by Una LaMarche
How to Be a Perfect Parent in Five Easy Steps, or Never
I don’t dole out much parenting advice as a rule, largely because I have only one child, who isn’t even old enough to spell, much less shout creative expletives at me, and I still spend most of my days feeling like a complete and utter fraud and failure.
Before Sam was born, I fetishized parenthood as a kind of beatific state that involved a lot of staring down at a swaddled, sleeping child while visitors arrived bearing gifts of wine and foot-long sandwiches.
It doesn’t help that my mother has what is either the world’s most selective memory or the patience of Job waiting in line at the DMV. She was one of the original attachment parents, a baby boomer brought up in an emotionally barren household who had attended many years of Reichian therapy in pursuit of her goal to love and bond with my sister and me to an absurd degree.
This meant that I was held constantly, that I slept in bed with my parents well into kindergarten, and that I breast-fed until I was four years old. (Or five, maybe. My mom has always been fuzzy on the exact math, but I choose to go with four, because as it is, people tend to look so shocked that I’m afraid their lower jaws might actually fracture were I to add a full year to my tenure of latching on to what I liked to call “nippy.”) Mom says she tried to convince me to wean at age two, but that I refused, arguing, “But, Mommy, I like it.” Incidentally, this is also why I refuse, as an adult, to go on any diet that excludes alcohol.
When I ask my mother if any of her sacrifices—being regularly kicked in the face during slumber, being suckled like a Holstein into her forties—took a toll, she always smiles brightly and tells me that she loved every minute. So that’s how I entered into motherhood. Completely excited, naively confident, and totally fucking deluded.
To say that my first weeks as a mother failed to live up to my expectations would be a staggering understatement. First of all, in my visions of postbaby rapture, I always pictured myself in a flattering maxidress that clung to my newly bountiful cleavage in a manner that would remind my guests of Halle Berry emerging from a waterfall in a string bikini. Instead, I wore what amounted to a diaper made of enormous maxipads, held up with mesh boxer briefs.
I also, freakishly, lost my appetite, so the plentiful gifts of banana breads, casseroles, and lasagnas were wasted on me. I didn’t glow; I withered. I looked pale and sad. I was too tired to do much besides sit on the couch holding my son and looking overwhelmed. My skin broke out and my nipples, which had up to that point never had to work a day in their lives, literally cracked under the pressure. Approximately eight thousand times a day, after feeding my mewling little miracle, I would alight to the kitchen, where I would carefully dip my breasts first in salted water and then in olive oil. It was sort of like making a sexy bruschetta (aside from the scabs) and it was the closest I came to cooking for a good twelve weeks.
There were bright spots: I rewatched all of 30 Rock and Mad Men and Lost over the course of a month, while sitting and breast-feeding like a really lazy martyr, Our Lady of Perpetual Hulu. I eventually stopped needing adult diapers and didn’t have to wear a bra most of the time. I automatically got free two-day shipping with Amazon Prime just for expelling another human being from my body. It wasn’t all bad. And of course, I loved my newborn son so much it consumed me. It was like a tidal wave of hormones I drowned in, for better or worse. It’s true that for about six weeks I cried whenever the sun set and that I did once add Brooke Shields’s Down Came the Rain to my Amazon cart for overnight shipping. But I didn’t end up ordering it. Postpartum depression is a serious illness, one that I thankfully did not have. What I had, I came to understand over time, was the normal reaction to becoming a new parent, which can be boiled down to a single, haunting refrain: What in the fuck have I done?
No matter how much you love your baby (and all the clichés are true—it’s like your Grinch heart grows five hundred sizes and then you put on permanent, person-specific beer goggles for the rest of your natural life), there is no way to prepare for the nanosecond during which you transform from a freewheeling childless narcissist into someone who is responsible for protecting, nurturing, and educating a helpless, wailing flesh peanut for the next eighteen years and then, oh yeah, also, forever.
Time-out: If you’re tripping over the words “freewheeling” or “narcissist,” thinking something along the lines of, Hey, that’s not me. I worked eighty-hour weeks! I built igloos out of recycled small-batch soda bottles for Habitat for Humanity! I’m a self-hating vegan monk with agoraphobia! How dare you judge me?! You’re just a virgin who can’t drive!! Okay, first of all? I took care of those last two bucket list items at ages twenty and twenty-five, respectively, so how do you like them freakishly old apples? Second, no matter how hardworking or self-denying or altruistic you think you were before you had kids, I guarantee you that your life was actually one hundred thousand times more indulgent than you think. For example, did you set your own alarm clock, and did it ever hit you? Did you consider it a basic human right to be able to poop alone, without being stared at? Did you ever give more than a fleeting moment’s thought to anyone else’s naps? Did you do things like drink a cup of coffee or read the news without having to turn on the TV at top volume to distract someone who otherwise would be literally trying to eat your body? The defense rests. Which, of course, is just a figure of speech, since I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in years.
But back to the moment of birth. It’s life altering in an almost comically overdramatic way, like the Kool-Aid man crashing through the wall of your otherwise humdrum barbecue.* You give up your former life cold turkey, and then sweat through the withdrawal for a few months (or, in my case, years). I hope this doesn’t make it sound like I hate being a mother—I don’t, at all, and I wouldn’t go back to a life without my son even if I could (as it is, my birth canal resembles one of those air mattresses that will never, ever be able to fit entirely back into its pouch, no matter how aggressively you deflate it). But loving a child and even fetishizing parenthood won’t protect you from a bone-chilling, existential angst that can set in within seconds of delivering the placenta.
This is the voice that will keep you up nights, asking questions like, Who approved you to be a parent? I have seen you lick pudding off your cell phone, and you weren’t even sure it was pudding at the time! Or, Is the baby breathing? No, but really, is he? If you look really close? Is he pooping enough? Is he pooping too much? Is his poop the right color? Is my breast milk less healthy because I ate twenty-five Mary Janes for lunch yesterday? Does it taste like the milk at the end of a bowl of Lucky Charms? Is he sleeping enough? Is he sleeping in the right position? If I pick him up every time he cries, will he be too dependent? If I don’t pick him up, will he be a sociopath? Is there any way I can find out what Tom Hanks’s mother did, and then also Jeffrey Dahmer’s, so that I can make an informed decision about sleep training? Speaking of which, is it weird that he’s always trying to bite my face? If he turns out to be a cannibal, will I still love him just as much as if he were a urologist or a model?
There aren’t any answers—not immediately, anyway. Other new parents are just as freaked out and useless, and people with older kids have repressed the first few months; they’ll probably just hand you a lasagna and then find an excuse to leave the room. Also, forget the Internet. I’m serious. Until you regain the ability to reason that comes with at least five hours of consecutive sleep, online message boards are not your friend. If you doubt me, stop reading right now and type any infant-related worry into Google. Now tell me how long it takes before some stranger is informing you that you need to go to the ER, usually in frantic, misspelled ALL CAPS, because, presumably, the sanatorium only gives them computer privileges for five minutes at a time.
So, while I’ve never liked the phrase “fake it till you make it,” as depressing as it is, that’s really what child rearing boils down to: pretending you know what y
ou’re doing while secretly suspecting that you—you specifically—are the person Keanu Reeves was talking about in Parenthood when he says, “You need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car—hell, you need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.” Only, substitute “mother” for “father” if you’re a woman. You get it.
Of course, not everyone is willing to admit that they don’t know anything. Why would they, when there’s money to be made by exploiting our rampant insecurities? There are loads of people out there writing books and articles and studies and blog posts about how to get your baby to sleep through the night at eight weeks, use a potty as something other than a hat, or signal for more macaroni in Morse code, and all of them make it seem easy, and like you’re the asshole for not pulling up your sweatpants and wiping away your pudding stains (it was definitely pudding . . . I’m at least ninety percent sure) and just doing it already. This is the secret to fixing your entire life, these self-anointed experts coo.
At first I believed them. I bought their books. I bookmarked their articles. Occasionally I even read a sentence or two in between nipple dips and Hulu ads. I tried things like nursing on all fours to avoid plugged milk ducts, wrapping the kid like a burrito and then holding him like a football. I even bought blackout curtains for our bedroom that made it look like Meat Loaf’s castle in the “I’d Do Anything for Love” video. None of it did any good. Looking back from a relatively sane perspective, I think there are two reasons for this:
1.At the time, I defined successful results as “magically transforming my life back to normal.” Little did I know, the ship of normalcy had sailed the moment a human head emerged from my lady bits. And you know what? In retrospect, that was a pretty big red flag.
2.The people who wrote the books and articles and blog posts meant well, but the advice they were doling out was usually specific to one type of child—theirs. When you’re a parent and you accidentally discover something that works, you basically do handsprings and then go outside to leap at strangers in the street for Milli Vanilli–style chest bumps. You become filled with the misguided confidence that everyone can benefit from your experience, and then you write a book about it. (Not that I would ever do that. Ahem. Let’s move on.)
Since none of the tried-and-true baby-whispering tricks worked for me, I was left to my own devices, and by “devices,” I obviously mean the various remote controls to my TV and Roku box. This is why, for a few weeks in early 2012, I thought I had discovered the secret to baby sleep. And that secret’s name was Ryan Gosling.
Here’s how it happened: One night in February, for no apparent reason, my previously catnapping baby was unconscious for eight hours straight. This was a Very Big Deal in my household, and the subject of much jubilation—that is, once I confirmed that he was, in fact, still alive when I awoke with a terrified start and two Heidi Montag–size breasts at seven a.m.
I practically skipped around the following day, throwing my hat up into the air à la Mary Tyler Moore, telling anyone I could find that my life was about to change.
I was an idiot. That night we maxed out at three consecutive hours. The next night, four. I wracked my brain for any conceivable reason for our one-off success. I kept trying to re-create the circumstances of the night I’d started referring to as “Armabeddon,” going so far as to eat the exact same dinner of salami and cheese on a few slices of stale bread, washed down with the same two glasses of the same cheap red wine. I even dressed the baby in the same pajamas he’d been wearing that night, on the off chance that they were made not by popular child’s clothing brand Zutano but rather by magical elves who lived on a diet of Benadryl and soft ocean waves.
No such luck. “You fools!” my infant seemed to sneer, like Vizzini in The Princess Bride. “You fell victim to one of the classic blunders: never go in against a four-month-old when sleep is on the line!”
And then, just when my husband and I were about to throw our hands up and call it a freakish anomaly, he did it again.
Now we had two sets of data to compare, and, after painstakingly retracing our steps, we discovered something wonderful: the only thing the two nights had in common was that we had watched movies; specifically, The Ides of March and Drive, which both star Ryan Gosling.
Then it was game fucking on. That night I happily paid to download Blue Valentine in HD, mentally designing the cover of my bestselling book The Gosling Solution: Hey, Girl, Get Your Baby to Sleep Through the Night Using the Magical Powers of the Guy from The Notebook. Jeff and I opened another bottle of wine, toasted to our genius, and proceeded to watch a supremely depressing two-hour movie about how all people are broken and all marriages are doomed. Ten minutes later, Sam woke up.
How dare you, Ryan? I was going to be bigger than Ferber.
If you’ve learned one thing from this chapter so far, it is probably that I’m not really qualified to give parenting advice (information, you may remember, that could have been gleaned from the very first sentence! I wanted to give you an excuse to phone it in during book club so you could focus on the cheese plate). That said, I do have some nonpatronizing* tips for ignoring / putting in perspective all the bad advice that’s out there.
You Will Always, Always Be Doing Something Wrong . . . So Stop Worrying About It
In case you don’t know what you’re doing wrong, I have provided a handy chart.
A Brief Index of Common Parenting Mistakes and Their Meanings
Are you . . . ?
Then, obviously . . .
Exclusively breast-feeding
THE BABY WILL NEVER SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT AND YOUR NIPPLES WILL FALL OFF, AND YOU’LL HAVE NO ONE TO BLAME BUT YOURSELF.
Exclusively formula-feeding
YOU’RE POISONING YOUR BABY, YOU MONSTER. DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT’S IN FORMULA? PRETTY MUCH JUST FECAL MATTER AND SCRAP METAL.
Sleep training
YOU’RE ABANDONING YOUR BABY AND AS A RESULT IT WILL NEVER FORM A PROPER EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT TO ANOTHER HUMAN BEING.
Not sleep training
YOU’RE CODDLING YOUR BABY AND AS A RESULT IT WILL DEPEND ON YOU FOR THE REST OF ITS NATURAL LIFE.
Cosleeping
IF YOU DON’T ACCIDENTALLY KILL YOUR BABY BY SMUSHING IT IN THE NIGHT IT WILL PROBABLY GROW UP TO BE A SEXUAL DEVIANT.
Introducing solids at four months
YOU MUST WANT YOUR BABY TO CHOKE TO DEATH, DON’T YOU?
Still feeding your one-year-old purees
YOU MUST BE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL PUSSY.
Making your own baby food
WHAT, MORTAL FOOD ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOUR PRECIOUS BABY, GWYNETH?
Not making your own baby food
CONGRATULATIONS, YOUR CHILD HAS JUST INGESTED ITS OWN WEIGHT IN ARSENIC.
Are you . . . ?
Then, obviously . . .
Using disposable diapers
YOU MUST WANT TO SPEED UP GLOBAL WARMING WITH THOSE LITTLE SHITBALLS OF ETERNAL WASTE.
Using cloth diapers
OH, HELLO, HIPPIER-THAN-THOU MARTYR WHO DOESN’T OWN A TV!
Using plastic of any kind, ever
SEE: NOT MAKING YOUR OWN BABY FOOD
Letting your kid play in dirt / eat sand / lick playground equipment
WAY TO PLAY TRICHINOSIS ROULETTE, PIGPEN.
Purelling the (literal) living s
hit out of your child
YOU’RE KILLING ALL THE GOOD BACTERIA AND DAMNING YOUR KID TO A LIFE OF NOT BEING ABLE TO DIGEST ANYTHING BUT SPELT BREAD.
Going back to work and hiring a nanny
YOUR CHILD WILL PROBABLY GROW UP CALLING YOU BY YOUR FIRST NAME.
Staying home with your kid
YOU’RE NOT CONTRIBUTING ANYTHING TO SOCIETY. LEAN IN, GOD DAMN IT. LEAN INNNNN!!!
Engaging your baby in educational play every waking moment
YOU’RE A HOVERING PSYCHO WHO’S SABOTAGING ANY HOPE OF YOUR CHILD LEARNING TO BE INDEPENDENT.
Letting your child watch MythBusters while you blog and drink a half bottle of wine
YOU’RE A NEGLIGENT SLOTH WHO’S SABOTAGING ANY HOPE OF YOUR KID GETTING INTO A DECENT COLLEGE.
Sending your kid to private school
YOUR CHILD WILL GROW UP IN A PRIVILEGED BUBBLE AND BECOME THE KIND OF OUT-OF-TOUCH ASSHOLE WHO WEARS A BOW TIE TO FOOTBALL GAMES.
Are you . . . ?
Then, obviously . . .
Homeschooling
YOUR CHILD WILL BECOME THE KIND OF ANTISOCIAL WEIRDO WHO BUILDS HIS OWN YURT AND MAILS ANTHRAX TO POLITICIANS.
Sending your child to public school
YOUR KID WILL BARELY LEARN HOW TO SPELL SINCE SHE’LL BE TOO BUSY MAKING SHIVS OUT OF ASBESTOS SHARDS.
