1. They will not appreciate you until you are dead
They assume that you will always be around until it finally hits home that you are gone for good, then suddenly they see what they don’t have in their lives, contrasted with what used to be there. Every single little thing that they took for granted will be highlighted. Until you die, though, they are blind to it, you are pathetic compared to the parents of their friends.
2. Whatever method of parenting you choose will be wrong
If you push it will be too hard, if you don’t push then you should have. Every single thing you do will cause an issue and the issue will be entirely your fault. What’s more they will rebel against you, so that if you try to raise them the right way, they will go, at least for a time, in the opposite direction, and the consequences of this will also be your fault.
3. They will profoundly disappoint you
It won’t happen all at once either. When they come out of the vagina they will have all kinds of potential, but only in your imagination. You will imagine your kid to be a great man or woman, imaginative, athletic, good-looking, talented, and they will grow up to be less so. You will come to see over the course of the next 2 decades that your kid is more like the kids at their school than they are like you. You will see that they are lazier, dumber, less gifted than you are, at least at the things you think are important but most likely at everything.
4. You will screw up
And your mistakes will have very real consequences. You are a flawed person, maybe you have a temper, maybe you don’t have enough of one, maybe you love your job and spend too much time on it, maybe you are less motivated about work. Everybody has something wrong with them, everybody fucks something up at some point. Whatever mistakes you make will have definite repercussions in your child’s life, they will view life through the filter of that mistake and either become prone to it themselves, or have some other issue as a result. So on top of them making you a scapegoat for all their own adult issues they will have genuine ones that you started with your issues.
5. Teenagers are assholes
There are the assholes that are assholes to your face, and there are the assholes who hide it from you, but they are all assholes. This is not to say that some are not bigger assholes than others, who are not just going through a phase but on the road to becoming assholes for their entire lives. Every kid goes through that phase where the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood, the increased and increasing expectations, the insecurities, all combine into a shit-supercell of self-pity and melodrama.
6. You will love them too much
That means you are tied to them no matter what. Even if you kid grows up to be a serial killer or child molester. You will, because of this emotional bond, go into denial. Deep, stupid, dark denial. Everything bad said about your kid will be a lie, and even when you are convinced that, yes, he did molest the neighbors dog, you will be quick to assume that he is cured. Two weeks behind bars and you will start doing everything in your power to get him out. On one level this is sweet, on another it is an example of pure, blind human stupidity and you and your sick, perverted kid should probably be killed.
7. They will look to you for everything
Not only that, it will continue well past the point that it should. It’s a tremendous responsibility, being your child’s main supplier of stuff, of good times, of attention and affection. If you have any kind of life or interest in anything outside of child-rearing, you can change "responsibility" to "soul-crushing burden".
8. They will be obnoxious
Kids are ignorant of everything including how not to act in public around strangers who neither know nor like them. It is important that you know this fact before somebody kicks your kid in Wal-Mart.
9. They will take a lot of your time
PTA meetings, swing-set assembly, computer assembly, re-learning math so you can help them, reading boring stories over and over again, trips to the ER, driving through the ‘hood looking for a bondsman, endless illnesses, listening to dumb stories about nothing important, all part of the job and basically will suck away maybe a third of your leisure time till they leave home.
10. You will develop patience
You will find yourself able to tolerate weakness, stupidity and assorted other flaws in people younger than you with an equanimity you would never have possessed were it not that your kid was also deficient. On the surface it seems like a good thing, except what it really is is that you are trying to pretend that the flaws are not so bad.
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