Sex, Lies, and Fischer Price: What Oprah Doesn't Tell You About Family Life

One of my friends broke things off with her fiancé, quit her job at a suburban synagogue in order to pursue an acting career in the big city, and now spends entire afternoons participating in “hot house yoga” and schlepping from audition to agent to temp job to audition—and she loves it.

Another quit her job of fifteen years, moved out of Chicago for digs in rural Wisconsin, bought a motorcycle, and now lives a zen life in the woods.

One, believe it or not, became a nun, took a teaching position at a local Catholic university, and then quit the convent and moved to Brazil to live on the beach with a lover she met online.

All of these women are blissfully happy. However, note the absence of husband and children in each of those cases. While my friends opted for lives focusing individually and exclusively on career, spirituality, or love, I decided to multi-task and GO FOR THE GUSTO. I wanted it ALL: career, spirituality, love, home, husband, AND family. Further, I actually believed it was all possible. After all, I am one of the female children born in the seventies who actually bought into the party line that we women, with the right education and a "say no to drugs" attitude (thank you, Nancy Reagan), could easily have it all. Clearly, I was doomed from the outset.

Thus, I spent years and years of my life being a good student, a leader in various organizations, and an exemplary employee. Then, I married one of the same. Together, we climbed the middle class ladder. We weren’t ones to keep up with the Joneses, probably not because we were above that sort of behavior, but because we were too busy talking on our cell phones to even notice the Joneses. We socialized with like-minded friends, held barbeques, went on weekend trips where we spent luxurious hours making love in cozy bed and breakfasts, bought all the cool new technology coming out on the market, spent an extraordinary amount of time worrying about ridiculous things like our body fat indexes, and then bought a house with a big yard. It was then that we decided that things were going so well that we should complete the package and procreate. After all, we had spent ten years together as a couple. We had taken the litmus test of marital stability and we’d passed with flying colors-- not to mention that our parents were starting to really lay on the pressure and whenever my mother would visit she’d open my refrigerator and announce, “Your eggs are approaching their expiration date,” and look at me pointedly. Besides, the ten years we had been together had showed Scott to be good father material (which means I still thought his quirks were cute) and, Lord knows, I was perfect in every way. Further, we believed that our mission statement (“With the right education and attitude anything is possible!”) would guide us serenely through the next couple decades of our lives as easily as it had the last. Besides, how difficult could parenting be?

In short, we were chumps. Parenting, regardless of education and attitude, is very, very hard. Like. Oh. My. God. Hard.

To be fair, our naiveté was not entirely our fault. Friends, family, and coworkers would turn doe-eyed when anyone mentioned the impending arrival of a new baby. They’d murmur things like, “a baby is a blessed event,” and “nothing smells as sweet as a new baby.” A surprising number of our near and dear even went so far as to inquire when we were going to have children…and this was while we were engaged. New parents we encountered swallowed their true feelings, smiled, and mumbled that they were blissfully happy rather than admit the truth that they were clueless, half-mad with lack of sleep, and questioning their ability to make it through the next hour, let alone the next twenty years. How were we to know they were dissembling? Even big business is in on the game. Entire aisles of nationwide retailers provide sporty-looking baby items with advertisements featuring smiling young people (too young and well rested to realistically be parents, in my opinion) confidently cruising along with a grinning baby in tow. Entire industries are devoted to churning out pale pink, watercolor blue, lemony yellow, and sage green mini-items for mini-humans. It is as though these retailers are implying that nothing swaddled in little lemon yellow duckies could possibly induce any sort of stress whatsoever, so go ahead and combine sperm with egg and spend, spend, spend! Even the media does a very good job of covering up the truth that no parent really knows what the hell is going on and is just stumbling along blind and shit-scared that they are ruining their children. Commercials show new parents confidently smiling down at their little sleeping bundles of joy. Television shows, though no longer quite as simplistic as Father Knows Best, portray parents who, while not exactly model citizens at all times, seem to have the low-down on what makes their kids tick. Why the deception? Why the deceit? Why aren’t people up in arms shouting from rooftops that being a parent is not the Disney image currently advertised? Why isn’t Oprah devoting entire weeks of programming to uncovering this myth? Oh, et tu, Oprah? Et tu?

Oh sure, the signs were there if we had known to look for them. But why would the blissfully ignorant look for signs?