Metallica for baby

So it was one of those semi-tense situations where Henry was teetering somewhere between kind of calm and definitely crying, so I was doing anything and everything to keep his little world relatively stable in a desperate attempt to keep him out of the crying zone. These efforts included the carrying, the bouncing, the rubbing the back, and of course singing because hey, while I'm doing all this stuff he still seems cool. Logical right?

Except the song I was singing, whatever it was, ended. Or maybe I forgot the rest of the words. And suddenly I found that all the lyrics to all the songs that I know just vanished from my brain right at that moment, all of them except for the loud headbanging part of "One" by Metallica, which is not to be confused with "One" by U2 which does not feature a loud headbanging part. And thought it wasn't ideal, it was all I had, so I sang it. Very nice and soothing like.

And from the other room, about when I'm getting to the part about the landmine taking my hearing and my arms and my legs, the Ash tells me to "sing something soothing" to which I respond that I'm doing the best I can. I mean, the content isn't soothing, but the delivery was maximum Mr. Rogers chillout. But at the same time, the lyrics to another song pop into my head, the theme to "Reading Rainbow" which is quite a bit more soothing lyrically, hands down, so I sang that cuz I was done with "One" anyway.

It's funny, at times, the more difficult times, the act of parenting feels a bit like a game of Gother Than Thou. For those who don't know or who are too lazy to follow the link, Gother Than Thou is a card game where each player attempts to prove that they are indeed the gothest of the goth. This is accomplished by securing a set number of goth points by playing cards for your character to perform various goth acts such as put on eyeliner or score a steady clove supply or spend the night on the grave of your lover who has left this world. The catch though, is that for every goth point you win, you're giving up points for health and money. So by the end of the game, whoever has won and been declared gother than thou is extremely broke and extremely sick.

This is like parenting how, you sick fuck?

Well you know, there's the sacrificing of the sleep and the time and the, you know, stuff, but at the end you get to be, um...I don't know. It seemed like a pretty good analogy when I started writing and now I can't remember why, much in the same way that I can't remember words to songs. Maybe it's just me wishing for more sleep. Fuck it, I'll hit Save anyway.