Death by Teenager

Every time anyone reminds me that I WANTED kids, I tell them the God's honest truth: I never wanted kids. I just wanted babies.

And I was very perceptive that way, because I'm pretty sure having a teenager will kill a body. Or maybe only parenting a teenage GIRL does that. But teenage boys are said to have more car wrecks. So that probably causes parental death too.

Except in the case of a boy, your heart probably just stops in its tracks when you find out the car was upside down on the interstate at three in the morning. So that would be a quicker death than a girl who kills you by heartbreak and extreme moods. Except, somehow my parents seemed to live through it. They must be superhuman.

Or maybe parents are like Spiderman. Except that instead of getting bitten by a spider that allows them to climb walls, the baby's birth renders them impervious to death by empathy, or death by guilt, or death by scowling and rudeness. I'm pretty sure those feelings can kill a person though, because I definitely had a near death experience this week.

Look at this gal, my sweetheart, my angel, my sweet pea. Here she is all happy before she remembered that I ruined her life (as all parents must, I imagine):And here she is again all happy after she's nearly killed the both of us with her grief over me ruining her life:I don't know why the cat lets her do that. He'd have bitten anyone else's face off and hidden for a week. Actually, that one is our scaredy cat. He probably just would have hidden for a week. But he would have WANTED to bite our faces off.

The upside is that in my fog over the power of teenage emotions, I fixed two of our toilets. Well, I changed out the valve in two toilets and the flappy thing in one of them. But I couldn't even figure out how to get the flappy thing off the other one. Because despite this being a '70s house, I'm pretty sure that flappy thing on the upstairs toilet was installed in 1936.

In any case, the moral of the story is this: when I see a cute baby in a restaurant I plan on fixing a toilet in lieu of getting baby lust. Because it's way easier to fix a toilet than to subject yourself to parenting a teenager. At least, those are my plans. We'll see how it all works out.