“Ok, guys, we’re leaving in five minutes.”
Yeah, right. And while we’re at it, let’s finish the broccoli, play nicely with your sister and leave Target without a tantrum. Getting out of the house in a reasonable amount of time is more difficult than regulating crypto, but I’m still the fool that thinks it can happen every time we embark into the real world.
For most of my life as a single man, I measured my egress in seconds. As long as I had the “Big Three”—wallet, keys, phone—I was good. (My good friend Robby would use the lesser known, old-timey saying, “Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.” That works, too, but I took me until my 30s to wear a watch and I have fairly good eyesight.) Shirt, shoes and sanity were all optional. Little did I realize the fortune I possessed, as time was always truly on my side.
Soon, I met my future wife and I was forced to win the waiting game. Like a bush league rookie, I would get ready alongside her in the beginning. What I did with the next 45 minutes is lost on me. It took me years to figure out how to snack, scroll, stroll and snooze until she gave me the 5-minute warning. Even if that five turned into 15 (which it always did), I could manage this perilous purgatory.
And then, the reckoning. For months after our first daughter was born, I forgot what it was like to even leave the house. Donned in sweatpants and my tattered Sublime T-shirt from 1999, I would emerge from the front door just to gather the mail, looking like a caveman after the Ice Age. When we finally did venture outside, we had to encase the child in seven layers of clothing and a plastic bubble to protect her from every living bacterium that we studied in the baby books.
It only got more difficult from there. Diaper bags and strollers and bottles and snacks and toys and snotsuckers and binkies and more snacks. Then came the second one, and everything doubled. I felt like we were vacationing for two weeks every time we went to the grocery store (which is about the craziest experience you get to enjoy as a new parent). I was sure the timeline couldn’t get worse. The kids will become mobile and we could even use them as little pack mules.
To reiterate a common theme of parenting assumptions: nope. My daughters somehow become Meryl Streep when the door opens, winning the award season for “Best Drama That No One Asked For.” Every piece of minutiae becomes life or death. Asking which shoes to wear seems like a choice of torture. Strapping them into the car seat is like hogtying an oiled pig. Every single toy in the house must be taken with them, as if the structure was burning down around them.
And I thought my wife’s hair and makeup routine was brutal.
Juice, they scream. Goldfish, they whine. Stuffies, they cry. All I want is beer and silence. Why is this so difficult? How do they magically become naked when the car starts? How do they destroy the living room in the time I take to find the keys? And why is one of them wearing a beanie in 95 degrees and the other a fireman costume? I have no answers to these questions, but it doesn’t matter. We now operate on bizarro island time. Never mind showing up anywhere on time—if we make it to the destination at all, that’s a win.
We’re in the car. The tears are drying on my face. My patience isn’t worn thin; it’s disintegrated into Veggie Straw dust. The kids are screaming. I am broken. “Alexa, play the farting song,” my youngest shouts. I have become a faceless digital assistant, and the soundtrack of our travels is graphic flatulence. A few miles down the road, I’m ready to reset and start anew.
“Dad,” my oldest daughter says. “I wanna go home.”
I can’t wait to do this again tomorrow.