Parenthood and boot camp not as different as you’d think

At 1500 hours rendezvous with Offspring Bravo at the coordinates of 1st and Comanche. Transport “package” to home base in order to coordinate combination of forces with Offspring Charlie. If watches are properly synchronized Offspring Alpha will require support at precisely 1700 hours for basketball drills. At 1830 all units will report to the mess hall for nourishment of the battalion. Offspring Charlie will have “domestic assignments” completed and will properly apply an approved dentifrice in preparations for lights out at 2100 hours. Offspring Alpha and Bravo will follow the same regimen for lights out at 2130.
The preceding paragraph does not describe a little known offensive during World War II. Parents will recognize the actions as a regular day in the life of any family with children. The sheer volume of things enumerated on the average family of five’s “To Do List” would make the social secretary for Laura Bush consider applying for a transfer to Undersecretary of Defense in Charge of Making Rumsfeld Appear Less Like a Dyspeptic Cactus.
I do not remember life being so packed with activity when I was a kid. During my grade school years I walked home after school and had a snack while I watched a guy standing on a cheap spaceship set wearing a goldfish bowl on his head in an attempt to look like John Glenn introduce cartoons starring Yakky Doodle Duck or Snagglepuss. I did not have ceramics class followed by Cub Scouts followed by thirty minutes of homework followed by twenty minutes of answering e-mail. Of course e-mail in the middle seventies was as likely as the video watches Dick Tracy and the culturally insensitive Joe Jitsu wore on some of those Major Astro cartoons. (Anybody else remember “Hold everything please.”?) Actually, if you remove the ads I get for shrinking the size of my debt and increasing the size of something else I do not, as an adult, get the volume of e-mail the majority of kids get.
My kids have more going on in their lives than I do. I go to work. Towards the end of the day I call my wife to find out what is required of me in order to make sure each child is properly transported and no one is left unsupervised for an extended period of time. I take care of my assignments with the children and then I go to sleep. That is what my days have become. We have referred to it as “Tag Team Parenting” ever since we first had children. It used to be one parent would hand off to the other parent as we pursued our own jobs, hobbies, and activities. Now our jobs, hobbies and activities are pretty much eaten up with chasing children. To be fair my wife does the vast majority of the transportation and the entire calendar keeping work. I prefer to come home after work, have a snack and watch cartoons.
Earlier I likened family activities to military endeavors. When one enlists in the armed forces one never really knows what it will be like. Oh, they have an idea. They have seen it in the movies. They have talked to other people who have experienced it. They may have even spent some time in quasi-military organizations like R.O.T.C. However, they do not KNOW what it will be until they get there.
It is the same for starting a family. I had seen it in the movies. I had talked to many people who had kids. Heck, I was a kid in a family with three other kids. I even babysat for the neighbors with frequency as a youth. In every one of those instances I was only briefly in charge of a child or I was able to hand it off when things got truly unpleasant.
Talking to other young adults with children about children is not going to give any kind of accurate picture. These people talk about how the unconditional love which emanates from the baby and child gives such a sense of fulfillment they truly do not know how they ever felt like fully rounded people before they had their children. What they fail to tell you is lack of sleep and inhaling the fumes of Desitin ointment causes this Pollyanna outlook on parenthood. Once the person gets a full night’s sleep and a breath of clean air this impression leaves. Unfortunately, that doesn’t occur until the children are about to leave for college and it is way too late.
Running a family of five is quite like a large military exercise. It costs an exorbitant amount of money and there is no viable exit strategy.

Christopher Pyle may not have been as busy as his kids, but at least his after school cartoons featured mice and cats hitting each other with frying pans and not an oceanic invertebrate wearing short pants.