Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn’t go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn’t ever do it twice.

After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you’re meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It’s only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.

If you have a gift for frightening new parents, your fortune in this world is secure. New parents are not rational; they worry about all sorts of things that it makes no sense to worry about.

The domestic policy handbook clearly states that when anything goes seriously wrong with our child, I am to holler for her mother and then take my place at her elbow and await further instructions. As I say, the American father of a baby is really just a second-string mother.

Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight.

THE FIRST RULE of fatherhood is that if you don’t see what the problem is, you are the problem.

The language of parenthood is encoded. When a mother says to a father, “I want to take her to the hospital,” she is really saying “WE are ALL going to the hospital, and if you whisper even a word of complaint, you will have proved yourself for all time a man incapable of love.” Maternal concern is one of those forces of nature not worth fighting.

A family is like a stereo system: A stereo system is only as good as its weakest component, and a family is only as happy as its unhappiest member.

THE SECOND RULE of fatherhood is that if everyone in the room is laughing, and you don’t know what they’re laughing about, they are laughing about you.

One of the many things I dislike about being a grown-up is the compulsion to have a purpose in life. People are forever asking why you are doing whatever you happen to be doing and before long you succumb to the need to supply an answer. The least naturally ambitious people can have ambition thrust upon them in this way. Once you’ve established yourself as a more or less properly functioning adult, it is nearly impossible to just go somewhere and screw off.