Strangely Naked

Dear My Child,

You’re f’d. Thank you for your ability to process my abruptness. I say “thank you” because I refuse to apologize. It helps you feel like you are being complimented while helping me avoid apologizing which only leads you to feel like you’re in a parental position where you can admonish me and neither of us want to flip that dynamic. So, just understand that you’re learning to deal with disappointment through my foresight to know that you needed this moment to grow as a person, which is why I set out to screw up on a near-constant basis since well before you were conceived.

While I would love to leave you to ponder the ephemeral nature of “you’re f’d” I feel like I at least owe you an explanation as to why when I am too squeamish to even use the actual word I’m implying. Mainly, you’re f’d because you share my genetic miasma, but also because you’re subjected to my myopic dipshiterry (by the way, spell check programmers, it’s about time to include curse words, and while you’re at it, there are obviously two ‘r’s’ in ‘dipshitterry’). I say that you’re f’d because of all of the horrible things I subjected you to when you were still figuring out that pooping brings you great joy.

To give you some examples, here are just a sampling of thins I watched in your first three months of life while you wiggled and kicked your way to unconsciousness: Narcos, My Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Sin City 2 (not even the first one, you sad, self-pooping, illiterate creature), and Orange is the New Black to name a few. I’m not trying overtly to warp your mind, but it is a pretty good test of nature versus nurture. I’m pulling for nature and crossing my fingers that you’re not a serial killer when you read this.

Perhaps the part I’m most concerned with is the part where I accidentally hit your head a couple of times. I don’t want you to end up like an NFL player who commits suicide so that doctors can examine his brain and declare some damning evidence that will be completely ignored. In my defense, I’ve never dropped the remote control on your soft spot.

The scariest part is that if I’m afraid of all the ways I’m screwing you up now, the real challenges are yet to come. Once you start to understand words, then the worst gameshow in the world begins, “What will I say or do that will cause you to need therapy?” Will it be when I’m reading you a bedtime story and start to spontaneously cry because I just thought of your grandma dying and me giving the eulogy? Will it be when you start to complain about a bully and I off-handedly remark that “well, fire works pretty good”? Who knows, until it happens!

Aside from your own personal demons that I helped or will help conjure, you and your generation will probably also have to deal with the ruination of the environment. You can blame that on your grandparents’ generation. If there’s one thing we can all get on board with, it’s shaking our collective fists at Baby Boomers.

Good Luck,

Your emotionally stunted parent (not the other, good parent, I’m the dumb-dumb parent)