Things I No Longer Care About

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When you become a mother, you quickly realize how much there is to care about. You care about the fact that today your fetus is the size of a tangerine. You care about whether eating a turkey sandwich will cause irreparable damage. You care a lot about how this being will exit your body and how much it will hurt.

Later, you care about everything your precious bundle eats, wears, reads, watches, and whether strangers are covering their coughs and following hand washing protocols.

When your child gets older, you care about things like homework. You have to care about where they’re going and who their friends are and are they going to bed at a decent hour and how you’re going to pay for college, and you probably do all of this while also caring about your job and your significant other and your aging parents and the environment and political activism and occasionally meeting your own needs.

It’s a lot of caring. And I, for one, am tired of it.

I can’t care about all of the things anymore. I can’t care because I have four children and I have been parenting a long time and I am old, and you guys, I am tired. There is a reason youngest children get away with everything, and I will tell you right now: it’s not because their parents like them more.

It’s because their parents physically can’t care anymore. It’s a burden that is too great to bear.

I’ve decided to throw off the weight of the world. It’s not my job anymore. I’ve decided to make a list of things that I officially no longer care about.

Things I No Longer Care About (Warning: Controversial)
by Sharon McMahon

1. I don’t care about loading the dishwasher properly.
I don’t care if the dishwasher is packed to the gills and every dish is perfectly Tetrised into place. I don’t care if it is only 75% full when it’s started. I don’t care that the plates don’t line up perfectly. I don’t care that the silverware is all facing up or down or whatever position the silverware is supposed to be in when being dishwashed. This is my actual dishwasher.Things I No Longer Care About (Warning: CONTROVERSIAL) | Duluth Moms Blog

My beloved mother would like to disagree. She does care. She cares a lot. She cares enough to unpack the dishwasher and redo it after you’ve done it wrong. But I, Sharon McMahon, have added this to the list of things I do not care about, and I’m sorry mom, but I have a messy dishwasher and it’s just the way it is.

2. I don’t care about having a tidy desk.

Things I No Longer Care About (Warning: CONTROVERSIAL) | Duluth Moms Blog

I know what they say about a well-organized workspace and a well-organized mind and coughdon’t care-cough, but you know what? It’s not for me. The nice thing about a messy desk is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

The other nice thing about a messy desk is that I am doing my actual work that people pay me to do and not the pretend fake work that no one cares about because I am doing my actual work.

Question: Is anyone paying you to clean your desk? Guess what. Zero percent of the 45,000 people I know are doing that. And thus, I don’t care if my desk is perfect. Maybe if clearing my desk of pens and hand cream and Starbucks stoppers and ponytail holders was an income opportunity I would care, but it’s not and I don’t. I do my job reasonably well. I don’t have cockroaches. It’s good enough.

3. I don’t care about blow drying my hair.
I really don’t. I take a shower at night. I comb it. I sleep on it damp (the horror! THE HORROR!). And then when I wake up in the morning, get ready for this, MY HAIR IS DRY IN THE MORNING AND IT’S MAGICAL.

I probably do spend a little time the next morning styling it with some kind of heat tool to make myself look less creepy, but that takes less than ten minutes and I wasted zero percent of my life force having my hearing destroyed by an air blaster.

4. Crocodiles and/or Alligators.
I know about ecosystems and top level predators and and Steve Irwin and the Everglades.

I know and yet I don’t care. They are mean and ugly and they eat children at Disney World and they sleep motionless with their mouths open and I really would not be sad if there were no more crocodiles.

Or alligators. I don’t care enough to know the difference.

5. This last one is likely to get me kicked out of school. I will probably be suspended and/or expelled and no one will ever talk to me again except to say, “Whatever happened to that one girl, Sharon?”

“No idea.”

“Yeah. She didn’t care about important things.”

I know all of this, and yet I still cannot care about zombies. I haven’t read Zombie Pride and Prejudice. I would rather stare at the wall than watch The Walking Dead.

Try me sometime. I will choose wall gazing 100% of the time over any kind of media involving zombies.

Things I No Longer Care About (Warning: CONTROVERSIAL) | Duluth Moms Blog

I would much rather watch a TV show about any of the following:

  • Hot Sauce (Why do people want to burn their tongues off?)
  • Chicken Diapers (This is a thing. Look it up.)
  • Doughnuts (because, DELICIOUS)
  • Crocodiles, blow drying your hair, cleaning your desk, or loading your dishwasher. All of those things are way more interesting than zombies.

I polled several of my friends about things they do not care about, and I love their answers. They said things like, “Ironing”, “Washing my car”, and “Tom Brady’s missing jerseys”.

I’ve decided to stop caring about those things too. And I feel about five ounces lighter. 

3 COMMENTS

  1. Your way too cool. Thank you for this post! I couldn’t agree with you more about all the things your don’t care about especially ZOMBIES!!

  2. I love you Sharon!!!! You made me smile and laugh on this gloomy Monday! You are spot on and Cheers to us non Zombie fans, I could not agree with you more xoxo

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