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"FacebookPinterestFacebookPinterest\n\n Yes, fatherhood is terrifying. Have you seen a new father lately? He looks like he just escaped from Gaunt\u00E1namo. We'd like to tell you not to worry, that it's all hype. But the fact is: Sleep deprivation is real. A whole new universe of pressures and priorities is about to emerge. You'll wake up in the middle of the night doing college-tuition computations. You'll wonder if you've taken your last trip to Europe (or for that matter, to bars). But mild torture and low-level dread are only the smallest fraction of the experience\u2014like, did we mention unparalleled life affirmation? Sheer joy? A renewed sense of purpose? The subgenre of women who find you, the new dad, sexy? There's a lot you don't know about fatherhood before you become a dad, and the vast majority of it is good.\n\n The biggest problem with becoming a dad these days, besides the stinging realization that you're not the center of the known universe, is that no one tells you how to do it. We're not like women, who seem to be in a lifelong training course for motherhood and who have a vast mommy-industrial complex of books and shows and magazines and expert friends at their disposal. The only experience we've had with fatherhood was through our own fathers\u2014which, if you haven't noticed, ain't exactly the model for how things work anymore. In the intervening years, mom/dad lines have blurred. Your participation in the daily life of your child is no longer merely interesting; it is required. You're expected to know everything, only no one has ever taught you anything. But we're here to tell you, knowledge is available. There are ways to avoid certain pitfalls. Ways to make yourself invaluable. Certain bits of technology you'll want to avail yourself of. Some hardships you'll want to commiserate over. We figure you can learn it all in the short essays below\u2014give or take a decade.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n You will Find Other Moms Hot\n\n Generally speaking, of course. You will probably feel a little weird about it, too, but you'll think it. A lot. Maybe it's because your wife gave birth to your child, which was the most miraculous and beautiful thing ever, and you should totally tell her that, especially when she complains about her boobs. More likely it's because your social circle now lurches like an unmoored Venn diagram, careening into so many other parents' circles. Moms are suddenly everywhere. They're at the park and at teh day care in the morning and pushing carts around Babies \"R\" Us, and they're usually both a little disheveled and shiny with maternal hormones, the combined effect of which is almost exactly like your pre-baby wife after two margaritas. Your kid will babble at her kid, and you'll translate it in that goofy baby-talk way\u2014\"Say bye-bye to the pretty baby!\" and then you'll smile at each other, and it will all be very...sweet. And because your perspective on everything has changed, sweet is now the first component of sexy, which is why, when she walks away, you will reflexively check out her ass.\n\n And all those girls\u2014young and flirty\u2014you used to think were hot? You will realize: She is someone's daughter. You don't want some old guy\u2014some married father\u2014slobbering over your daughter twenty-five years from now, do you? No, you don't.\u2014Nick Bishop\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n You'll get a Do-Over on Childhood\n\n There's this little secret they don't tell you about fatherhood: You get to do childhood over. With the slightest whiff of an excuse, Daddy is permitted to drop all chores/work/paying of bills and can suddenly be found stuffed in a woven basket in the laundry room playing hide-and-seek. Or maybe Daddy has assumed the character of Lou the Leprechaun or Marlo the Panda or Captain Krell, the very naughty pirate who is in constant battle for treasure against three wee pirates, staying in character, wearing scarves and an eye patch on a rainy Sunday for, oh..up to eight hours.\n\n Is this normal?\n\n \"Yes, this is very normal,\" says childhood expert Michael Paterniti.\n\n The thing about doing childhood over again is that you get to do it a little better this time, with a little more awareness and invention. There are going to be occasions when it is incumbent upon you to hide in that woven basket in the laundry room or do that crazy jig because it's just what the moment calls for\u2014and because being a kid, however briefly, is the most perfect, edifying way to be at all.\n\n Take last night, for instance. After putting the kids to sleep, I did the dishes, took out the recycling, and before heading to bed at ten, caught sight of the last toy left out, a recent birthday present for our youngest: a remote-control motorized car. Who doesn't love a motorized car?\n\n \"No one,\" says childhood expert Michael Paterniti.\n\n You could make it turn under tables, run over action figures, and smash into walls. You could jam a couple of bendable guys into the front seat, and soon they were racing from the kitchen to the living room to save the president of the United States from radiation poisoning, Polonium-210 in his chipped-beef sandwich.\n\n They made it. The day was saved. It was after midnight before I got to bed.\u2014Michael Paterniti\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n You Will Not Become a 24/7 Entertainer\n\n Beware the baby-industrial complex. It's real. It's insidious. It will fuck you up! Like its military counterpart, the BIC exists to move product, whether it's the Baby Einstein/Wiggles/Clifford stuff\u2014or the vast literature warning parents against that stuff. The difference is that with the BIC, the real menace isn't in the product in conditions you to buy. It's the conditioning itself.\n\n And what does the BIC condition you to do? Panic. And in turn, to fetishize both your children and your child rearing. How does it do that? By turning parenting into a science. By convincing you to distrust your own intuition and to invest yourself only in the kind of knowledge about your infant that can be acquired through...videos, books, flash cards, and games. By selling you on the notion that, say, some sugar-crusted, patently crappy Baby Einstein arrangement of a Beethoven symphony has been \"reorchestrated in a way that's appealing to babies.\"\n\n Dad, you gotta fight the powers that be. It won't be easy, because the pressures parents come under to buy the things for their kids that will allow those kids to \"keep up with the Joneses\" are powerful. But fight you must. You gotta reject the BIC's contention that every moment of your baby's first years is monumentally consequential and must therefore be programmed. Stuffed. With \"learning.\" (The kind of learning, of course, that can only be acquired through...well, you get the idea.)\n\n 'Cause guess what: Your kid doesn't need to be entertained 24/7. You want to be a father who helps his kid's imagination flourish? You want to be a father rather than a droid\u2014and fatherhood to be fun rather homework? One of the best ways to develop a child's imagination is to stop micromanaging that child, to leave that child alone, to put a huge hole in the daily schedule devoted to: NOTHING. No videos. No books. No stuff.\n\n And no you.\u2014Andrew Corsello\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n You Will Start Referring to Your Wife as \"Mom\"\n\n It's going to happen. Try to catch yourself. She's going to say it first, or maybe you will. (She will.) The first time, it will be a little joke. Just between the two of you, once lovers and now parents, a seismic identity will shift both of you will note is oddly thrilling.\n\n You'll be sitting there patting Baby on the back, coaxing a belch. He'll belch. You'll say, \"That's my boy.\" She'll look at you. Her eyes will light up with adoration. A dad. She loves seeing you be a dad, a love that's so different from the lover love she's by now used to. So she'll compliment you. She'll tilt her head and say, \"Good job, Daddy.\" Daddy. Okay, she just called you daddy. Are you listening? Because if you're really listening, maybe you'll catch yourself. Catch yourself! Resist the temptation to right then and there to say, \"Thanks, Mom.\"\n\n If you don't resist the temptation (you won't), then forgive yourself and try to move on. Try not to say it again. It was a joke. One joke! It will never be funny again; it will only get creepy. You'll be at the mall, pushing Baby, and she'll be, \"Daddy, look at these shoes!\" And you'll be, \"Aw, Ma, don't you have enough shoes?\" The slope is slippery and steep. Pretty soon it's \"Mom, are we going to have sex tonight or not?\" Mom. You are calling the person you sleep with \"Mom.\" It's bad. It's a little sick. It's certainly sickening. All your friends will hate you.\n\n So let's review: Catch yourself. Resist. Forgive. Move on.\u2014Jeanne Marie Laskas\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Your Wife Will Go a Bit Crazy\n\n The time will come when she will go dark. Very dark. You should be prepared for the moment when you look at her and think, I don't know you. You scare me. Please give my wife back to me, pod lady.\n\n Picture a woman sitting on her sofa. She has not showered in some time. She's working on two hours of sleep. She's staring at the TV, and she has your baby in her arms, and while she knows that TV is something to be avoided, she's also hoping that your baby will be intrigued enough to focus for a while on these four Australian men\u2014the Wiggles\u2014so that she, your wife, might close her eyes for thirty minutes. Is that so much to ask for?\n\n The Wiggles, she's pretty sure, do not have penises. They are grown men who wear bright shirts and sing a song that goes Fruit Salad / Yummy, yummy and who each have cute idiosyncrasies. Like Jeff (purple shirt), he's always sleepy, and Anthony (blue shirt) loves to eat. She's watching them, and the baby gets quiet, but doesn't fall to sleep as she'd hoped. Instead, her mind drifts to an image of her former self, a woman who believed she knew how to be sexy, who believed she could get the attention of any man she wanted. And she begins to do this with the Wiggles. She's thinking about the sex she used to have and looking at these four Australian castrati and wondering, If I had to fuck one of these guys, which one would it be? She'll consider this for a while, and she'll come to a decision. When she confesses this to you later, do not ask her which one she would choose to fuck. (It's not sleepy Jeff, that's all you need to know.) Instead, give her some sympathy. You may be tired yourself, but she's fantasizing about screwing the Wiggles.\u2014Tilly Porter\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Dear New Dad Who Used to Be My Friend,\n\n The problem isn't that you talk about Ferberizing and diaper rash. Okay, a little bit that's the problem. But it's more that you forgot how to have a normal conversation. I don't want things to be like the old days. I just want you to remember that not everyone has the same priorities as you. Please stop telling me how exhausted you are. Please stop with the soliloquies on how bad other people's parenting is. And please stop telling me how uncool you are all the time. \"I'm not cool! I'm a dad who goes to sleep at eight!\" I know that. And just so you know, you weren't cool to start out with. That's not why I liked you. I liked you because you were a good friend. And now it's like you're talking to me over this divide. \"YOU'LL UNDERSTAND LATER,\" you say loudly, like I'm a non-English-speaking cabdriver. I'm childless, not retarded. And while we're at it, one more thing. Talking to you when you're at home can be like talking to one of those smackheads you see on the street who have the nods. Huge, really long, awkward pauses, punctuated by other pauses and idle saliva swallowing. Just get off the phone if you have to\u2014that's fine\u2014but don't make me sit there while you have a narcoleptic episode. Anyway. Please recite this back to me whenever I have kids.\n\n Yrs,\n\n Devin Friedman\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Dear Childless Friend with Whom I Now Have Trouble Relating,\n\n First, let me just say that I understand how sleep cycles and fevers and baby slings\u2014and the superior tone with which parents discuss these things\u2014are all very tedious business. I grant you all that (and so much more). And yet the reason you feel like I sometimes talk to you across a divide is because I'm talking to you across a divide. There's no way to say it without confirming all your negative opinions about me, but your concerns, unless we're talking actual life/death stuff, they're pretty trivial. It's okay. A life where your biggest worries are whether your girlfriend appreciates you enough or what it might signify that your boss didn't reply to your e-mail or how you really want to find something meaningful to do\u2014that's a life to be envied. And I do. There are plenty of moments where I'm jealous of your freedoms. But also, seriously, you're messing with me, right? That grave tone you're talking in when you're telling me how depressed you are about your birthday coming up\u2014that's bullshit, isn't it? Because if it's not, man, you need to figure out some way to get the hell outside yourself. And that's what a kid does for you more than anything else, helps you put your worries into proper proportion. Even as I'm saying this, I can hear the snickering: Another parent acting like he's received the wisdom of the spheres. What an ass-wipe. But honestly\u2014it's really stressful to renovate your apartment? C'mon. Stop.\n\n Fondly,\n\n Joel Lovell"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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