Oops, I Must Have Been Too Busy Bitching About Not Getting Any Sleep To Mention How Great My Kid Is

Janeane Garofalo had a great joke in a recent standup about a friend who’d become insufferable since becoming a parent. I’m paraphrasing here, but Garafalo’s friend said something like, “You know what, now that I’ve had a baby, I finally get it — it’s not all about ME anymore.” Garafalo’s response: “You’re just now getting that? It’s not all about YOU, now it’s just all about something MADE OF YOU?” Funny, except the best thing about a baby in my opinion is that it is made of you, but it is, decidedly, not you. What a relief.

If your baby was like you it would sit around drinking too much coffee reading dusty websites that document the unraveling of Sid and Nancy’s relationship from old scanned-in newspaper clippings. It would overthink stuff, have the bad habit of rolling its eyes a lot and would listen to that one song too many times because it tends to get OCD about certain pop songs.

No, what your baby is, if you’re paying attention, is a fresh start, a chance for you to see if you could take all your perfectly decent raw materials, add them to someone else’s perfectly decent raw materials and shape something that bears no emotional resemblance to Lindsay Lohan. It’s a do-over, a try it now, a ‘mon back with the benefit of hindsight. It’s a work of art. Maybe it’s the new Cubism, or maybe it’s just another velvet dog painting.

This is both incredibly indulgent and humbling. I think the humbling part is what the outsider must not see, because all they hear is you yapping about how great your kid is or bitching about how hard it is to parent (I am not innocent of this; I am aware of what my columns are about!). You know, as opposed to before, where all you did was yap about how great YOU are. And that was preferable?

It’s the STFU Parents syndrome: Boast too much about your kid, and you’re an asshole. Complain too much about the downside and you’re an asshole. Win-win for Tumblr sites everywhere, not so much for those of us actually trying to figure how much we are allowed to talk about something that now affects 99% of our waking life. Also, I don’t think you single childless people know what you want anyway. You’re always changing your mind about when it’s ok for people to talk about this stuff. I think you all should probably at least meet up and get your story straight, but you’d probably just get drunk and end up having ill-advised, unprotected sex and want to TELL EVERYONE ABOUT IT.

But back to me! Recently, there was a period of time where my baby was teething every single night and we were getting no sleep and going into work exhausted and the baby was also intermittently getting fevers every other week at daycare because she’d just started daycare, and we were having to take turns picking her up and staying home and it was just the crunchiest of crunchy times in our very brief parenting life so far.

Yes, we knew we’d signed up for crunchy, and we were getting some fucking hard granola. We had a sense of humor about it, but it was the kind where we acknowledged the shittiness, not the other kind, where you pretend your life is perfect until you grow a tumor.

So when I was asked about the apparent lack of sleep at work, apparently I made the mistake of answering honestly — something to the effect of how brutal the last few weeks had been. The response: “Whoa man, you make it sound like your baby ruined your life.”

Record scratch.