Barbies - Shell's Chronicles of Dumbass-ery (Episode 3)
Good evening, my Lovelies! Welcome to the final (for now) edition of Shell's Chronicles of Dumbass-ery. While I've only shared a very few examples of my dumbass-ery, I assure you that there have been many more. Now, some may not consider what I'm about to tell you a form of dumbass-ery, but I feel like it is, so, it is.
As a little girl, I always dreamed of what it would be like to fall in love and have a family. Little did I know at the time, it isn't all cute little houses with front porch swings and adorable children and puppies frolicking in the yard. Oh no, it comes with water heaters that leak and have to be replaced, septic systems that back-up, and that damn yard? Well, it has to be mowed on a regular basis. There are mortgage payments and stacks of bills to be paid. There are groceries to buy and dinners to prepare and dishes to clean. Laundry. Don't even get me started on laundry!
And those children that I so desperately wanted? Sweet babies to cuddle and coo at. Precious little lives that we get to hold in our arms and love with every ounce of our being. Yeah, those little darlings grow up and become pains in the ass. Oh, you still love them and if you're lucky, for the most part, you enjoy them. But gracious there are times they make you want to pull your hair out by the roots!
So what about this makes me feel like a dumbass? Everything. Why, oh, WHY do we fill our children's heads with all these happy little scenarios and unrealistic fantasies of what life will be like as an adult? I feel that if I had been properly informed of the pitfalls, the drudgery, the monotony of the day-to-day life of an adult with a home and family to care for, that I would have been so much more prepared and my level of dumbass-ery about this wouldn't sit quite so high on the scale.
I can hear all of the people who disagree with me now. "Oh, but we want children to fantasize about an ideal life so that it is something for them to strive for, something to wish for so that they are happier children." Yeah, in my book? I would have been much happier had I known about the possibilities so that I could have been more aware and I could have known what signs to look for when things were about to fall apart around me.
Didn't my parents prepare me for things of this nature? NO! They hid the hard stuff as much as they could. Hell, they still try to hide the hard stuff from me. While I'm sure they didn't want my brother and me to know just how bad it was at times, I can't help but feel that they sheltered me from things that had I known about, I would have known better how to handle in adulthood.
Am I saying that we shouldn't fill our children's heads with good things? Of course not! We definitely need to fill their heads with good things, loving things, and visions of a brighter future. But we also need to be real with them on the most basic level. We can't shelter them forever no matter how much we wish we could.
Letting them see that life isn't all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens may be hard, but they will appreciate it one day. That "one day" might not be until their washing machine breaks down mid-wash and they have to wring all the water from their clothes and cart it all to the laundromat when there's a foot of snow on the ground. Hell, even then it may not hit them just how appreciative they are until they are lying flat on their backs staring up at the sky with their clothing scattered around them because they slipped on the ice that built up on the driveway that nobody shoveled, but believe me, one day they'll thank us for the hard doses of reality.
Whether it was my own dumbass beliefs, or instilled dumbass-ery, thinking that I would have that picture-perfect little life without the hardships of the day-to-day, definitely deserves a place of honor in my Chronicles of Dumbass-ery.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go empty a laundry basket that has been sitting in my room for a week with clean clothes in it so that I can pick up all the dirty clothes and wash them so that THEY can sit around for a week until I need another empty clothes basket for the next round of wash.
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