This is from one of my fave blogs, Dad Gone Mad, written from the view of a guy with 2 young kids.
Things They Don't Tell You In Childbirth Classes Because You'd Puke
It has occurred to me lately that the classes most hospitals offer to expectant parents about childbirth and childrearing are woefully devoid of information about the most disturbing elements of parenthood. I remember walking out of those sessions saying, “OK. I know how to change a diaper, how to burp a baby and that the birth of my child has something to do with a vagina. I’m all set. Bring on the offspring!” I was such a dipshit.
Bringing a child into the world is disgusting and gory and unsanitary, and raising them isn’t much cleaner. As a service to my brother-in-law Robert (a new father), Old Buddy Andy (an expectant father) and Craig The Mouse Killer (newly engaged), I will now list a few of the key discoveries I’ve made during my four-plus years of fatherhood --- items not discussed in childbirth or childrearing classes because they don’t want to make becoming a dad seem as much like an episode of Fear Factor as it really is:
Childbirth
1. When your wife is in the late stages of delivering your child, the doctor while ask her to push, whereupon she will bear down on midsection with the force of 10,000 atomic bombs. The goal, naturally, is to have something come out of her crotch. Unfortunately, there are two holes in her crotch and it’s best that you know now that something is going to come out of both holes. Hole number one will produce a baby. Hole number two will produce, well, number two. You’ll try to look away and you’ll try to maintain your focus on what’s coming out of hole number one, but you won’t be able to. And you’ll never be able to look at a Play-Doh Fun Factory again.
2. After your child is born and has been taken across the delivery room to be weighed and measured and wiped clean of yuck, you’ll notice that the doctor is still staring into hole number one. Do not attempt to accost the doctor; he’s not getting his jollies. He’s actually “delivering” the most rancid, foul, nightmare-inducing substance known to man: the placenta. If your doctor is a sicko like ours, he’ll hold it up and show it to you when it comes out. Be prepared. The placenta looks like someone has taken the layer of melted cheese from the top of a pizza and is holding it sauce-side up. They’ll try to convince you that it’s beautiful and a miracle and shit like that, but when you’ve been up all night stressing about your baby being born with his nose on his ass or your wife dying during childbirth, there’s nothing beautiful or miraculous about a big skin bag covered of blood, is there?
3. The first few shits your newborn takes are made of the same substance NASA uses to adhere those special tiles to the outside of the Space Shuttle to protect it from the unfathomable heat it encounters upon re-entry to earth’s atmosphere. It is black and sticky and infused with the smell of the vomit one produces after a night of partying with a quart of tequila and a bag of chili-cheese Fritos. By all means, make the nurses in the hospital change the first few diapers. They love that shit. And if you get it on your hands, there isn’t a space-age polymer on the planet that will get it off of you.
Childrearing
1. There are more varieties of fluids in a child than there are under the hood of your average import sedan, and all of them are bound to come out flying out of the child at different velocities from time to time. For example, last night there was a wad of snot the size of a nectarine that had dried and sealed shut the left nostril of my daughter. I was able to pry it loose with a chamois, a putty knife and a stick of Juicy Fruit, but my point is that you have to be prepared for anything. They puke when they’re mad. They have diarrhea when they’re asleep. And they shoot piss at you when they’re having their diaper changed. Fathers of Planet Earth, I have but one word for you: duck.
2. Imagine your wife at her PMS worst. Picture her raging at you, spewing hate in your direction for no good reason, slamming doors in your face and threatening to dismember you with her eyelash curler. Now imagine that same behavior from someone who is two feet tall and cannot color a picture without sticking his tongue out. This, basically, is the kind of irrational behavior you can expect from your child when you deny him Halloween candy for breakfast or tell him that he may not, under any circumstances, throw dogshit at his baby sister. Kids are fucking crazy sometimes and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s best to just let them wail and go back to watching SportsCenter until they calm down.
3. If you do not already know how, you should learn to complete the following tasks immediately (reason in parenthesis): strip and remake a bed in the dark (your kid will wet the bed at 2 a.m.), breathe threw your mouth for long periods of time (your kid will get sick and will simultaneously cry, vomit, shit his clothes, also at 2 a.m.), resist torture (your kid will want to watch Barney’s Adventure Bus for the 1,192nd time right about the time your favorite team is taking the opening kickoff back for a touchdown in the Super Bowl), make pasta with butter (that’s the only thing your kid will eat until he’s 14), take a kick or a punch in the balls (no matter how hard you try to avoid it, your kid will hit you there --- either accidentally or on purpose --- once a day for the foreseeable future).
4. You’ll never sleep through the night again. That’s just the way it is. But I’ll be up, too, so call me.
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