You're not a parent, are you? I mean, it's blindingly obvious to me that this argument is happpening between someone who is not a parent and people who are, who understand how it is possible to simultaneously love your child more than anything in the world, and want to be the best parent possible, and prioritize their needs above your own, and at the same time acknowledge that taking care of a child is often an exhausting, mind-numbing, thankless set of neverending tasks that drive even the most devoted and loving parent STRAIGHT UP THE WALL. There was some dystopian novel that came out a while ago where women were only allowed to use 100 words each day and I observed at the time that the author clearly did not have young children because there would be days I would use up my 100 words just repeating "put on your shoes" over and over and over again until my very beloved child actually did it so that we could leave the house. My very beloved child is currently 9 years old and I told her to brush her teeth, a thing that she does LITERALLY every single night as part of her bedtime routine, at least twenty times tonight, and every single time she was pikachu-face at the novel idea up until the point she started yelling that she WAS brushing her teeth, how dare I not be able to see through the wall and know that. (Except that she clearly was NOT brushing her teeth if she was yelling about it.) I love my child, I love being a parent, my kid is amazing and awesome and sometimes I want to have dinner with someone without having to tell a small person to sit down and eat 350 times over the course of ten minutes.
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