I don’t think kids suck, but I knew that that would grab your attention and make you think, “man why does he think kids suck?”

Kids don’t suck. They’re actually pretty damn amazing, but what sucks is that you constantly have to teach them lessons and remove any feelings that you may have.

Let me explain why:

1. My kid literally took my heart and ripped it out of my body on Christmas night.

But she was probably unaware of that, which is actually pretty nice.

She came over, I made it magical for her, I put music on, I lit candles.

All her presents from Santa and myself were under the tree.

It was beautiful. And then she did her thing that she normally does.

She says, “let’s call mom and get it over with.”

Her words, not mine.

She called me. After about four or five minutes she started melting down. My poor little girl has had the flu. She’s had it non-stop. She started getting really upset, and saying why am I always sick. When am I ever going to get better. And she just got all emotional. And it was beautiful to watch and beautiful to see. I knew what was coming next. Mom would be over at my house picking her up, or I’d be dropping her back off, which is something I don’t really think should have happened, but it’s the way she’s been conditioned, and that’s the way we’ve been doing things to this point.

Her mom was wonderful. She tried many ways to get her to soothe her so she didn’t come over and allow us to have our Christmas time together.

But my daughter was melting, and basically after about 10 minutes of melting I had nothing to do but just give in and allow her mom to come over.

2. Kids will make you really angry.

And there’s nothing you can do to tell them that.

She was whispering on the chair to her mother. I knew exactly what she was whispering. Ready to tell daddy she was leaving.

Her mom was slowly packing up her two American Girl dolls — what kid needs two American Girl dolls, I’m not quite sure, but then again what kid needs 100 stuffed animals?

She then looked at me and said you do take care of me daddy too, but it’s not our day.

Well, technically it was our day, it was our Christmas, and our Christmas is now officially over.

But I didn’t say that, of course. And there was nothing I could do.

Which leads us to:

3. Kids are going to get you so upset, there’s nothing you can do.

You can’t rationalize and talk to them until they get older. You can’t explain anything to them. Well, my daughter was feeling really sad. She goes, I just want my family together.

Well, my ex and I are not family. My ex is actually living with somebody else, and we’re not family, but in my daughter’s eyes we will always be family. I could explain it to her and tell her that mommy’s with another man and daddy is by himself, and we have two separate families, which I’ve done. But it doesn’t mean it’s going to register in the mind of a beautiful little emotional six year old.

Christmas to me was over. And I have never been a big holiday person. I do holidays because I have a beautiful little girl.

So, in her room, we created this absolutely gorgeous Christmas village. I took it down. Trying to move forward. Christmas was over. It didn’t work out the way it supposed to work out.

I’ve never been a fan of leaving decor up. It had been up since Thanksgiving, and as far as I’m concerned it should come down on Christmas. Christmas is over. I never understood people that leave their trees up for three or four weeks after the holidays. Put them up at Thanksgiving, take them down Christmas night. Make it a tradition. It would have been a tradition if my daughter didn’t bail out on me. She’ll probably be confused when she sees her room, and it’s not the way it used to look, but I took her Christmas presents and turned it into a new type of village, so I’m sure she’ll be equally as happy that I spent time kind of creating that for her.

Kids suck, man. They’re going to pull your hearts like nobody else ever does, and you have to realize that. Once you realize that it’s all about them, and it’s not about you, it can soothe yourself. Make yourself feel better. Save the big conversations for when they’re ready.

One thing my daughter never said was thank you. So I have to re-teach her that.