How it all started

It all started as a way to process the insanity happening in our lives. It morphed into a way to remember the insanity happening in our lives. It morphed further into a way to laugh (like in a just to keep from crying kind of way) at the insanity happening in our lives. Then it grew into this.

Return of the living Dad. It’s got two parts to it. First, the zombies. If you’re not hip to zombie movies (like me) it’s a spoof on Return of the Living Dead. Which itself, is a spoof. At least I think. It’s awesome. I watched it purely because I chose the title for the blog. It’s got gore, screaming, terror, bulging eyeballs, sweaty people running around petrified, dirty clothes, comedy, classic rock. It’s identical to life with kids.

Then there’s the ‘Return’ part. And I guess, the ‘Living’. Being a parent of two kids ages (almost) 4 and 1.5, I’m a zombie. To say I’ve Returned or am Living is in both cases a gross overstatement. Barely scraping by is a better assessment. But by medical definition, I do currently satisfy the base requirements for being alive. And the potential for Returning, and for Living─a more complete if not less tired existence─is something this title gives me, if not hope for, then a loosely positive, you know, slightly more than depressing outlook on the future.

This blog─which started as a book─is (or will be) chok full of stories about collectively 5.5 years of life with (very) difficult kids. It started as a way to record the crazy shit happening in our lives. And with the effect fatigue and time has on memory, I found (and find, daily) my wife and I both forgetting key stuff. Like we’d literally reverse memories. Tell stories NOT how they happened. Remember things in a positive light somehow. We’d get nostalgic. After the kids were in bed we’d take 2 minutes to unwind, 1 minute to get dinner, 30 seconds to feel the quiet, and then, with our destroyed, crushed bodies, talk about how we missed them. The screaming, the brother-fighting, the whining, the resistance, the tantrums, the seal-wrestling event that was getting dressed for bed: it all evaporated. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. It makes you forget them. Especially ones that are difficult. Especially ones that involve kids. Which is why when people say “it goes so fast” they really mean, “you forget so much and somehow replace the insane meat-grinder of life you’ve lived through with flowery, wonderful memories that actually don’t belong to you.”

Which is why I wanted to write some of it down. Not only so I wouldn’t forget, but so I didn’t commit the mortal sin of telling someone going into the fire for the first time that they’ll “figure it out”, that they’ll “be a bit tired”, or that the first years are “you know, challenging”. It’s ROUGH in here man. Four (five and half combined) years might not sound like a lot. But it is when you haven’t slept for 50% of it. When you’ve been sick for 40% of it. The other 9% is cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Which leaves 1% for all other emotions and experiences. And that leaves out the car-screaming, the general screaming, the tantrums, the hour before dinner that always goes nuclear, the weekends, family events that are double the work of normal life (which is triple the work of family events), the whining, the not eating, the throwing bowls on the floor, the not listening, the doing exactly the opposite of what you asked them to do while looking directly at you while they do it, laughing. There isn’t enough percent to accurately convey the full spectrum of life.

This blog takes after the book, which focuses on what you could call the main “areas” of life with kids: sleep, behaviour, sickness, the car, feeding, etc. It’s essentially a gigantic rant. So much of our lives was (and is) this shoulder raising, eyebrow raising, hair raising, blood pressure raising experience of just fucking not knowing what the fuck is going on or what to do about it. Having had that experience, the eventual goal is to offer ideas, experience, suggestions and insights into the realities of “parenting” as I experienced them. With a heavy emphasis on minimal bullshit, maximum reality. I didn’t get that when I was starting out. I still don’t get that. You only get a super, ultra real skinny on what happens in the general, day to day grind of parenting when one of your neighbours or friends lapses in a moment of vulnerability or devastating fatigue and tells you something honest. Or if you share something that then triggers them. Or if someone shares on a social channel and gets a zillion “same here!” responses out of the woodwork. It’s weird.

When we didn’t (and don’t) find much for similar experience, we bought the books. Read the blogs. Scrolled through the memes. But very few (or very few that I found) had a clue. The parenting genre is full of sheen and gloss and joy and darling this and rub your baby’s back once and they’ll drift off to sleep that. My kids didn’t do that. They didn’t do anything the internet or print media said they would. Ever heard of a sleep consultant? Ever heard of not sleeping for a year? Ever heard of a kid that hates the car? There’s a litany of stuff I still shake my head at wondering how the fuck we made it this far.

But. Like a zombie movie. We’re still uninfected. We’re humans. We’re Living. If not Returned. And as such there might be something useful in here for others that are wandering through the barren, apocalyptic landscape of parenting, hunched, eyes half open, not fully a human, but not yet a zombie.

I hope this ends up being the kind of thing that would have helped me before having my first kid. I hope it might be the only “baby blog” parents will need, despite not really imparting any useful information, just a constant stream of difficult anecdotes and real life incidents that have made me want to cry more than ever before in my life. I hope it’s the type of resource that gives parents-to-be a real, yet funny and hopeful (underneath all the dread and fuuuuuck man Jesus Christ almighty stop fucking screaming please fuck, God help me) outlook on parenting.