Being a parent is hard.
This is probably the first time you’ve heard this, since most parents are reluctant to tell you how tough they have it. But caring for a human being with zero emotional regulation, motor skills, or neck strength? It’s sort of hard. How hard? It’s difficult to say because people with kids are tight-lipped and refuse to elaborate endlessly at dinner parties, but it probably falls somewhere between the challenge of opening a can of soda and the issues one might encounter doing spinal surgery on a trampoline. Thanks a lot, parenting books. Guess I’ll figure this one out on my own.
As time passes, your baby will grow into a child, and that child into a larger child.
Shoes, clothes, food—you will need more of these as the dimensions of your child expand, proportionate to linear time. Will your child get longer? You bet—but also wider. Expect your child to grow, physically, in all known directions. Good luck reading about this on any mommy blogs.
Children require money.
This one is shocking but true: Children cost money. Mainly because you have to buy “things” for them. Sneakers, lasagna, mid-tier college tuition, a tiny little toilet, a bar mitzvah gift for his shittiest friend, hideous plastic garbage toys—these are just some of the “things” that your child will likely need and that modern commerce demands be obtained with liquid currency. It’s nearly impossible to find this information anywhere, so go ahead and complain about this all day until you pass out.
Two children is more than one children.
Remember that money thing from before? Well, prepare yourself, because this one is a doozy: If you decide to have a second child, that child will also cost money, maybe even more money than the first child (inflation). This will effectively double the amount of money, not to mention space, your constantly expanding children require.
Summer happens every year, usually at the same time.
No, last year wasn’t a fluke. You can generally count on summer to occur sometime between April and November. Summer is a period when, traditionally, there is no school (you might remember this from being a child yourself), which means that you will have to find another way to fill your child’s days, as they will continue to exist. Offensive as the very fact of summer is to you, personally, it’s a trend most eagle-eyed parents get good at spotting.
Your baby may not initially know Microsoft Excel.
It would be great if all babies came out with at least a basic understanding of Excel but, in addition to pissing themselves and having no language skills, most babies can’t format cells for shit. Not that anyone bothers to tell you that.
Your mediocre husband might not turn out to be an excellent father.
Surprised that your dud of a partner didn’t do a one-eighty and show up for parenthood in a way he’s never shown up for anything else in his entire life? Yeah, it’s a head-scratcher. Watch your friends’ jaws drop when you tell them that the same guy who still insists he’s “not good at cleaning” has discovered that he’s also “not good at getting up in the middle of the night.”
Children defecate, just like adults do.
Yup, believe it. When you feed a child food, that child’s body converts the food into excrement (turn your child upside down to confirm this). This process may sound familiar to you, a carbon-based organism, but feel free to discuss this phenomenon as though it’s totally new, and don’t skimp on the details. People are very interested in the volume and frequency of your child’s bowel movements.
Time is finite.
O.K., strap in: Time, as we have come to understand it, is finite. What this means for you, as a parent, is that every minute you spend bathing your child or feeding your child chewed-up carrots is a minute that you cannot devote to other activities, like flying to Spain or going to a movie. I know—it’s complicated. Just imagine a bucket full of water. Now imagine you dip a mug into that bucket and scoop out some water. There would be less water in the bucket, right? That’s sort of how time works. Sorry!
Public school is free and private school costs money, and people will argue that your child might get a better education at private school, but public schools tend to be more diverse. Plus, if you have the means to pay for private school, it’s actually probably preferable to support the public-school system. Also, getting a child into a good private school requires a ton of work, so it’s a dilemma.
No one talks about this. ♦