I have a few friends and family members who are preparing to have their first babies, and since I just had my second baby and thus now obviously know everything there is to know about parenting, I thought I would offer up a few tips.
It is worth noting since we are in The Digital Era of Everyone Being Angry All the Time, I do not actually think I am a parenting expert. I am not a doctor, or a child therapist, or a Mormon with six kids and a million Instagram followers homesteading from my immaculate kitchen in a giant house purchased with my husband’s tech salary (this is the majority of Parenting Influencers, fyi). Apart from the very real and good advice that you shouldn’t pay attention to anything you see on Instagram about parenting, I am not actually attempting to offer advice, though I do think some of what I’ve written here is actionably helpful. I am mostly just joking, though. I will add, however, that you may find parenting to be more enjoyable if you can be lighthearted about it and not take yourself too seriously. That may be just general life advice actually.
And so with that, I give you The Only Parenting Advice You’ll Ever Need. Go forth and have zero problems parenting. You’re welcome.
Memorize the names of every Republican member of Congress.
Stick with me here. One day you will be out somewhere and your baby will start screaming. (Godspeed if this happens to you on an airplane. Try not to wish for the entire plane to drop out of the sky and plummet to the ground in a fiery crash just so you can escape your misery.) It will feel awful—overwhelming and embarrassing. Your pulse will race and you’ll start to sweat and everyone will look at you like at some point a little over nine months ago you decided to have a baby specifically so that you could bring it out in public and make it scream so that everyone around you would be disrupted and annoyed. You will try many things, everything you can think of, to get your baby to stop screaming and none of it will work. At this moment, take a deep breath, and start reciting the names of every Republican member of Congress. I know you feel like an asshole right now. Everybody around you is looking at you like you are an asshole. They’re looking at your baby like your baby is an asshole. But trust me, every single Republican member of Congress is a way bigger asshole than you are. So calmly tick off the names from this long list of gigantic assholes in your head while you gather up your stuff, pay your bill, and make your escape. If you want to save yourself some time, just memorize the members from Texas. There are a bunch of them and they’re all doing way more to ruin people’s lives than you and your screaming baby are.
Embrace the 90s dance party in your head.
Is it appropriate to sing “Too Close” by Next to soothe your crying baby in the middle of the night? No, it is not. Have I done it? Also no— seriously, it is not a good choice for a lullaby—but I’ve come close. It grows tiresome to sing the same songs over and over again, and you’ll be surprised to find what lyrics your mind draws a blank on and which ones come roaring back to you at three in the morning when you feel almost drunk from sleeplessness. Singing a baby to sleep is so romantic in theory and so painfully tedious and frustrating in reality. When you look down after one song and your baby’s eyes are closed, their lips gently parted and they are sleeping peacefully, it is lovely and becomes a cherished memory. When you look down after a dozen songs and their eyes are still wide open and your body is weak from swaying and bouncing, it is enraging and you wonder if a person has ever willed herself into spontaneous combustion. It helps to incorporate a little variety into your nightly karaoke. My new thing with Baby Number 2 is that I put my earphones in and sing along to a playlist I’ve created and dance around the room until he starts to nod off. This offers the bonus of muffling his cries which helps keep my nerves from getting too jangled as I belt out “I’ll Make Love To You” by Boys II Men. (Just kidding. This is also a very bad choice for a lullaby.)
Repeat after me: it’s only 10 minutes.
Imagine this: you are driving in your car and are only ten minutes from home when the baby starts crying in the backseat, so you pull over to the side of the road, get out of the car, pull the baby out of their car seat and proceed to rock and sway the baby until they settle. Then you put them back in their car seat, buckle them in tight, get back behind the wheel, and get going again only for them to start crying again two minutes later. Now you are eight minutes from home and pulled over on the side of the road shushing and rocking and settling a baby. Back into your seats, back out again three minutes later. And so on and so on until you might as well just call it a night and sleep in your car because you’re never making it home at this rate.
No one would ever do that. You would simply say, we are only ten minutes from home, this baby is safe, they can cry for ten minutes until we pull up to our house and it will be fine.
A little-known fact about parenting is that sometimes you have to poop even if your baby is crying. Sometimes you have to shower. Sometimes you need to eat for the first time that day. Sometimes you just need to get the fuck away from this needy little monster for a few minutes so that you can return a little calmer and more capable of handling whatever they’ve decided to throw your way. It’s okay for babies to cry. You can know this, you can fully believe this, and yet it can still be so hard to allow yourself a moment to do something else while your baby is crying. So imagine that instead of sitting on your couch texting, you’re driving in your car and only ten minutes from home. Put the baby down somewhere safe and take those ten minutes for yourself. It’s only ten minutes. They’ll be okay.
If you’re going to make other people uncomfortable, make them really uncomfortable.
My son’s kindergarten class lets out on the side of the school building and when the teacher opens the door at the end of the day and the students come streaming out to meet their parents, I like to point out which kids were breastfed and which ones took formula. It’s really obvious. You can definitely tell.
What I have learned about parenting is that no matter what you do, someone will inevitably think you’re doing it wrong. This is not advice about whether you should breastfeed, formula feed, or some combination of the two. I don’t care. No one should care (but boy do a lot of people really care!). Instead, this is just a heads up that when you are out in public feeding your baby, you will almost certainly at some point get nasty looks from strangers. For me, this has happened when breastfeeding—though I imagine if you were bottle feeding your kid in public you might get looks from people who think you should be breastfeeding instead—and the first couple of times, it was so humiliating that it brought me to tears. My first son ran hot and he would kick and fidget and struggle to latch on if I had any kind of cover over him, so if I wanted to be out in the world and needed to feed my baby, I had no choice but to be out in the world, breasts exposed for all to see. It’s a pretty vulnerable position to be in when you’re not used to it. But once I got used to it, I decided to turn my discomfort back onto the people who were making me uncomfortable and it was glorious.
I was once out to lunch with a friend and the baby started crying so I nursed him right there at the table while I continued to eat french fries. A guy a couple of tables away from us was looking at me with disgust, so I stared back at him, not with anger, but with a grinch-like grin spread across my face, my eyes unblinking. He squirmed and looked away, but when he looked back, there I was, still staring at him, my face unchanged. After a couple of minutes, he ended up asking for a check and packed what was left of his food into a carryout container, and left. I consider this my life’s greatest achievement.
It’s worth noting: the only thing people are more judgmental about than how you feed your baby is whether or not you’ve put them in a coat for the three-second walk from your car to the entrance of the grocery store. It’s wild. Do old ladies at grocery stores have some kind of bloodhound-like ability to catch the scent of a child without a coat? And they always speak directly to the baby—"You must be freezing. You need a coat.”—as if the baby will confirm that you are indeed a negligent mother. I don’t have a good retort for this, so I usually just roll my eyes, but something along the lines of “Actually I procreated with a penguin, so this baby doesn’t really get cold,” is probably off-color enough to make most people uncomfortable.
When you flip a coin and it lands on tails, heads hasn’t disappeared.
There will likely come a moment when you feel like you hate your baby. I’m not talking about just general frustration and exasperation at how your baby is acting, but a deep sense of resentment and anger for how you’ve turned your life upside and still the baby refuses to be satisfied. It’s not rational, but I think it’s okay. You’re sleep deprived. Your hormones are all over the place. Imagine if you welcomed a stranger into your home and they kept you up all night, demanded that you feed them every two hours, and yelled at you repeatedly while doing little else besides pooping. You’d be like, man, fuck this person, why did I invite them here. Sanctimonious moms on the Internet will tell you that you should never say you hate your baby (you hate what your baby is doing, not who they are, I recall reading once), but I tend to find that trying to stifle or amend your feelings for some invisible audience is not particularly helpful to your postpartum mental health. So go ahead and let yourself acknowledge those feelings of hatred. It doesn’t mean that you don’t also love your baby, or that you won’t take care of them—flip the coin again a few minutes later and it will just as likely land heads up—all it means is that this moment is hard, and that you should ask for some extra help and a little relief if you can get it.
Another it’s worth noting for you: you may not feel like you hate your baby, but you may not feel like you love them right away either. That’s okay too. When you’re hugely pregnant and your body aches and you can’t sleep and you’re anxious about what labor and birth will be like, everyone will tell you how the moment you hold your baby in your arms, it will all feel worth it. But that is not always true. How you feel after your baby is born comes down more to how much of which chemicals your brain releases and in what order than anything else. Again, this person is a stranger to you. It may take a little time to feel a sense of love. Your role to start is all about survival. Your survival and the baby’s survival. If you’re focused on that, you’re doing fine.
Do your best to keep things in perspective.
I don’t mean the days are long but the years are short perspective. Or this too shall pass. Though, irritating as they are, both those sentiments are true.
Have you ever had that dream where you’re in college and it’s finals period when you suddenly discover that this whole time you’ve been enrolled in a class without knowing it and now you have to cram an entire semester’s worth of knowledge in order to ace the final and avoid failing the class? (Why do I still have this dream so often?)
I think that must be what it’s like to be a baby. They have to learn so much in that first year. Every couple of weeks they’re learning how to do a totally new thing. It’s like a nonstop finals period for a bunch of classes they didn’t even know they signed up for. What a nightmare!
When my son was a toddler, whenever he would get upset about something small I would say to him, “Oh no, does this feel like a tragedy?” as a way to remind myself that what to me was a small little nothing thing was a really big deal to him. Once he learned to talk, he would hiccup through his tears, “I’m having a tragedy.” It was very cute.
Now, when the baby is especially cranky while going through a developmental leap, I’ll say to him “Oh no! Did you forget to withdraw from Art History?”
When all else fails, turn your frustration into a silly song.
no one poops as much as you
you poop more than you sleep
I’m tired of cleaning up your poo
you stinky little creep
I sang this to my baby yesterday and he smiled. My album of children’s songs drops later this year.