The thing about parenthood is that it damages your dignity.
When you hit puberty in middle school, you learn the importance of dignity. Keep your head down, be inconspicuous, wear the right clothes, don't draw attention to yourself and if you do it had better be for the right reasons like you can tackle or sing or drive a cool car and not for the wrong reasons like your mom made you wear the cardigan your aunt bought you.
So we grow, picking and choosing with dignity and developing into a bright, charming, intrepid person with no baggage who can find a mate.
Then we become that fun, happy couple who has all the right taste, does all the right things and makes all the right choices.
And if we choose to have kids even that seems a cool choice at first because everything seems under control. Then we start to lose it.
Soon we have multiple little people with their own strange interests and allies. We're running them here. We're running them there. We're trying to fathom why they're rowdy, why they're coarse, why they're incorrigible, why they don't appreciate our sound judgment.
We wear $11 blue jeans so we can pay for select baseball, buy them laptop with enough memory they can dominate as a gamer, and pay for Rice. Then they knock us for wearing dad pants.
Yeah, layer by layer, parenthood strips away every shred of dignity to the point that you're just happy to be alive and to be able to provide for the ones you know and love.
And that's a good thing. It's like the enlightenment of a Buddhist monk.