranger to playing the Tooth Fairy.  Granted, the costume would fit me a little weird, but as to the actual act of replacing a tooth with two dollars without waking the kid up, I’m a pro.  But there’s one finer point of playing the tooth Tooth Fairy that’s eluded me until now, and I finally want an answer:

What the hell am I supposed to be doing with all these teeth?

Currently, I have a baggie containing my 8-year-old’s upper right incisor stashed in a desk drawer.  I’m telling myself it’s only there temporarily, but that implies I have some grander design for the tooth.  I do not.  Sloan, likewise, has informed me that the corresponding tooth on the left side is also really loose.  By this time next week, I expect to have paid 4 dollars for used human body parts (maybe earlier if her school has another mandatory loose tooth extraction event, more commonly known as ‘Dodgeball’).

I really have no clue what is expected of me every time I come into possession of another one of her teeth.  I’ve thrown away a few and felt absurdly guilty about it.  “This is your little girl’s central incisor!” my inner monologue seems to shout at me, “Don’t you want to stash it away forever to remember this moment?!  Don’t you want to spend 275 dollars on a gold trimmed keepsake box like some kind of medieval reliquary displaying the toenail of St. James?”

Seriously: $275.  The same place also sells a 2 inch porcelain Noah’s Ark toy that costs as much as my first car.

But for all that guilt, do I really want to keep these things?  Will I ever get out the pouch of loose teeth that I’ve kept like some kind of rag-and-bone man to coo adoringly over them?  I can’t really see myself ever doing that.  Maybe if it were the little stuffed Clifford doll that she took everywhere as a toddler I could; that’s a relic of early childhood with a lot of emotional history attached.  I don’t feel that way about her second bicuspid.

Of course, the whole question of whether to keep the teeth is just one outgrowth of the fact that none of us parents seem to have any clue what we should or shouldn’t be keeping.  Forget just teeth; anything that spends more than 5 minutes in the kid’s presence feels like there’s some pressure to keep in perpetuity. 

Baby booties?  You’re supposed to keep those, apparently.  Baby blanket?  Store that thing forever.  Drawings and crafts?  

Dear god, where do you even begin with the drawings and crafts…? 

I have like 3 banker boxes worth of drawings sitting in my garage, plus smaller caches of rumpled, doodled-on paper scattered throughout the house.  None of these drawings will ever get looked at again, but for some reason it seems important that I keep them.  It might just be easier for me to pre-shred them and make mouse nests out of the remains myself. 

It’s not just vague guilt keeping me from tossing this felled-redwood worth of paper into the trash, either.  Kids also seem to have a sixth sense for the location of every doodle they’ve ever produced, and will guard this mountain of crumpled printer paper like some kind of dragon that just raided an Office Max.

At least the drawings can be stacked; it’s the crafts that I struggle most with.  The crafts take up 50 times as much space, break any time they’re touched, and shed a trail of beads and sequins like a bedazzled golden retriever.  Once the kid discovers those craft chests you might as well just accept that your entire house is going to look like a parade float just exploded and throwing away any spec of it will be met with resistance.

This kit contains roughly 2,000 pieces and is somehow capable of producing 3,000 things that you’ll be expected to store.

Now that my younger daughter is beginning to reach drawing age, I’m worried that it’s either time to make some major cuts to what I’m willing to store, or just accept that my new role in life is guardian of an ever growing stockpile of barely remembered keepsakes.  I’ll definitely need another fridge to hang all her best artwork on, and possibly a second garage for the rest.

…Anyway, my kid just walked past chewing gum, so I probably need to go hit an ATM before the end of the day.  All these teeth aren’t gonna pay for themselves.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column

Posted in Life With Kids

Who Should Plan A Kid’s First Concert?

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

A few weeks back, my 8-year-old daughter Sloan finally got to experience one of the growing up “firsts” that I’ve been looking forward to for years:

I took her to her first rock concert.

I hadn’t planned to take Sloan to a concert, but scheduling conflicts with the couple my wife and I had planned to go on a double date with resulted in a spare ticket.  You’d think that modern concert tickets costing more than a human kidney would’ve ensured more diligent schedule checking, but the result was getting to take my kid to her first concert, so I’m calling it a win.

The concert in question?  Bruce Springsteen.

Now I’ve been to like 200 concerts in my life and have the hearing of a nineteenth century cannoneer to prove it.  From my experience, Springsteen is the gold standard of live acts, and I was really happy I got to share such a cool show with her.  My first concert was very special to me: Fiona Apple opening for the Counting Crows (forever giving me the right to scoff at kids who thought mall-punk was “Emo” ten years later).  I wanted Sloan to have a really memorable first show, too.

So we got our tickets together, picked out our coolest concert clothes, got her a set of ear protectors meant for target shooting (because my wife Sara mandated it, just to establish that she is both a responsible parent and a total square), and we went to see The Boss.

The show was a blast.  Bruce still has the energy of a singer half his age, the band brought a full horn line, which was fun and unusual, Sloan identified no less than 3 songs as the new Best Song Ever™, and her energy lasted almost to the end of the nearly 3-hour show.  Pretty good for an 8-year-old.  We even had the incredibly cool luck that a friend of mine was working as a stagehand for the venue, found one of the band’s discarded setlists, and gave it to Sloan as a memento from her first concert:

This is as hard as an excel spreadsheet can possibly rock.

So bearing all that awesomeness in mind, I still worry that making this her first concert might have been a mistake on my part.

I mentioned having a memorable first concert earlier.  The Counting Crows are great to see live (or at least they were in 1996) and I still have fond memories of how fun and unique that show was, with most of the songs straying far from the album versions I was familiar with. 

…But the fact that the first band I saw was any good live was entirely by chance.  They were a band I liked, my dad bought us tickets, and everything else was pure dumb luck.   I also liked the Gin Blossoms at the time (look, it was the mid 90’s; I’m not proud of these name drops), who I would eventually end up seeing at a festival years later.  They were…less fun.  The fact that I left my first show thinking “Concerts are amazing!” instead of “These songs are free on the radio, and the singer doesn’t sound drunk,” was entirely down to luck.

What I wonder about, though, is if I might’ve still had an amazing time no matter how bad the band was.  Maybe more important than it being a good show was the fact that I was seeing a band that I liked, not just a band that my dad enjoyed.  I loved those moaning, post-grunge, sad sacks and was ready to celebrate it. 

So what’s the most important part about a kid’s first concert: seeing a good show or establishing themself as a person with their own unique tastes in music?

Sloan wasn’t much of a Springsteen fan before going to see the show.  She knew a few of the more famous songs and is certainly a fan now, but that’s a result of going to see the concert and not how her tastes developed naturally.  I’m the fan.  As much as she wound up enjoying the show, if I’d asked her what she would’ve liked her first concert to be 2 months ago, Bruce would not have come up.

Maybe the ages we experienced our first concert at are enough to justify me taking the reins on this.  She’s still shy of 9, whereas I was 14.  A young teen wants to define themselves, but at her age, being into the same stuff as your dad is still cool.

…Cool to her, I mean. As a balding, pudgy 40-year-old, things that I like actively become less cool by association.  At this point if I bought a Maserati people would be calling them “Dad wagons” within 3 months.

Cargo shorts, socks with sandals, 630 horses of raw Italian power…dads, amiright?

So all that to say, maybe I need to prioritize taking her to see a band that she likes.  I’m not thrilled at the idea of sitting through 2 hours of the Imagine Dragons concert she would definitely ask to attend, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she’d look back on hearing that stupid robot voice going “thun-DDEERR?” with a lot of affection if it was something she picked.

I’m glad that we got to experience her first concert together, but I just want to make sure that I balance sharing the cool stuff that I enjoy with learning about the cool stuff that she enjoys.

…Also I need to stop letting Sloan come in and read over my shoulder while I’m writing, because she read the last couple paragraphs and immediately wanted to hear “Thunder.”  Guess I better work on learning the lyrics to this song; If that’s our next concert, I might as well make it special.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column

Posted in Everyday Life

The ER Is A Weird Place To Write Comedy.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I should open by saying that I’m typing this column on my phone in the waiting room of a hospital ER.  I had mild heart attack symptoms earlier tonight, hyped myself up until “mild symptoms” became “terrifying certainty,” and went to the hospital.  Now I’ve been sitting here in the emergency room, probably fine, and feeling like a complete tool for the last 5 hours.

I’ve never had an issue with false alarm hospital visits before.  Some people will go at the drop of a hat, but I really dislike seeing the doctor and tend to avoid going until I’m sick enough to start hearing dead relatives beckon from beyond the grave.  The only other time I’ve ever gotten scared enough to visit the ER, I went into emergency appendectomy surgery within a couple of hours.

What I’m saying is that unnecessary doctor visits are not a pattern of behavior for me, but if I went every time I wondered whether or not I should go, I could probably list the hospital as a forwarding address for my mail.

I hate feeling any unexpected physical symptoms, because no one has figured out a good system for what is and isn’t ER worthy. The easiest way to decide if something is serious enough for a trip to the hospital is a Google search, which is also the worst possible place to turn for medical advice.  Beyond the sites shilling conspiracy theories, metaphysical healing, and miscellaneous mumbo-jumbo, even the serious sites are no help. Nobody wants to get sued, so every symptom, no matter how minor, comes with a recommendation to visit the emergency room.

Short of breath?  ER.

Bad gas?  ER.

Disappointed with the last “Avengers” movie?  ER.  Better safe than sorry.

“We thought the time travel subplot was pretty thin, too, but you should probably get checked for a stroke just in case.”

Regular readers know that I mostly write about my experiences as a parent, and today is no exception.  I’m finding that the older I get, the more my medical decisions are made with my spouse and kids in mind.  I’m sitting in this miserable waiting room, trying to type next to a guy whose combined snoring and sleep farts could probably drown out a basalt mining drill, purely for my family.

(Seriously: some doctor is gonna miss a code blue because this dude is louder than a marching band getting hit by a train.  I didn’t know the human body could produce this kind of volume.)

Supposedly married men live longer, and I think I can see why.  The long running joke among guys is that a spouse will make you go to the doctor rather than just duct tape your leg back on or whatever, and yeah: that isn’t entirely wrong.  I’ve gone to the doctor before purely because my wife Sara drug me there by the scruff of the neck (metaphorically, though my neck scruff is probably equal to the task).  It’s more than that, though; once you have a family, your health stops being about you.

When I was in my 20s, dropping dead unexpectedly never really scared me all that much.  Some pain, a moment of wondering if you still have time to erase your weird browser history, and then you’re forever beyond having to give a damn.  Seemed pretty easy. Your mom will cry, someone will have to clean your grungy apartment, and then everyone will move on with their lives.  It’s the ultimate no call, no show.

…But dying unexpectedly with a family absolutely scares the crap out of me.

What would happen to my kids if I disappeared tomorrow?  Would my wife have to break the news to them?  I can’t imagine having to do that if the roles were reversed.  Who would take care of the 3 of them?  Would Sara’s mom move in to help with the kids?

I don’t think I’m here because I’m worried about my heart; I’m here because I’m worried about how my heart effects my spouse and children.

Between starting this column and now, I’ve been discharged from the hospital.  An EKG, a chest x-ray, and 2 sets of blood work confirmed that my heart is fine.  Honestly, by the standards of a heavy 40-year-old, it’s actually in pretty good shape.  For all the drama of tonight I guess I had nothing to worry about, besides what this is going to cost me and finding a ride home at 2 AM.

…But I think I need to view this as a disaster averted instead of a clean bill of health.  A Get-Out-of-Hospital-Free card I lucked into, not something I’ve earned.  I’ve never paid a ton of attention to trying to stay fit because I like who I am.  My lackluster physique isn’t something I’m ashamed of, but I’m beginning to realize it’s something I need to be prioritizing, because my health isn’t my own any more.  It’s time to take it seriously.

It’s also time to call the hospital and see if I can wheedle out what was wrong with the snore-farter, because whatever he has, I don’t want it.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column. 

Posted in Life With Kids

I Am Routinely Out-Negotiated By Children.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

The problem with trying to negotiate with kids is that they’re too good at it.

Try to get a kid to do anything they don’t want to and it becomes immediately clear that you’re in for a spirited debate.  Bedtime, in particular, quickly becomes a gauntlet of increasingly outlandish add-ons and upsells, like a used car salesmen trying to talk you into artisanal wiper fluid and galvanized floor mats.

They want just one more story.  Just a tuck in.  Just a goodnight hug.  Just a hug for their favorite stuffed animal.  Just a few minutes to use the toilet again.  Just another tuck in now that they’re back from the bathroom. Just a quick glass of water.  Just move the nightlight across the room because it’s too bright.  Just a moment to change into her green pajamas.  Just one more hug.  The extra hug would be sweet if it actually felt like the point was showing affection instead of setting back the bedtime clock another 8 seconds.

I’m beginning to think we’re sleeping on the idea of children as high-stakes negotiators.  If you gave a 6-year-old the stipulation that for every hostage they freed they could stay up an extra 10 minutes, then every police standoff would be over in under an hour, with the lead negotiator also securing 3 stories, 2 lullabies, and an episode of “Bluey.”

It extends past bedtime into everything they do.  Trips to the park?  They will try to haggle out extension after extension.  I’m not talking about “Dad can we stay just 10 more minutes?” either.  I’ve refused that and gotten progressively shorter requests all the way down to “JUST 15 MORE SECONDS?!”  Every negotiation ends with a new attempt to secure jjjuuussssttt a little more.

In fairness to her debate skill, she probably got several minutes of extra playtime while I ranted about how pointlessly trivial a 15 second extension was. Point to her.

I think kids are such hard negotiators is because they understand that they can try to manipulate every situation for their maximum gain long before they understand when they shouldn’t.  I seem to remember Jeff Goldbulm giving a speech about that attitude in “Jurassic Park.”

This isn’t the scene where he makes the speech, I just refuse to pass up any opportunity to use this photo.

When our toddler was a month old and my wife and I were subsisting on a series of short naps instead of real sleep, I remember saying that if our baby had a button that would keep the two of us from sleeping for 6 months, she’d press it twice. 

Not vindictively (though when you haven’t slept more than 45 minutes at a stretch for weeks, everything feels vindictive), babies just don’t understand that other people have needs. All she knows is that her life is easier when mom and dad are awake, so her tiny hands would happily hammer that magic insomnia button like this was a game of “Galaga.”

…And yeah: it’s obvious that a baby isn’t going to understand that other people are affected by them crying all night.  I get that.  No one expects a 2-month-old to be polite about their nighttime feeding schedule.  What I didn’t realize until after I had kids, though, is that every interaction with them for YEARS still contains some element of them not understanding that 3:38 AM is an impolite time to try and recreate the sounds of a soccer riot.

Case in point: at the moment my 8-year-old is going through some eating resistance and trying to argue down the amount of dinner she’s required to eat.  What she doesn’t seem to understand yet is that this is kind of insulting to the person who went to the trouble of cooking.  She seems genuinely confused that trying to debate her way out of eating a single unnecessary crumb of the stir-fry I just made might be a little hurtful.

Meanwhile, I’m confused at how a dish she described as being “better than a thousand Christmas mornings” last week suddenly tastes like cat litter with soy sauce on it today.

She isn’t trying to be a jerk about the food.  What she struggles with is the abstraction of people seeing their work as an extension of themselves, and insulting it is the same as insulting them.  If it were something more direct, like coming up to me and stating “Dad, you smell like if a fish died twice,” she’d recognize that would be hurtful. 

(She has actually come up to me and said that exact sentence, but I was too busy laughing at that line to ever follow up and find out if it was meant seriously.)

So every day we have the same argument: how much of this horrible food does she have to eat before she’s allowed to leave the table.  Amounts will be negotiated, counter offers will be made, food will be redistributed around the plate in an extremely bad-faith attempt to skirt under the required dinner threshold.  It feels like trying to get North Korea to eat its vegetables.

I talked about the idea of kids dealing with a lack of autonomy a couple of weeks ago and I suspect this may be a continuation of that.  So I think I understand why they fight tooth and nail over every issue, so now the big question is this:

How do I encourage it?

Yeah, you heard me: how do I encourage it?  Like many of you, I have gotten jerked around by people better at negotiating than I am all my life.  How much have I overpaid for cars?  How much have I been underpaid for labor?  If I can raise a kid willing to advocate for herself and drag every cent out of a boss who wants to short her salary in 20 years, I am FINE to put up with picky eating and hard bedtimes now.

Willful child?  No: future badass.

…just be a little more tactful about badmouthing my stir-fry, ok?

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Life With Kids

Someday I’ll Miss Chuck E. Cheese.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Monday I took my kids to the park.  I didn’t really want to.

I didn’t want to because I was sick, the kitchen needed to be cleaned, there were clothes to fold, the dishes were piled up, I had dinner to make, and I was holding some outlandish fantasy that I’d be able to do it all in time to watch Monday Night Football.

…But perfect weather is rare in Oklahoma and school was out for the holiday, so I relented and took both kids to the park.  It was a great. Sloan (8-years-old) played on the playground and Penny (18-months-old) stuffed dirt up her nose.  Then everyone hurt themselves and cried, demanded to go home, cried again because I agreed to take them home, and restarted the whole process back at the dirt-up-nose phase.  Pretty standard park trip.  4 out of 5; would recommend.

The real reason I took them, though, is the looming specter of The Last Time They Ask. 

The last time Sloan asks to go to the playground is coming.  The last time I’m handed a stuffed animal to hug as part of the going-to-bed ritual is coming.  I was in the middle of typing that the last time she hands me a plate of pretend food from her kitchen playset was coming, until I realized it’s probably been 8 months since that last happened and I WAS NOT PREPARED TO DEAL WITH THAT REALIZATION TODAY.  Time to mentally file that one away with the last time I heard what her imaginary friend was up to and the day “Daddy” turned into “Dad.” 

Kids grow up.  They grow out of stuff whether I’m ready to let go or not.  Sloan is past the halfway mark towards her ninth birthday already, and the ominous ‘tween’ phase feels like it’s right around the corner.  When I was her age ‘Tweens’ weren’t a thing, but now it seems like pre-teen-post-childhood era starts earlier for kids every year.  Pretty soon they’ll exit the womb already poking at a smartphone and midway into a K-pop phase.

I guarantee that even this thing comes preinstalled with some trendy social media app I’m too old to understand.

I feel a lot of mixed emotions about going into the tween years.  I’ve really enjoyed seeing how every new year created a kid with interests and opinions of her own, and I’m excited about what comes next.

…but, real talk?  I like doing kid’s stuff.  I like swings and stuffed animals and tea parties and pretending to be a dragon so she can chase me around the yard with a foam rubber sword.  The feelings of growing-up FOMO are hitting hard, and I’m already pretty susceptible to that kind of thing.  I mean, I had to take “Puff the Magic Dragon” out of the lullaby rotation because I can’t make it to the end dry eyed, a song I’m convinced was written as part of a cold war psych program designed to make opposing soldiers cry so hard they can’t aim straight.

Here’s the song for those who’ve forgotten it and/or want to cry every last drop of moisture out of their body.

How do you balance enjoying a time of their lives that’s painfully impermanent with living a normal life?  I don’t love going to Chuck E. Cheese, but my kids do, and the span they’ll love it is short.  Every day I don’t take them is one more day crossed off the calendar where a trip to that horrible place is The. Best. Thing. 

So should I be going to Chuck E. Cheese more?  Way more?  Should I go once now and then stop forever so it lives in Sloan’s memory as something perfect instead of the grungy child casino it becomes once you cross a certain age?  Because we’ve got maybe 200 more days before her perception of that nightmarish pizza rat goes from a magical new friend to a teenager dressed in a sweaty carpet.  Probably less if she tries to read this over my shoulder when I’m not looking, as I suspect may have happened during my spirited criticism of a certain Christmas elf (though maybe I’m not super heartbroken about seeing that holiday ordeal in the rear-view mirror).

This is not a complication of parenting I ever expected. 

At least this particular harbinger of growing up gives me an excuse to play skee-ball.

Maybe any approach to enjoying their limited childhood still leaves you feeling guilty.  Take this line of thought to its logical conclusion and everything feels like squandering time.  Keep the meals and sleep short; there’s memories to be made.  Every quiet afternoon must become a visit to the park.  Every visit to the park must become a trip to Disneyland.  Every trip to Disneyland must become a trip to that ultra-exclusive Super Disneyland where Beyonce takes her kids.

Of course that’s not sustainable.  I need rest.  I need time away from her.  Nobody can afford Disneyland every weekend.  I need to write a column about feeling like I shouldn’t be squandering my limited hours of her childhood writing a column.

So yeah: I’m easy to talk into a trip to the park. I don’t know what the right balance is with this.  Maybe there isn’t one.  I suspect that when my toddler reaches her own tween years I won’t have learned a single thing from this experience and I’ll be feeling the exact same anxiety I am now.  Maybe at least I’ll have something funnier to say on the topic.

…Anyway, I guess I’ve low key talked myself into taking the kids to Chuck E. Cheese now.  Maybe Disneyland; I’ll play it by ear.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Life With Kids

Maybe We Should Be Letting Kids Curse.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

ME: “Please, PLEASE: you NEED to take the Tylenol.  We have to bring down your fever.”

[This is called “in medias res.”  It’s where I start a scene midway into the action and you get instantly invested in the story.  For full immersion, you should know this exchange takes place at 11:30 PM, Christmas day.]

SLOAN, AGE 8, CRYING: “I don’t know how to!  You said it was really easy, but what if I choke or something?!  I’m scared!”

ME: “We’ve been doing this for an hour.  I know this is as hard for you as it is for me. Just pop it in your mouth and take a swig of your drink, then you can be done!”

[Sloan cringes and doesn’t take the pill.  I put my face in my hands.]

ME: “Look, I recognize I’m asking you to do something grown-up, so I am going to grant you a grown-up privilege: if you take the medicine, then you may say a curse word to vent your frustration at this whole ordeal.”

[Sloan’s face changes instantly.  She looks at the pill with mixed fear and longing.]

SLOAN: “…Which curse word?”

ME: “Dealers choice.”

[She takes 3 deep breaths, puts the Tylenol, partially dissolved from 6 failed attempts to swallow it, on her tongue, and downs half a bottle of Gatorade before she comes up for air.  Her eyes are saucer wide, and she shows me her empty mouth.

SLOAN: “I DID IT! I DID IT! I DID IT!”

[Deep intake of breath, like she’s preparing to yell to a passing helicopter]

“TRIPLE BITCH!!!!”

ME: [completely loses my mind laughing.]

…Christmas at the Gallagher home this year was, undoubtedly, a triple bitch.  First, I got sick, then the toddler got sick, and then Sloan got REALLY sick.  She’d eventually test positive for the flu, but we wouldn’t know for a few days because she went from mild cold symptoms to pure misery on Christmas eve when the doctor’s offices are all closed.  If the potential dates a kid could get sick were written on that big wheel game from “The Price Is Right,” then Sloan’s flu hit that little $1.00 space that makes the contestants jump around like their socks are on fire.

Like this, except instead of 25 large, his prize was ruining an 8-year-old’s Christmas.

So while my wife’s extended family met to eat a big meal and exchange gifts, Sloan and I stayed home, ate macaroni and watched the Cowboys game.  When other kids were pretending to be asleep while listening for Santa, Sloan was still up, trying to take liquid medicine and throwing it all back up (hence the pill—it was our last resort).  When other kids woke their parents up at 5 AM because they couldn’t wait for sunrise to open presents, Sloan woke us up at 5 AM because she felt terrible and also couldn’t wait for sunrise to open presents.  Hey, it’s the flu, not bubonic plague; some things are still gonna happen.

So the offer of curse word immunity seemed pretty reasonable to me.  The kid had had her Christmas thoroughly messed up and didn’t have a lot of avenues to vent her well deserved frustration. 

When I have my day ruined, I have a huge range of options to help relax and mitigate my emotions.  I don’t just mean alcohol or other adults-only vices, either.  Personally, I stay up super late playing violent video games, and at some point go to an all-night  fast food joint for the kind of gargantuan burger that cows record true-crime podcasts about.  I have autonomy to decide what I need to emotionally recover.

But Sloan can’t do that.  Her bedtime is 8:30. She doesn’t get unlimited screen time when she needs to veg out or games designed to vent anger.  If she drove to Whataburger by herself at 1 AM to order a double bacon burger, the employees would probably call the police.

There’s a whole world of major and minor vices that adults can use to help mitigate our emotions when it feels like the world is out to get us.  What do kids get?  A room they can sulk in and Daniel Tiger giving them some preachy speech about Big Feelings™?

Respect as ever, Daniel, but this was a bigger deal than your popsicle failing to meet expectations.

Maybe I’m in the wrong about allowing her to bellow profanity (I’m almost certainly in the wrong about finding it hilarious) but I stand by the decision.  I hated being her age, because everyone tells you to ‘act your age’ without any of the tools that help adults keep their cool.  Everything about a kid’s life is controlled by someone else.  I set her schedule.  Her school dress code dictates clothes and hairstyles.  She goes where I drive her and eats what I cook.  There’s no coffee when she’s tired, no comfort food when she’s stressed, and no real solitude until she’s old enough to be left home alone. 

How well would you do if that were your life?  I wouldn’t last a week.  Even a day might be a stretch; at this point I’m not even sure my heart can still beat on its own without at least a little caffeine in the morning.

So yeah, I’m calling it: so long as she keeps it away from teachers and other adults who might use it as a reason to make the kid’s life hard, I don’t mind if she says a bad word or two when life doesn’t go her way.  Nobody ever got hurt from bad language, and more than a few of my comedy role models turned their filthy mouths into lucrative careers.  If it helps the kid get in touch with her emotions without turning to more self-destructive means of coping, I’m ready to look the other way on this from time to time.

…also I’m gonna start using “Triple bitch” as my go-to curse word because that is absolute poetry.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Life With Kids

“Dad, The Couch Is Upside Down.”

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Let’s review Greek mythology for a moment:

King Sisyphus died, tricked his way out of Hades, and came back to life again. Twice.  Then he died a third time and, much like a good arena rock band, called it quits after the second encore.  As punishment, Zeus sentenced him to endlessly push a bolder up a mountain.  When Sisyphus was almost at the top, he’d slip, the boulder would roll back down the bottom, and he’d start all over again.  Repeat forever.

I bring this up only because I think that fate read a little differently in ancient Greece, an era when laundry was generally cleaned on the same schedule I use for changing the battery in my smoke detector.

My dishwasher is now running for the second time today and somehow the sink is still full to the brim with dirty plates.  Also, there’s 3 loads of laundry to be folded, I need to go grocery shopping, and the kids’ room is so messy it could probably qualify for international relief aid.  I’ve done all these chores in the last 48 hours, but somehow they went from ‘finished’ to ‘alarmingly behind’ without a step in between. 

Is it too late to get set up with a nice rock pushing gig?

I knew that the chores would be pretty intense when I became a stay at home dad, but I don’t think I realized just how intense a mess two kids and a cluttery spouse can produce.  I pick up the same dozen stuffed animals so many times in the course of a day that if my toddler had a Chucky-style haunted doll that was just walking around the house on its own, I don’t think I’d notice.  If it ever did any creepy stuff, I’d be too focused on cleaning up after it for the scare to sink in.

“Somebody wrote ‘Revenge never dies’ on the mirror AGAIN?!  I’m gonna run out of Windex before the end of the week at this rate.”

“It’s playtime… I said, ‘It’s playtime‘ … It’s playt–HEY, PUT THE LAUNDRY BASKET DOWN AND PAY ATTENTION!”

Today is the last day before the kids go back to school after Christmas break, and looking around my house feels like I’m getting ready to put post-World War II Europe back together.  The buildup of clutter seems almost unreal.  There’s clothes in the laundry hamper I haven’t worn since the Bush administration.  I think there’s a sweater in there that might’ve drifted in from an alternate dimension.

I honestly don’t know how other people keep their living spaces in order beyond just staying on top of basic chores.  Forget window-washing and yard work; I struggle enough just to keep everyone in clean clothes and eating something besides a diet exclusively consisting of Pop Tarts and Lunchables.  …Emphasis on ‘exclusively,’ by the way; I’m in no position to badmouth a Pop Tart.  I’m just satisfied if I can serve at least something in the course of a day that didn’t come out of an industrial fabricator.

How do people find time for stuff besides the baseline, though?  Like, where does the time and motivation for yardwork come from?  My neighbor across the street has 2 kids under 8 and still finds time to rake 2-3 times per week.  By the time I get down to raking on my to-do list, my trees will all look like the gray stumps dotting that sad, barren wasteland from “The Lorax.”

On the far end of town, untouched through the years,
the leaves on Matt’s lawn are piled up to your ears.

It’s not from a lack of desire, either.  I like having a clean, orderly lawn.  I like having a fridge with space for groceries instead of just old takeout containers and like 30 varieties of hot sauce.  I like a vacuumed floor.  Hell, I LIKE VACUUMING.  It’s quick, easy, it makes the dog go bananas…there’s way worse chores you can get stuck with.

…but even for being quick and easy, it’ll never reach the top of the priority list faster than kids can create emergency cleanup jobs.  Ditto the raking.  Ditto cleaning out the fridge.  A bored kid with a box of art supplies will always create a better mess.

“Dad, I was painting a picture for you and all my paints fell on the carpet.”
“Dad, I knocked over the kitchen trashcan and now there’s garbage everywhere.”
“Dad, the couch is upside down.”

That last one isn’t a joke. That happened.  I went to the bathroom, and when I came back my daughter (6 at the time) was sitting astride the defeated corpse of my couch watching cartoons.  She didn’t even offer an explanation, just “The couch is upside down.”  No details.  No preamble.  Just a simple, emotionless statement, like a column of smoke announcing the election of a new pope.

Maybe school resuming tomorrow will open up enough time to beat back the mess a little.  I’m skeptical, but not totally counting out the possibility.  Maybe I’ll fold all the clothes, wash all the sheets, sweep the tile, vacuum the carpet, and carry all the scattered toys back to their rooms of origin.

…But the perfect Marie Kondo house isn’t happening.  I won’t reorganize my chaotic kitchen cabinets.  I won’t box up all the kids clothes that don’t fit anymore.  My closets will stay disorganized, my fence will remain unpatched, and the mice in my garage will all look like the old rat from “The Secret of NIMH” before I ever get out there to set up traps.

“Our legends tell of peanut butter atop boards of death, but none still live who have seen them.”

I don’t know if I’m just way worse at keeping a house than everyone else, but I honestly suspect the rest of you are in this boat, too.  It’s probably easier to hide if you don’t write a column on the subject.  I just wanted to offer a message of solidarity and say that you’re not the only one struggling to keep-

…hold that thought, I gotta roll: I think I just heard a couch flipping over.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Uncategorized

Maybe The Grinch Had Some Valid Points.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I love Christmas.

I’m writing that on its own line as a reminder to myself as much as anything else.  I love the decorations, I love the food, I love giving presents, I love getting presents.  Aside from my well documented vendetta against a certain polyester elf, I enjoy it all.  I even like Christmas music, though that’s a statement that comes with more footnotes and caveats than a doctoral thesis.

I’d be cool taking Paul’s name off bare minimum 3 Beatles songs to square the books over this atrocity.

I bring all this up because I cannot mentally square my love of Christmas as an institution with how much I am ready for this holiday to be something I can look forward to again instead of having to actually deal with.  It’s so exciting when it’s coming up and so stressful and unpleasant in the moment.  It’s the holiday equivalent of commercial air travel.

Those decorations I love?  Awful ideas.  Who in the world thought that Christmas tree ornaments were a good idea around children?  Can you even imagine that sales pitch?

“Check out this festive holiday bauble I made!  Kids will love them!”
“That’s pretty.  So you hang them up high where toddlers can’t scatter them all over the house?”
“Actually I was thinking 2 feet off the ground.”
“Oh.  Well they must be pretty durable otherwise kids might break t-“
“They’re made of glass the thickness of a silk scarf.”

We have an 18-month-old currently, so I decided to rip the band-aid off early and just instated a no-ornaments policy this year.  The likelihood was just too great of her taking every ornament off and breaking them the first day, pulling the entire tree over, and probably dousing the remains with kerosene and setting the whole pile on fire.  The kid is resourceful like that.

The 8-year-old is taking it surprisingly well.  It probably helped that I had her help me attach our tree to the wall with a bungee cord.  When your holiday decorations need the same treatment as securing furniture in the back of a pickup truck, it tends to drive the point home.

Our tree was going to look just like this one…except bare, sideways, and next to a contractor bag full of shattered glass.

I could cope if that was the one thing about getting ready for the holiday that I seem incapable of managing, but that’s where it STARTS.  My clock just ticked over to 12:01 AM December 22nd and there is not a single present wrapped yet.  Repeat: it is 72 hours until Christmas day and I currently possess the same number of wrapped presents as I do thermonuclear warheads.  I am woefully unprepared for both Christmas morning and a tactical nuclear exchange (though at least the latter would get me out of having to worry about the former).

I’m trying to convince myself that spending tomorrow night after the kids go to bed sitting up and wrapping presents will be pleasant.  A quiet moment to sit in the dim light while the house is asleep, listening to a podcast, drinking tea, and wrapping gifts.  That sounds nice.  Almost as nice as enjoying a quiet house, listening to a podcast, sipping tea, and doing ANYTHING BESIDES WRAPPING PRESENTS FOR HOURS.  I am fully capable of enjoying a quiet evening alone without devoting it to seasonal chores.

Why are we wrapping presents anyway?  The stocking is always the kids’ favorite part.  Couldn’t I just buy a gargantuan novelty stocking and cram the whole pile in there?  No need for tape, scissors, bows, cards, or cleanup.  Just 3 minutes to stuff everything into the yuletide megasock and then you’re ready to hit the ‘nog.

Big enough to hold a hoverboard, a puppy, a Playstation, and all the other stuff they asked for and aren’t gonna get.

The giant stocking in that photo is seven dollars.  That’s it.  The price of a Big Mac combo.  That’s what’s separating you from never having to wrap another toy that the manufacturer thought would sell better if they made the packaging the shape of a shrink wrapped octopus.

Right now the fact that it wouldn’t arrive before Christmas is the only thing keeping my finger off the “Buy Now” button.  Next year that festive seasonal rucksack may make an appearance.

Don’t let all this give you the wrong idea; I really do love Christmas.  Any issues I have with preparing for the holiday are minor quibbles.  The joy I get from the soft glow of Christmas tree lights far outweighs the annoyance of picking up ornaments broken by kids and dogs.  The time I’ll spend wrapping presents is less than the time I just spent writing about not wanting to do it.  For every obnoxious “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer” there’s a “Chorus of the Bells.”  With Christmas, the good is great while the bad is just kind of stressful and annoying.

…All I’m saying is that next year, my 80-gallon, industrial-grade cargo stocking and I are going to engage in a little strategic corner-cutting to help keep the fun front and center.

Anyway, Merry Christmas.  Now go move the elf.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Uncategorized

This Should Not Qualify As A Christmas Tradition.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

Young parents (or middle-aged parents who got started late, like me) have to navigate a wholly different, entirely more complex landscape than our own parents ever imagined. Social media, cyber bullying, rapidly changing social norms…all of these are challenges not seen by earlier generations.

None of them, however, come close to the greatest obstacle we face.

I am, of course, referring to Elf on the Shelf.

If you’ve dodged this particular holiday ordeal, A: I hate you, and B:Here’s how it works: 

An elf (small doll) gets “adopted” into your home (suggested retail price: $32.95) and begins appearing at various locations around the house (you move it around overnight) throughout the entire month of December.  For some reason, searching for the elf’s new location every morning amuses kids to no end, despite just being a holiday version of the VASTLY less popular household game, “Help dad find his car keys.” 

If this seems like an easily forgettable chore that will upset and frustrate the kid if you forget, well, you’re wrong: forgetting it will tear your kid’s heart asunder like they just visited a cancer ward exclusively for golden retriever puppies.

Now, in fairness, moving the elf is a pretty minor chore, and I can live with that.  I like Christmas.  My reserves of holiday cheer can endure moving a doll from the mantle to the bookshelf once per day. 

That, sadly, is not what my kid’s friends’ parents are doing. They’re doing this:

While I have nothing but admiration for the parents who can display this level of dedication to a bit, the last thing I need around Christmas is a kid who comes home to inform me that her friend’s elf made a gingerbread house overnight while ours just sat on the TV.  In terms of terrible things she could bring home from school, I’d honestly prefer she came home with a jar full of termites than outlandish elf expectations.

Listen kid: I’m happy that your friend’s elves are rock climbing or cooking hibachi or taking up artisan woodworking or whatever they’re doing today. 

Your elf isn’t gonna do that stuff. 

Your elf is gonna sit by this lamp.  He might fall over in the night.  He’ll probably acquire a ketchup stain at some point.

But over and above the expectation to produce Pinterest-worthy tableaus of Yuletide mischief (note that I spent more effort on phrasing this sentence than I will ever spend arranging the elf), the thing that bothers me most is the Elf’s backstory.

The story, outlined in a picture book that comes bundled with the doll (presumably to justify charging over thirty bucks for a toy they didn’t even bother to give feet) is that the elf moves around on its own overnight so it can report the kid’s behavior back to Santa.  So aside from being Baby’s First Narc, the elf story is so transparently fake I’m worried it’s gonna collapse the whole Christmas Magic™ illusion.

My 8-year-old has already started low-key reminding me to move her elf overnight, and I can’t decide what to make of it.

Let me be clear. This is not her saying “Dad, don’t forget to move my elf overnight.”  That would be simple; I would tell her to move her own elf.  I would feel fine telling her that because, in this theoretical scenario, my daughter and I have mutually agreed that this Dollar-Tree-quality doll that somehow costs as much as a lobster dinner is an inanimate piece of polyester.

That, however, is not the conversation we are having.

“Dad, where do you think my elf will move tonight?  I hope he hides in my stocking.”  She can’t wink yet, but if she could, she’d be batting that one eye like she had a bug trapped beneath her eyelid.

What does this mean?  Does she believe?  Is she trying to convince herself that it’s real?  Does she know the elf is just a goof but wants ME to think that she believes it?  Is she equally suspicious of Santa or has she compartmentalized the elf to its own category.  I haven’t been this confused since I started trying to figure girls out in the sixth grade.  This is “Do you like me?  ___Yes  ___No  _X_ Maybe” all over again.

Anyone who knows me knows that I LOVE Santa.  I ought to—I’ve worked as a charity Santa for years.  I love what he represents and what he means to kids.   But as much as I’d like to hang on to my daughter’s belief years for as long as possible, I recognize that she won’t believe in Santa forever.  I accept it.  In some ways I’m looking forward to it.  I’m excited to see what kind of person the kid turns into, and growing out of stuff like Santa and the Tooth Fairy are a big part of that.

…but, man, don’t let the thing that ends her belief in The Big Man be this doofy little doll that she’s supposed to pretend is playing cards with her Barbies and going fishing in the dog’s water dish.  I can deal with my kids growing out of a belief in Santa, but he deserves a better send off than this festive holiday version of Capone going down on tax evasion.

Anyway, I have to cut this off and go move an elf.  Maybe if I remove the living room vent cover I could recreate that scene from “Die Hard”…

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.

Posted in Uncategorized

The Park Moms Are Better At This Than I Am.

Posted on by Matt Gallagher

I’m amazed by moms, sometimes.

Go out on a Saturday to the zoo and really appreciate how prepared some of those moms are.  5 minutes per animal, 45 on the playground, in and out of the zoo in 4 hours exactly.  The stroller is clean and free of debris, and there’s a cooler full of water bottles and snacks tucked neatly under it.  There’s a schedule; there’s order.

…and there’s me.  I’m the parent whose toddler is eating leaves while the older kid tries to climb into the meerkat exhibit.

It’s interesting how being stay-at-home parent can still give you an inferiority complex , even though you’re almost totally isolated from other adults. Like a castaway concerned whether his tattered rags are in trendy summer colors.  Over the years I’ve worked with bestselling authors and people who would go on to win Emmys.  People who were routinely recognized on the street.  It’s easy to feel inadequate in that situation.  The closest I’ve ever come to being recognized on the street was overhearing a pair of awestruck kids discreetly pointing at me and whisper-shouting “I THINK THAT’S SANTA!!”  That’s a kind of recognition, I suppose, but not the kind that constitutes an impressive LinkedIn profile.

If you’re married the feelings of professional inadequacy start with your spouse, obviously.  Nothing really feels like a counterbalance to their actual job.  My wife has RESPONSIBILITIES.  Meetings.  Seminars.  Out of state travel for more meetings and seminars.  I, meanwhile, have seen every episode of Bluey four hundred times and routinely get toddler urine in my hair. 

I do laundry all day but wear the same clothes so long I barely produce any dirty clothes.  I think I’ve had on this hoodie since Halloween, and the jeans so long I’m worried I may be in the process of absorbing them into my legs like a jellyfish digesting a sardine.  This is no way for an adult to live.

I sometimes wonder if I should start filling out more paperwork just to feel on the same footing as my wife.  Would the IRS mind if I submitted a 1040 and just drew little frowny faces wherever there was supposed to be a blank to fill in with my income?  Hopefully there are some extra forms for that to really make it the kind of long, convoluted process that’ll let me relate with other working adults again.  Maybe the baby and I could find out our enneagram types together to make this feel more like a workplace.   “Looks like you spilled juice on the written test, and during the verbal section, answered every question ‘Doggy!’  I’m calling that a type 2 with a 3 wing.”

The natural remedy for that would be to get closer to other stay at home parents, but, as I mentioned, it’s clear that the moms I encounter and I are playing in entirely different leagues, if not different sports altogether. 

It’s obscene what other parents manage to accomplish in a day.  How do you make it to the park every day with a kid whose hair is combed like some of these moms?  I show up in a dirty car with a disheveled kid, with my clothes covered in dinosaur stickers and, like, a corndog stick tangled in my beard.  I feel like that’s what parents of toddlers are supposed to look like.  It’s what EVERYTHING small children interact with looks like.  You can’t be clean around little kids.  They exude a cloud of dirt, vomit, and little broken bits of Cheez-Its.  Every kid under 5 is like watching the origin story for a future episode of Hoarders. 

…and yet, there they are: park moms.  Hair combed, teeth brushed, clothes that were presumably still on a hanger that morning, and with CROWDS of kids.  You’d think they were trying to put together a baseball team.  Just child after child after child, all neat, all with last names for first names, all with their own labeled water bottle brought from home stashed in the ‘park snack bag,’ which somehow became a thing since my own ‘drink from the hose’ style childhood.  What in my pantry could I even have to put in a park snack bag?  Canned soup?  Uncooked rice?  Where are these women getting all these oranges and Fig Newtons?  I can’t imagine the planning that goes into this.  They must schedule trips to the bathroom 3 weeks in advance.

I don’t mean to imply that stay-at-home parenting is a bad gig.  It’s a really great gig; I haven’t enjoyed this level of cartoons and dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets since my early 20s.  There’s still plenty of work, though, and there is simply not a format for sharing your successes in a way that puts you on level with other adults.  Cleaning the floor of a kid’s closet should come with an award.  It’s like mucking out the Augean Stables, except you also have to sort out a zillion loose puzzle pieces and you’ll definitely step on a Lego. 

What jobs like cleaning a kid’s closet really lack, however, is some kind of arbitrary professional certification or the ability to get you in the door if you’re interviewing to become a brand manager:

“Do you excel while in working in difficult situations?”
“Difficult?  You bet!  I stepped on so many Legos last week than my wife thought I had stigmata!”
[Sound of resume in a shredder]

All that to say, if you do know someone who spends all their time with kids, try to really foul up something we’re good at.  Make an inedible meal, fold some laundry wrong, change a diaper in a way that requires a lot of hand washing after the fact…we’re all a disheveled mess and need to know that we’ve got some skills that other adults aren’t automatically good at.  Having to reload the dishwasher after you botched it is as good as a birthday present.

…and if you happen to be married to one of those perfect park moms, throw a handful of dirt in her purse for me.  Get on my level, Susan.

Feel free to buy me a cup of coffee at paypal.me/inessentialreading if you enjoyed the column.