I am the bad cop.

When it comes to parenting, provided you are blessed enough to have two parents sharing the job, it seems you always have the good cop and the bad cop. Remember "wait until your father gets home!"? Ok, my mom never said that to me, my parents are divorced, but I have heard it on tv.

I don't have to wait until my husband gets home to dole out some discipline, though I do sometimes wait for him to discuss the bigger issues, which luckily for us are few and far between. But even in those cases, I am going to be the one who hands down the harsher sentence. I am the bad cop. This is ironic because my husband is a real cop. And I am sure he is much meaner to punks than he is to our kids. Luckily for him, when he has someone looking at him with utter hatred, he gets to leave them where they are coughjailcough and come home to his wife and kids. Which is actually a little misleading, as my husband is an auxiliary officer and has, hmmm two arrests I think, yeah two. But you get the point, you know, the whole cop reference...*ahem* moving on. But me, I got nothing. Well, I can always escape to my beautiful new bathroom. Oh and speaking of time off, um when is mine? I was feeling less than motivated yesterday and for the most part took the day off. "The day off" still included several loads of laundry, but mostly playing Bejeweled Blitz on the computer. I felt guilty too. And I couldn't figure out why. If I had a "real job" and took the day off, I would be out doing carefree things, not giving work a second thought. Of course, I wouldn't be sitting AT work, looking at all the work I was skipping out on, and therefore would be able to have those carefree feelings. Sorry, I digress...

So I am bad cop. Ask my kids, mom can be mean. Yeah, well mom was a wild kid herself and knows all too well what trouble you can get into, you just don't know it yet. I am certainly not sharing my dirty little secrets with my kids while they are young enough to use them against me!

This honor of being the bad cop, it doesn't stop with the kids. It starts all over again when it comes to taking care of our parents. If you are not bestowed with the honor (and I say that with all sincerity) of taking care of an elder loved one, you may not fully understand. But some days it feels like you are in trouble with your own bad cop. And it feels just like it did when you were little. So you sort of become the bad cop adult child and the scolded little kid all at the same moment, without a clue how to conduct yourself. I find the sudden urge to write "I am sorry for making you take your vitamin and medicine when you didn't feel like it" one hundred times on the blackboard. But only after I actually make him take them.

So that gets me thinking about the fact that my own kids will someday be mom's bad cop, taking care of me when I don't want to play by the rules. God willing, and if Pat and I do it right, that is what will happen. Will they remember the times I handed down the harsh sentences, or will they remember the warnings, the many, many....MANY warnings I gave and let them drive on without a ticket?

For now though, I am just the bad cop, the mean one. Ask anyone in this house.