Not sure whether you’re a primary caregiver? There are a few tell-tale signs.
You know you’re a parent when you think it’s acceptable to:
- Eat biscuits with your face in the cupboard so your children don’t see
- Have a bath while another human being defecates in the room
- Repeat mundane instructions ad infinitum while being roundly ignored
- Live in a sea of too-small shoes
- De-louse and de-verruca another human being without screaming or throwing up
- Spend three hours on the toilet, risking hemorrhoids, in a bid to be alone
- Participate in elaborate international conspiracies about bearded men entering the house at night
- Remove stringy snot from another human being’s nose
- Park your own life aspirations for 18 years
- Tear your hair out over coat-buttoning (or lack thereof) every day for six months of every year
- Spend the GDP of Guatemala on childcare
- Scrape dog shit off someone else’s shoes
- Treat sleep like an optional resource
- Spend hours devising increasingly complex ways to sneak greens into cheesy pasta
- Panic and holler your child’s name across a department store the moment they’re obscured by a rack of knickers
- Have all your radios tuned to Shit FM
- Spend two-thirds of your life clearing up someone else’s crap
- Pay a weekly fee to someone for whom you do everything, all the time
- Love the little blighters more than life itself
- Make grotesquely overblown and sentimental statements about how much you adore your children to prove you’re a good parent despite all the evidence to the contrary
