The Bad Parent's Apologetic Manifesto and/or To-Do List

1. I will not insert bigfoot and flying saucers into my readings from the bible just to make it “more interesting.”


2. I will not teach my son that mooning is considered a polite greeting in Papua New Guinea.


3. I will not teach my son that burping aloud is ok when you turn it into a word. .


4. I will not consistently offer that the sound of my own fart was actually that of a rare “barking spider.”


5. I will not fart on my son.


6. I will not teach my son the ancient rubric “Why fart and waste it, when you can burp and taste it.”


7. Apparently it is NOT ok for him to have a mohawk when he attends a private upscale catholic school.


8. Peanut butter and Hershey’s Chocolate Milk mix is not an acceptable substitute for a healthy sandwich.


9. I will not teach my son to forgive the fat bully kid on his basketball team for being such a dickwad by patting him on the shoulder and saying “It’s ok, being adopted must be hard.”


10. I will not laugh uncontrollably when my son shoots himself in the finger, point blank, with the compressed air nerf-pellet gun I told him he couldn’t play with.


11. I will not convince my son, over the period of one year, through subtle ‘slips’ and through stories of his ‘difficult capture and hair removal surgery’ that he’d started life as a monkey.


12. Or a girl.


13. I will not wait until we are deep into a forest trail to talk about how people who get pythons from pet stores secretly release them into the forest preserves when they get too big.


14. There is no such thing as being able to kill someone with a single touch.


15. You’re best friend is NOT a ninja ‘in hiding’.


16. You are NOT ‘every once in a while’ possessed by the devil.


17. The TV remote will NOT work on the neighbor’s set ‘if you try hard.’