There are many wonderful things about being a parent, but unless your child is an angel, getting your kids to eat their food isn't always at the top of that list.
In a now-viral Facebook post, mom Bunmi Laditan got real about why dinnertime is such a pain for her.
"Y'all know I've been going through things and trying to get right with God and stop swearing but I need to speak on something," she wrote. "Dinner time. Dinner time is some ultimate bullshit and I'm TIRED of it."
"I'm not running for public office, but if I were, my entire platform would be that all children under 10 be fed exclusively Ensure until they learn to cook for themselves whichever happens first," she joked. "I'm tired of dinner. It is absolutely insane that every night, mothers and fathers are forced to waste their life force trying to convince their seed to CONTINUE LIVING via the ingestion of essential nutrients."
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"You don't see baby koalas and buffalo rejecting their bamboo and savanna grass do you?" she continued. "You don't see little toddler alligators talking about, 'Mama, this gazelle is too stringy. It's hot. Mama the blood is hot. It's hot, mama. Can you blow on it even though I too am capable of blowing?'"
Her hilarious, relatable rant gets to the root of a struggle that parents often contend with — while it may not make sense to us, kids sometimes just don't want to eat. Laditan doesn't hate her kids, she just hates putting all her effort into making nutritious meals for them and then having to convince them to eat said meal.
"It's not poison, kids, it's called FOOD welcome to life," she wrote.
But Laditan does have one genius — if not a little impractical — solution.
"We as parents need to come together," she suggested. "Rather than feeding our children individually in our own homes, we need to nourish them at giant picnic tables in the street sitting side by side, too distracted by each other's presence to realize they're eating. Screw traffic- every night at 6PM, we set up the collapsible tables and do it orphanage-style: handing out sandwiches and apple slices and then hosing down the kids with dish soap (bath time) and calling it a night. Success."
Her tongue-in-cheek post has hit home for a lot of parents out there — since she posted her rant to Facebook on Monday, it has received over 25,000 times, and several parents commented on the post to share their own stories.
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"The worst is when they love something last week and this week, won't even touch it," one mom commented. "And you had the gall to CELEBRATE last week, to buy MORE of it at the grocery store."
"I've made about 9,000 dinners as a mother," another mom wrote. "I was over it around 25."
Making meals just for yourself every day is difficult enough, and we can't even imagine what these moms go through. (Thank heavens for Seamless.)