“My Life Is a Waking Nightmare”
Why do parents make parenting sound so God-awful?
Photo by Page Phelps/Thinkstock
Recently, a listicle started proliferating on my Facebook page, as listicles are wont to do. It was titled “31 Things No One Told You About Being a Parent,” and it informed me that becoming a parent means gaining weight, living in filth, and never having time to read the news.
The listicle’s title was wrong, however. Thanks to the Internet,
everyone tells me these things about being a parent, all the time. My
Facebook feed is an endless stream of blog posts and status updates
depicting the messy, tedious, nightmarishly life-destroying aspects of
parenting. I’ve gawked at “15 Unbelievable Messes Made by Kids,” “All the Birth Control You’ve Ever Needed in Six Pictures of Ponytails” (which appeared on a blog called Rage Against the Minivan), and this uterus-shriveling post on how “You will not get anything done when you are home with a baby.” There’s this one
on how you’ll give up on your values, your body, your style, and your
hygiene after you have kids. There’s that British comedian’s stand-up routine,
which has been viewed more than 4,700,000 times on YouTube, about how
even leaving the house is a miserable odyssey of screaming and fighting.
Ha ... ha?
For overwhelmed parents, I imagine the relentless stream of realtalk
is comforting. As a possible future parent, it’s utterly terrifying.
You can trace the genre of charmingly harried parenting writing back
to women like Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr, whose best-selling 1957 book
about raising four boys, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, became a
movie starring Doris Day. (Kerr’s essays, with titles like “How to
Decorate in One Easy Breakdown,” would translate seamlessly to a “mommy”
blog.) But the direct mother of this style of parenting writing is
probably Heather Armstrong, the blogger who writes under the name Dooce. Armstrong has been writing down-and-dirty posts about her family life for more than a decade now; the New York Times suggested a few years ago that she likely earned at least $1 million a year doing so.
When Armstrong’s style of ribald parenting blogging took off in the
early 2000s, it must have been genuinely refreshing to parents who found
themselves frequently bored, exhausted, and beleaguered, but unable to
say so. Writers like Armstrong are pushing back against a long and
damaging history of mothers having to pretend that parenting is nothing
but bliss, that they are completely fulfilled by it, and that they are
able to work, parent, and maintain a tidy home and a thrilling marriage
without batting a perfectly mascaraed eyelash. It’s a trend that is
still going strong on Instagram and certain smug corners of Facebook.
And yet, the backlash to it has perhaps encouraged a little too much honesty.
The pissed-parent genre follows a reliable template: My life is a
waking nightmare and I’ve lost all that I once held dear, but it’s the
best thing that’s ever happened to me! A popular post titled “So, You Would Like to Have Three Children”
published last summer on the site Short-Winded Blog is a fine specimen
of the form. The writer offers a “disclaimer” that her three children
are “a blessing.” Then she launches into 2,000 words on the logistical
trials, financial impossibilities, and emotional traumas of caring for
three children at once. The 850 comments on the post reinforce this
narrative. As one commenter put it, in a phrase that is the unofficial
motto of the form: “[A]s crazy as things get, I wouldn’t trade it for
anything.”
Advertisers and publishers are increasingly finding ways to tap into the new let-it-all-hang-out pose. There was this Argentine Coke ad, in
which a couple’s work, home, and sleep routines are destroyed by their
growing child, and yet they are inexplicably happy when they get
pregnant again. There’s Go the F**k to Sleep, and the book version of the massively popular Twitter account Honest Toddler,
written in the voice of a toddler who says things like “There are no
more carefree nights and weekends. You signed up for a child not a
mobile phone.” The Tumblr Reasons My Son Is Crying,
to which parents submit photos of their screaming tots accompanied by
descriptions of their absurd laments (“The ocean is too loud”), will
also be turned into a book soon.
My Facebook feed goes wild for this stuff. “So true!” my friends
write over and over again, because apparently parents never get their
houses clean, never have sex, never read books or have adult
conversations, never shower, and never, ever have a moment to
themselves. (Somehow they do find the time to blog.) Obviously a lot of
this is hyperbole, for the sake of humor and self-deprecation and
commiseration. The parents who write these posts get that. The parents
who “like” these posts get that. And I get that.
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