My younger brother was married last week in a very hippie hipster affair. I haven’t been surrounded by that many childless twenty and thirty-year-olds since I myself was childless and way hipper. And I thought I was still cool until I opened my mouth and started talking. It didn’t take me long to realize that not only am I so not cool any more but I have become the forty-year-old female version of the two old guys on the Muppet Show who sit in the balcony and hurl insults and make inappropriate jokes only they think are funny, Statler and Waldorf.
I could see the light go out of the young childless hipster’s eyes the longer I spoke with them to the point where it became so painful that I just stuck with my safe crowd – my husband and parents. Because all these bright eyed young things had “heard so much about me” from my brother. They heard about my Working Mommy book and my blog and thought it was so cool. And I was of course was excited that they were excited. So I started dishing with them like people who have children. Big mistake. Huge. Because unlike actual parents, when you make a joke about wanting to leave your screaming infant in the desert to childless twenty-year-olds they think you need to be locked up or in therapy. It’s just awkward and uncomfortable.
And once you go there with these young hipsters there is no coming back. Believe me I tried. Explaining the experience of a colicky baby and the utter despair you feel as a parent to a twenty-year-old with a Grizzly Adams beard only makes the situation worse. I could see in their eyes that they thought I was a modern day Joan Crawford.
And then I started to think that maybe I am a bad parent. Maybe this parenthood business has taken its toll on me – transformed me into something terrible to hear and gross to look at. Then I listened to my friend’s album Tenderness and Terror: Songs of Survival From the First Year of Parenthood and breathed a sigh of relief. There is someone out there as twisted and jaded as I am. There is someone who wrote and recorded a whole tongue in cheek song called “White Man In America” which is about how his colicky son shouldn’t be crying about anything because in this misogynistic patriarchal society he is at the top of the food chain. Or the song where he promises to waltz with his son his entire life so waltzing in these early days won’t seem so weird. Songs born out of the sheer will to survive the early years of parenthood. To try to find the humor in this overwhelming, no turning back, life altering event we parents jump into unwittingly https://www.facebook.com/IamAyellowWhale?fref=nf
So I will stop trying to educate those sweet childless souls. If they know too much they might not want to step off the cliff into parenthood. Let’s let them keep thinking it’s all rainbows and unicorns. Because the reality of parenthood is both terrifying and tender and who am I to spoil the surprise?
For laughter and inspiration read my book The Working Mommy's Manual, available on Amazon.
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