So, you want to be a stay-at-home parent?

Good morning Mr. Hunt. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to provide care and guidance to a young child. You will be inserted deep into hostile territory with little resource available to you. You will be expected to avoid confrontation with enemy combatants in the form of well-meaning busy bodies and evade said forces whenever possible. As always, if you should become captured during your mission, the agency will disavow any knowledge of your existence. Good luck Ethan. This diaper will self destruct in five seconds....

The thing is, the missions undertaken by Ethan Hunt and the members of the Impossible Missions Force are a walk in the park compared to my average day. I mean, they only had to save the world, rescue the girl, and assassinate the dictator all within an hour. I've got to keep my sanity, clean, cook, shop, sew, launder, iron, vacuum, keep from skinning the cats alive, dust, scrub, prep, and fold.

Every.

Single.

Day.

And as glamorous as all that may sound, that's the easy part.

Meet the hard part. This is "Butters" for those of you that may have stumbled across these words from much greener pastures. Nearly seventeen months, three feet, and twenty-eight pounds, that seemingly cherubic face can reduce a man who used to blow things up for a living and can drill a gnat's ass at three hundred meters to a sobbing shell of his former self. That loving little face can go from from making your day to making you want to drink heavily in about the same amount of time it'd takes el presidente to prove his intelligence.

I've been having a seriously rough time of late thanks to the little man. He's cutting even more teeth and despite copious amounts of Tylenol and Orajel, he wails like a banshee damn near constantly. Not even the judicious application of 70s and 80s metal can drown out his ear splitting octaves. He's at a point where I wonder if there is any truth to the old "he's going to make himself sick crying so much" schtick. We've reached a point where I wonder if it wouldn't be better to attempt my grandmother's remedy for teething and give the little turkey a shot of Tennessee's finest.

Or maybe it was "drink it yourself so you can ignore it." Can't really be certain, but I'm pretty sure that's the way it's supposed to be done.

I considered putting him in a box marked "free puppies" and putting it on the curb, but, after calling Mac last night to see how her first day of school went, I was told that I couldn't do that to her brother. I think if she were here wanting to rip her ears off rather than in the Democratic People's Republic of Kalifornia, she'd change her tune. Right now, I'd kill for that kind of distance from this nightmare.

You see, in theory I'll be laying him down for his nap soon, at which time my wo-man will call to see how things are going and I will regale her with the tale of how her son is driving me bat-guano crazy.

For the enlightenment of those parents who don't stay home, this is how it works. When the kids have gotten to be too much, something shatters into a million pieces, or you just need to run screaming naked into traffic, the little one(s) immediately become "your son/daughter/kids." Upon utterance of said phrase, a clear message is sent to the other party letting them know that, "I can't deal with this crap right now and so help me if you don't rescue me from this you'll regret it because I have all day long to think of something to do to you befitting of the nightmare I am currently having to endure and I will unleash upon you a plague so vile that the whole world will know of the darkness that I have let loose."

And amazingly enough lacking the ability to push a watermelon out of one's loins in no way precludes one from the ability to let those words fly. I comes down to who is the one that's at home dealing with it. Testicles or ovaries, it doesn't matter, it's just one of those things that goes beyond sex or perceived gender roles right to the heart of what it means to be an at-home parent.

Long hours of isolation and torture in a situation that would cause the most iron-willed individual to snap from the stress and repetition of it all.

But for we few, we happy few, it is a venture worth all the headache and all the stress. At the end of the day, when the wee one is fast asleep no doubt dreaming of what way he will challenge your sanity the next day, you at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you, not some faceless daycare stranger, have brought your child safely through another day.

At which point you recap the day mentally and seriously consider calling the guys in the white coats to haul you off to the land of the padded room.