My biggest problem dealing with my son, who is almost 3, is that he acts like a 3 year old.  I don’t mean the diapers and the crying.  I mean, he doesn’t have the adult capacity to plan ahead.

If you’re going on a trip, the night before, you pack your clothes, you print out your boarding pass, you email yourself the hotel info. My son doesn’t understand planning like that.  So every day when we drop him off at daycare, just as we walk in we’ll see some kid wearing a baseball cap, and then all of a sudden my son decides that he can’t make it through the day without a baseball cap on and he’ll lose it.

So, the next day I put on his baseball cap, and we get to daycare and the other kid walks in with his knapsack.  Now, there’s a tantrum about the knapsack.

The third day, we’ve got his hat and his knapsack, and sure enough the other kid walks in with sunglasses on.  So, now there’s a meltdown about sunglasses.  And, not just any sunglasses. It has to be the Spiderman sunglasses.

So, the next day, my kid walks into daycare, and he’s got his baseball cap, a knapsack, Spiderman sunglasses, and now some little fucker walks in wearing a watch.   A watch!  Are you kidding me?!  Where’s he going, that he can’t be late?  The board meeting?  Kid can’t even tell time.  But, he’s got a watch, so now my son needs a watch.  By week’s end, getting my son ready for daycare involves gearing up like a businessman going on a weeklong trip.

And, then goddamn it, somebody shows up and they have a matchbox car.  And, that’s when I’m like I give up.  I’ll never get this right because my son can never tell me in advance, “hey you know what dad, in order to be ready for school today I need my hat, my knapsack, my Spiderman sunglasses, my watch, and exactly 12 Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers, not 13, not 11, exactly 12.”  And, he can’t tell me he needs all that because even he doesn’t know.  He won’t know till he sees someone else doing it.

My son has 2 loving parents.  For all I know these other kids with their sunglasses and knapsacks come from broken homes where they get beaten. But, does my son care that he shows up to school with both his parents everyday? Does he take pride in knowing that he’s one of the very few kids in this World who has this luxury.  That he doesn’t have an absentee father who and a mother who drinks white wine by the boxload to forget how miserable she is being married to a guy who’s a crappy husband and a worse father?  No, my son couldn’t give a sh*t that he’s been so richly blessed.  All he cares about is that some kid has a matchbox car and sunglasses and he doesn’t.   I could give my son a million dollars, and he wouldn’t give a sh*t because that other kid has a fire engine, and he doesn’t.

You wanna know where capitalism comes from, it comes from that – because from the minute you get to about two months old and your eyes can focus, all they lock in on is what other people have that you don’t.