Turnabout is Fair Play

Entertaining a child all day is a grueling evaluation of mental fitness. I always thought that it took physical fitness and general health to keep up with the active youth. Turns out I was mostly wrong. It does take physical fitness, I suppose, though I’ve worked these past few years to increase my own for that reason. I didn’t know, however, that it took superhuman amounts of mental fitness. After a day of entertaining Balthazar, I’m completely fatigued. It’s the way I feel sometimes after a hard day at work (computer work). What does it to you is the constant barrage of talking. They require your attention for everything and that can drive you crazy. I now understand why parents get into the habit of using phrases like, “because I said so.” It’s just too much mental fatigue to come up for a reason for everything you say. I also understand why parents ignore their children’s blathering. They have to! It’s a self-defense response embedded somewhere in the recesses of our genome. I know it’s likely that I acted the same way when I was a child, so I’m appologizing now to my mother who was both single (mostly) and the direct object of my attention.