Three Things I Swore I’d Never Do

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Is there something you swore you didn’t like, until you tried it?

I don’t know if I would say that there’s something that I disliked until I tried it, but I will say that once I became a parent, I found myself doing several things that I swore I would never do.

Minivans really are sensible

Before I had children when I was in my early 30s and even going back to my 20s, and even my teenage years, I swear to God, I would never drive a minivan. And yet, since I had kids, I would borrow my parents, and then my mothers minivan, for car trips just because it was so much more sensible.

Yes, they’re ugly. Yes, they are a cliché on wheels. But the fact is, minivans give you a lot of room. And they also have lots of amenities to them, like USB plugs in the front and back seats, seat warmers, seat coolers - to name a few.

Smart phones and tablets are in valuable tools with children

In the early days of cell phones, we just assumed that the people who own them were either super wealthy or drug dealers. And then one day and saved by the Bill, we saw Zach Morris carrying around one of the brick style cell phones in the late 80s. Of course, he was probably paying eight dollars a minute to use that phone, but I digress.

As time went on cell phone plans got cheaper. I got my first cell phone when I was in college. Just to give you an idea of how old I am, this was before text messaging!

Then, once data access and smart phones became more practical, everybody started getting them. To this day, we still see people walking around, almost hypnotized by their mobile devices. This scanner cannot include tablets in iPads. As a parent, I swore up and down I would never let my kid become a zombie with a smartphone or tablet attached to his hand. That went out the window pretty quickly. Kid one had his first cell phone when he was five. This was before smartphones and his didn’t even have a keypad. In fact, he had three speed dial buttons on his phone. This was primarily sled he could talk to me; as X2 and I had split up at this point, and we were living far apart.

In the club

I’m not real proud of this one.

I turned 21 in 1995. I definitely got fully immersed in my bar/club-hopping phase. I would inevitably spot somebody in the bar at times I could tell it was clearly the oldest person there.

I remember thinking to myself back then “there is no way you would find me in a club after I turn 40”. I’m 50 today and every now and then, I still feel the urge to go to a club. don’t get me wrong, it’s not like it used to be. I do feel awkward, at least a little bit, when I’m there. And I don’t even go very often. In fact, I think maybe I’ve been to a club twice in the last three years. One of those times was a night that a friend of mine, The Butcher, was the DJ. But I still like hearing the music of my choice, seeing people dancing and having some alcohol.

Of course, I didn’t plan on being single at 50 either. So there’s that.

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