The World’s Hardest Job
The entrance ramp was waiting for me, beckoning. It’s a challenging, imperfect ramp. It’s choppy in places, marked by crumbling asphalt. There’s a pothole on the racing line (I have to remember that). The first curve is slightly off-camber, and the guardrail is pretty close on the exit.
Traffic finally clears, and I make my turn. All four tires grab asphalt, motivated by 250 horses. A quick tap for the yield sign, and it’s all clear. I hit the apex for the first curve and then hammer the throttle. As I approach the curve before the freeway, I glance at the traffic. My lane is clear.
Before I know it, I’m way over the speed limit and merging into traffic. And from the back, I hear my two-year-old son, “schneller, papa, schneller!”* I think I hear a “wheee!”** as well.
(* “Faster, daddy-o, faster!”)
(** “This makes fun!”)
Coming from a kid who picks through garbage cans looking for food and eats “chocolate” icicles off my car, I’m thrilled as a life lesson finally gets through.
Excuse me now while I get my son fitted for a go-kart.
I’m pretty sure that’s a real diaper and not body paint
“We are apt to forget that children watch examples better than they listen to preaching.”
--Roy L. Smith
“Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.”
--P. J. O’Rourke
“Parents are not quite interested in justice, they are interested in quiet.”
“Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.”
--Bill Cosby
[Addendum 2011-12-21] Raising kids isn’t like herding cats, or other such similes and metaphors. I think it’s the other way: herding cats is like raising kids (well).
