Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood

We're constantly judging and grading other parents, just to make sure that they aren't any better than us. I'm as guilty as anyone. I see some lady hand her kid a Nintendo DS at the supermarket and I instantly downgrade that lady to Shitty Parent status. I feel pressure to live up to a parental ideal that no one probably has ever achieved. I feel pressure to raise a group of human beings that will help America kick the shit out of Finland and South Korea in the world math rankings. I feel pressure to shield my kids from the trillion pages of hentai donkey porn out there on the Internet. I feel pressure to make the insane amounts of money needed for a supposedly 'middle-class' upbringing for the kids, an upbringing that includes a house and college tuition and health care and so many other expenses that you have to be a multimillionaire to afford it. PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE.

It's a fact that every minute you hold a child, it triples in mass.

It took a year for us to conceive our second child. This is a common ordeal for the average middle-class American couple that puts off having children until their thirties. We knew so many other couples that had experienced fertility problems and miscarriages that it was more surprising when someone we knew had a child without being consigned to thirty-eight consecutive weeks of bed rest. Turns out God WANTS you to conceive when you’re eighteen years old, apparently so that you can spend your twenties miserable and penniless and living in a camper.

Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It's the closest they'll ever get to being inside a working spaceship.

For every hour a mother gets to herself, a father will demand five times that amount for drinking with friends and acting like an immature dipshit.

Once they've borne children, mothers can construct virtually any costume using scissors, felt, Elmer's glue, and a leftover pen spring. They're like the Special Forces of crafts.

but time has a way of loosening you up, of getting you to give bad ideas a second chance. I

When a teacher is paying extra attention to your child, you believe that it's because you raised such an exceptional kid, one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest of her booger-eating friends.