So many moments in parenthood have “If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry” energy. You know all the clichés. The baby who has a blowout in the bath. The proud toddler running with their potty, sloshing it around and spilling the contents everywhere as they come to show you their accomplishment. (A lot of them are bathroom-related in the early years.) The little kid — pardon us, “big kid” — who way-too-loudly comments on a stranger’s appearance in public. The fact that it takes 45 effing minutes to get out the door every. single. time.
And even if the later years don’t have fecal fiascos (at least we hope not), you’ll need to keep hardy-har-har-ing. Because there’s always going to be something that will want to make you dab your eyes or pull your hair out right.
*Nervous laugh*
Saturday Night Livestar Mikey Day is the proud dad of an 11-year-old son, Abbott. (Who you might remember from his hilarious SNLappearance in 2020.) When we reminded him at the American Museum of Natural History Gala that Abbott is a tween, Day was taken aback. “Yeah, that’s a tween,” he concedes. “It’s like my brain refuses to accept that he’s getting older.”
It will come as no surprise that Day — who has been with SNL since his writing days in 2013 — approaches the sad reality of being a parent of a tween with humor. He tells SheKnows that he and his wife Paula Christensen have come to the unsettling realization that they’re the parents. Like, The. Parents. Not the kind of parents they were when Abbott was born in Aug. 2012, but the kind of parent you become when your kid enters tweendom. The suddenly “uncool” and “annoying” kind.
“He’s doing things that I did as a kid and I’m like, ‘Oh, man, we’re the parents,'” the Is It Cake? host says. “And I remember being annoyed by my parents. And I’m like, ‘Oh, we’re that now. We’re that.'”
They’re that.
“You always think like, ‘No, we’re cool, though. We’re not going to be annoying.’ We’re like ‘Yo what’s up, man?!'” Day jokes with us, putting on his best “cool guy” persona. “But I say the same things my parents did. Like, ‘After you eat can you put your dishes in the dishwasher? Please? It’s not that hard.'”
But what is hard — for all parents who go through this same identity crisis — is grappling with the fact that despite your best efforts, you turned into your parents. It’s all very Dr. Rick-esque. But everyone gets there. Everyone becomes that. And if you can’t laugh at the fact that your kids think you’re a drag (even though you’re clearly the coolest by saying, “Yo what’s up man?!”), you’ll cry.
Leave a Comment