Dear Future Daughter/Son/Non-Specific-Gender-Identifying Trans Child,
Take a seat. Daddy has some things he’d like to get off his chest. And no, it’s not just the piles of festering plates and clothes that have piled around him over the years, because boy, parenting sure does lower your standards over time. No, the things Daddy would like to get off his chest are more philosophical and emotional than that. I would like us to have a heart-to-heart—even though, over the years, you have slowly broken mine.
Oh shut up; you so have! And before you continue on with your terrible whining (a noise that has always made me gag), go out and ask any mother or father out there and I guarantee they’ll say the same thing: All children break their parents’ hearts. It’s just what children do. In fact, it’s what Daddy’s own mother continues to remind him still, to this very day, every time they speak on the phone. (Will she never die?)
In your baby years, you vomited, shat and pissed all over me, like some disgusting animal with an out-of-control septic hose attached to it. In your teen years, you stumbled home from parties and vomited red wine all over my already-dirty carpets. There was that phase of “experimenting” with drugs (couldn’t you have experimented with orchid hybrids instead?), and all those unhygienic things you inserted in yourself, from scary-looking piercings to scary-looking penises. Where does the heartbreak end?
Still, I want you to know you are loved, because various parenting magazines and blogs insist that’s my responsibility: to make you feel special and cherished and so on. And of course Daddy loves you! Don’t you see? It’s possible for Daddy to deeply love and resent you simultaneously, much like Daddy loved and resented the entire Australian Labor Party from pretty much the mid 1990s onwards.
And Daddy values you. Very much so. How could he not value you, when you cost so much money to bring out into the world? As the child of two homosexual fathers, you sure were pricey to conceive. Back when you were born, it wasn’t as easy as it is now. In those days, gay marriage was still illegal in Australia (hard to believe, considering it’s heterosexual marriage that’s banned now), surrogacy laws for gay parents were murky at best, and adoption for same-sex couples was outlawed in four states.
So how did you get here, you ask? A very good question! For now, I’m still going to keep that a mystery (because every child loves a good mystery), but you do have several options to choose from. Either the mobilised, angry LGBTQIMILF lobby eventually changed those outdated same-sex parenting laws, or we biologically hyper-evolved within a single generation so homosexuals could finally give birth out of their butts. I actually forget.
Anyway, you’re old enough to hear the truth about parenting now. And it’s this: all kids are little dickheads. Like you, I started off adorable. Then I went through my weird-body-shape-and-acne years, lost all traces of cuteness, developed an attitude and never once did I apologise to my parents for stealing the best years of their lives.
When you become a parent yourself, here are some parenting skills you might want to try that I’ve inherited from countless generations of angry Asians before me. Passive aggression is always welcome. Regular, trumpeting clarion-calls of “I WISH YOU HAD NEVER BEEN BORN” will help keep your own kid’s self-esteem in check. But whatever happens, ensure you earn decent money in your adult life. Then give it to me, so I can go on fabulous international cruises until I die. If you do this, I swear I’ll stop complaining and leave you the hell alone. Because we both know that’s what we really want.
Love you lots, Cutie-Pie. Daddy.
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