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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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