If you are not a parent you are going to get here and assume this is a potty-training chapter (since almost every mom-penned book follows the labor-and-delivery chapter with the potty-training chapter), and you’ll start gagging and you’ll want to skip it. But you shouldn’t. Because this chapter will make you feel very superior about using birth control and/or infertility.
If you are a parent, you’re probably going to think that you should skip this chapter, because you’ve already heard it all. But I guarantee you haven’t. And also? The nonparents reading this are totally going to read it and smirk at you later, and you should at least be prepared. This is the same reason I listen to a lot of über-conservative Republican radio. Because I want to know what is on the minds of my enemies. Also because I live in Texas, and there aren’t a lot of alternatives. And besides, this chapter isn’t even about potty training. I don’t even know where you got that idea. Potty training is not a fun subject to reminisce about. It’s more like a horrible death march through a haunted forest, and the trees are made of angry bears that you’re allergic to. And you have to look at pictures of dead people at the same time. Like, it’s so awful you want to just make your kid go live outside for the rest of their life, but you can’t do that because the dog’s out there. And that’s why I’m not going to write about potty training, and instead I’m going to write about perspective.
THE FIRST YEAR after having a kid felt sort of foreign to me, and I keep stumbling across it in my head, much like when someone you know dies and an hour later you’re laughing at Hee Haw, and then you think to yourself, “Oh, fuck, I just remembered that Grampa died,” and you get sad again, but then your head goes somewhere else and you’re all, “I wonder why you never see elderly biracial couples?” And then a minute later your mind yells, “Shit. I forgot Grampa died again.” And you keep crying and getting distracted, and you consider that you should probably just turn off Hee Haw, because obviously that’s not helping, but then you think to yourself, “But Grampa loved Hee Haw,” and you convince yourself it’s an homage to him, even though, really, you just kind of want to watch Hee Haw. It’s probably also some sort of self-preservation thing to help you deal with grief, so back off already and stop judging me.
And this is exactly what being a mom is like. You’re just going about your day, thinking about how awesome it would be to make nachos, and suddenly you’re all, “Holy shit, I have a baby. I should, like, feed it or something.” And you do, but then a half-hour later you forget again, and you hear her giggling in the other room and you think, “WTF? Whose baby is that?” and then you remember, “Oh, yeah. It’s mine. Weird.” And then you come up with these great ideas to turn the spare room into a bar, so you can charge your friends for all of the alcohol of yours that they’re already drinking anyway, and then you draw up the plans and bring over a contractor, and then you’re all, “Fuck. Wait a minute. This isn’t a spare room. This is the room the baby lives in.” Right?
Wrong. I was with you up until that last one. If you agreed with the last one then you need to put down this book and go find your baby, because she’s probably out drunk on some tree limb somewhere. You are a terrible parent.