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The New Dad's No Bullshit Guide to Parenting - #2

12/31/2018

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Body Transmogrification and Foot Rubs

Some unnamable compulsion drives me to write these tidbits of genius in a semi-sequential manner. Although there are much more interesting and graphic topics I’d love to dive straight into like the delivery room battlefield or the complexities of breastfeeding, it makes some sort of sense to start where you, beloved new father, will also start.

So… beginning at the beginning. Your female counterpart is preggers. Joy to the world. As the pregnancy progresses more and more people are going to notice, take interest, and insert themselves into your lives. It’s cool. Most of it is repetitive small talk and unsolicited anecdotes. Enjoy the attention and take part in it. The focus will be mostly on your pregnant partner, but you contributed… so enjoy your participation trophy of social attention. Just remember, most of what other parents will offer you is not necessarily applicable to you and yours.

For example, we’ve all heard horror stories about the cornucopia of ailments and inconveniences pregnant women must suffer through on their 40 week journey of baby building. Most of this is horseshit. Don’t let anyone’s horror story scare you. Sure, there are some things that come along with pregnancy like nausea, swollen feet, odd cravings, mood swings, and back pains, but most likely you and yours won’t be suffering through all of these at all, let alone simultaneously. TV and your overly fertile Aunt Wilma love to exaggerate this kind of shit. In the first few months of pregnancy, my wife probably had a hundred people ask her if she had started throwing up yet. A weird question really. The answer was always no (for us). Sure, some mild nausea that could be fixed with crackers and water, but no exorcist style projectile vomiting. Her only real burden was the rhinoceros legs she developed in the last five weeks. Otherwise, being pregnant can be quite easy and enjoyable if you approach it with a plucky attitude.

Every woman is going to experience pregnancy differently and it is your job to know that and respond accordingly. Most of the stereotypical side effects of growing a human will be mild if at all present. Chances are you will hold some hair back during the first trimester as your mother-to-be imitates a wildebeest mating call into the toilet. You will likely need to provide some back rubs and massage some feet and go on late night runs to the grocery store. But unless you are somehow cursed by the fertility gods, you likely won’t have to deal with a girl who wants to jump your bones one minute and murder you the next or hurl empty tubs of pickle flavored ice cream at your head while you rub her feet and catch her vomit. But, who knows, maybe you’re lucky.

Just know, there is actual real life science behind these symptoms. If you expect your partner to control any of this through sheer will power, you are an idiot. Pregnant women gain about 50% of their overall blood volume during pregnancy and gain on average between 25 and 35 pounds. That’s some serious transformation over a short period of time. What impressive shit has your body don’t lately?

Step up your attentiveness and get used to asking, “Can I do anything for you?” and you will be fine. And if you don’t think you need to do anything for her, you are an asshole. Your contribution was 5-7 minutes of sub-par sweaty love making, while hers is 280 days of aggressive bodily transmogrification that crescendos in a not at all private explosion of taint tearing terror. But… yeah… sure… tell her you are too tired to rub her feet.


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The New Dad's No Bullshit Guide to Parenting

10/19/2018

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Well, here you are, you slippery fuck. You finally managed to slosh your semen somewhere where it really stuck and now you are in for the long haul. For the sake of your spawn and the poor creature you convinced to carry it, I hope that particular semen sloshing was intentional and well-planned. Accidental procreation is a beast of another color and won’t be covered in detail in this series of profanity-laced commentaries.

The godly mission, as it were, of this collection of sleep deprived and caffeine-fueled rants, is to cut through all the ridiculous bullshit you will suffer as a new parent, specifically as a dad. As of writing this beautifully composed introductory post, my first born is fifteen days old. Obviously, I’m some sort of expert on the matter now and my wisdom should be taken as the sincere and sparkly Truth with a capital T.  I’m not sure if I conveyed the complete level of sarcasm I wished to attach to that last sentence, so let’s break it down.

Here’s my first point. Parents aren’t experts. Reproducing doesn’t magically make you an authority on life. The very moment you share with the world that you are expecting a child, you will be aggressively bombarded by every grown human with the same pre-existing condition. Take all advice from other parents with a grain of salt. Most of what other people are going to tell you is bullshit and based solely in their own very limited experiences. Which, ironically, is exactly what I’m doing, but I have no delusions about this. Between every overly ambitious F-bomb, I will aspire to pepper my personal anecdotes with facts and figures and actual literal truths. When my wisdom is rooted only in my personal happenstances, I’ll be sure to make that clear. If I don’t, please call me out on my bullshit as well.

The most basic truth is that none of us know what we are doing. We are all essentially doomed to fiddle-fuck our way through raising our kids, and it is a miracle that most of our kids will survive infancy. Find some comfort in this and rest assured that your kid will survive, despite your moronic self. The infant mortality rate in the US is 5.9 deaths per every 1000 live births. Funnily enough, those numbers change a bit based on what state you live in. Check out this info by the CDC (West coast = best coast!). And the number one perpetrator are birth defects, many of which are discoverable prior to your bundle of joy coming tumbling out of your wife.
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So long story short, the shit that other parents will feed you, is mostly that, just shit. However, some shit is more valuable than others. That overly potent friend of yours who is now popping out kid number five and has been living this life since they were twenty-two with a spouse that is still around and they all seem more or less happy and healthy -- they might have some insights worth listening to. But that other friend who just had their first kid and can’t stop talking about how their doula changed their lives or how aromatherapy made their delivery more spiritual or how Mongolian throat singing during labor eased the pain. Just smile and nod and then write thinly veiled shit about them in a blog later on.

Fun fact of the day - only 50 to 55-ish percent of pregnancies in the United States are planned events. So if you actually sat down with a person of the opposite sex and had the basic conversation of “Hey, I’m awesome. You’re awesome. Let’s rub our genitals together and make another, smaller, awesome person!” And they agreed. Chances are you are already in a better place to handle this shit than half of the other parents out there.  
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If you are of the 50-ish percent that didn’t have that conversation and are now somehow surprised by the fact that everything you learned in middle school health class is actually true and a small human being is the natural outcome of sticking your penis in a woman, then buckle in because you now have nine-ish months to get your shit together.

Hopefully my rambling can help, no bullshit.

Yours in dadding,
Matt


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    Matthew Branch

    Modern-ish man, writer, educator, adventurer, taco connoisseur. ​

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