I’ve been reading old posts by dooce about her daughter and parenting in general. This is totally where I’m at today:

You’re in this stage of life where the only way to communicate to us is by complaining, and that’s the thing about kids. You can get away with it because you don’t know any better, and as your parents we have to accept that sometimes, more often than not, all you do is complain. When you’re an adult and pay bills and the government takes more than a third of your income, sometimes it’s just not nice to complain all the time, even when you can’t have the remote. EVEN THEN, LETA. People don’t want to hear it all the time because they’ve heard it a thousand times already and at some point you just have to suck it. This last paragraph is more for me than it is for you because when you hang out with someone who does nothing but complain all day you, like me, may want to put that person out on the sidewalk with a sign around her neck that reads, “FREE, OR BEST OFFER.”

What I’m trying to say is, this month when people ask me about my week or my day or even the two hours I’ve been awake with you, instead of barfing all over them and lamenting the fact that damn, Gina, this is so hard, so very very hard, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, wah wah WAH WAH WAH, I‘m trying to look at them and say, “She calls me Mama, now. I never knew that word could be so amazing.”

Exactly.