Oh my God, this. When I was about 4 I was throwing a tantrum and my mom grabbed my arm and at the same time I threw myself backwards. Apparently my cry went from “bratty” to “in pain”. It was only a pulled muscle but thank God it happened in the olden days when abuse wasn’t automatically suspected.
Keep your passport up to date and in a place you kids and spouse can’t find it.
I completely get that, and understand where you’re coming from. Like I said, it’s a second full-time job (or primary), so you shouldn’t ever feel minimized in that duty.
Cheers! 
This is good advice for anyone, parent or not. My son’s elbow dislocated from me swinging him by his arms, more than once apparently. The first time he complained a little but the pain “went away.” The second or third time I mentioned it to the doctor and then I learned that how easily they can dislocate. Now, kids are rubbery beasts, so a dislocation isn’t necessarily as severe as it would be in an adult but still, dislocating my son’s arm is almost as bad as the time I stuck his head in the ceiling fan. So let me also recommend not doing that.
+1
I see a lot of parents trying to make up for things that they didn’t get to do or have with their children. It never seems to make the child happy. A lot of parenting I see seems to be based on fixing what was wrong with the parents’ upbringing, not really focused on the child at hand. My brother is so guilty of this, he shared the closet of a bedroom with his other two brothers as THEIR bedroom. He literally had NOTHING. His kids have everything, and have no idea what the value of money is. Something wonky with your laptop? Fuck it, break it in half and get daddy to buy you a new one. Its that simple. These kids cannot mow the damn yard, and they are now in their mid teens. I was already working as a mechanic at their age, and driving, and writing checks, paying bills. When my mother was their age, she was married with kids of her own…
And I would add that you can have plenty of parenting experience without being a parent yourself.
Especially if you have to raise your loser brother’s newborn baby because he has been in jail since the child was born and the loser he knocked up is jacked to hell on meth and hasn’t been seen since babbydaddy got busted.
Shit happens.
You don’t have to do the deed to be laden with the responsibility of parenting, trust me.
Well, sometimes I wonder. See below, “Ruthless Rhyme” from some 100 years ago; which has always rather tickled me (non-parent, non-child-lover, horrid callous so-and-so):
Father heard his children scream,
So he threw them in the stream;
Saying, as he drowned the third,
“Children should be seen, not heard”.
I think being the primary caregiver of a child for a long period, whatever the circumstances, counts as parenting.