Shitty Kidding
My oldest daughter couldn’t stop crying the other day, which was surprising. She doesn’t cry nearly as much as she used to. Broadly speaking, this is a good thing. The sound of your child’s inconsolable sobs can cause physical pain; a sonic cocktail of fingernails on a chalkboard, an injured dog, and Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park.” As a young child she cried often. Rarely did I understand the reason. Even more rarely could I get her to stop. When she wailed, I would experience a gauntlet of emotions, from sad to befuddled to frustrated to enraged. Too often, I heard myself venting to an imaginary parenting coach, “She’s crying for no fucking reason!” Sometime during my parental maturation process, I realized that no one cries for no reason, least of all a child. The failure to understand your children is probably not a failure at all. And if it is, it certainly isn’t a failure on their part. A child’s job isn’t to make itself understood. In fact, I’m beginning to bel