Archive for the ‘How to raise a child’ Category

It might make you want to stay alive even, thank you

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Ocean Vuong says in an interview—sent to me by my peer therapist—that he wrote his latest book because he wanted to examine the idea of “kindness without hope.” Why do humans help others when they cannot personally benefit? The phrase stuck with me. That’s kind of my whole deal.

I’m just trying to be kind. I also live my life without hope.

I don’t have hope politically. The world seems intent on trying out fascism. Historically, it takes a generation to flush a fascism. The things is, I only get the one generation.

I don’t have hope that the earth will be habitable by next generation. Maybe by the end of mine.

I don’t have hope that media will be a viable career for the next 28 years and two months, the length of my mortgage.

And, worst of all, six months into a breakup, I don’t have hope anyone will ever want to smooch me again.

Later, I listened to an Anohni interview about her song 4 Degrees. It’s from an album called Hopelessness, so the interviewer asks about that word. She says that hopelessness is a feeling, a sensation you experience in the body, but that it doesn’t excuse you from the table. You still have to show up and do the work.

That resonated with me as well. It’s a cool idea, noble perhaps: Even losing ventures are worth doing. But it left me feeling exhausted. It’s hard to find the motivation, waking up day after day to toil away, when you don’t really have faith that things will get any better. It’s grueling, and I’m tired.

A few months later, I listened to Ross Gay’s poem A Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. In it, he spends 15 minutes preening about all the delights of the world. “I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude over every last thing,” he says. The poem ends with a conversation between Ross Gay and an unborn child.

Soon it will be over,
which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. Every day.

Loving, what every second goes away. In this way, gratitude is not necessarily an antidote to hopelessness, but a companion. Holding hands at the end of the world.

I babysat my ex’s kid a few years ago. At the time, he was maybe 9, addicted to pixels. When he’d finally done all his chores and was allowed to watch YouTube, he asked me how long he had. Half an hour, I dutifully informed him. He threw a fit. Like actual crying and yelling, because it wasn’t long enough. He was self-aware enough to know that half an hour would feel like nothing while he was zoned out, and was pre-grieving the end of his TV time. I remember feeling smug and superior. Here was this child, upset about the end of something before it had even begun, before he could enjoy and appreciate it.

I don’t feel so smug anymore. I do the same thing—pre-grieve what I will one day lose, but haven’t lost yet.

So now, I’m trying to shift toward gratitude, enjoying with abandon what I have, while I have it.

My friend Rachel once wrote a gorgeous essay called How Do You Love What You May Soon Lose? I think the answer is: Ferociously. As much as you can, while you still can.

Posted on September 6, 2025 - How to raise a child, Interviews, Soapbox, Tunes - No Comments » Share

How To Raise A Human Child, As Explained By Pet Owners

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Raising a dependent is easy. Humans have been doing it for literally generations.

You may be thinking, “No, actually, it’s really hard. I shower this thing with love and affection and kisses and this goddam motherfucking piece of fucking shit just screams at me all day long.” If you are thinking this, please consider that, well, maybe it’s super easy, it’s just that you, personally, suck.

But you’re in luck!

Because we, owners of pets, are here to explain to you how to raise your brand new human child! And to start, let’s figure out that whole crying thing, shall we?

Great. The first step is to establish what type of cry your human child is emitting. There are four different kinds.

1. Food/water

All living organisms need nourishment. Honestly, if your baby is crying, it probably just needs food. How many times a day should I feed my human baby, you may be asking yourself. I, a human adult, eat about once a day, scarfing down a sandwich over the sink sometime between my full-time job, trying to keep the baby alive, arguing with my spouse about why we never have sex anymore, and exhaust-crying every couple of hours. So daily?

Wrong!

Think of cats. You know how you leave food out for them to snack on throughout the day? Your baby has a similar stomach size, and cannot hold enough nutrients inside of itself to last a full day. You want to be feeding that sucker every couple of hours. Yes, even during the night. No, it has no respect for your morning alarm.

It takes a tremendous amount of willpower and sleep deprivation to keep the helpless creature known as the human child alive.

Luckily, you do not need to feed and water your child separately, like most mammals. Just give it milk for the first couple of months, before moving on to pureed fruits and vegetables. Don’t even consider solid foods like turkey jerky until it has developed teeth.

2. Defecation

An unfortunate side effect of all the food you will be feeding your baby is that it will shit.

New mothers love to look you in the eye and claim this isn’t a big deal. “Baby doodoo is different. It doesn’t smell as much and is almost like tar. It’s kinda cute!” they will lie.

They are as full of shit as their babies.

And just like people learn to touch their dog’s fecal matter through a thin plastic bag, you need to learn to dispose of your baby’s poop.

Dogs can be trained to shit outside. Cats are drawn naturally to kitty litter. (Unless you don’t clean it enough. Then they will pee on your bed and then act like nothing has happened.) Human infants will defecate wherever and whenever they feel like it, with absolutely no regard for sanitation or how much your rug cost.

Here’s a tip: Invest in some diapers. Trust us on this one.

Once you’ve swaddled your child, the trick becomes knowing when to unwrap it, clean it off, and re-swaddle. What this means in practice is that whenever your baby is yelling at you wordlessly, you’re going to have to stick your finger in the back of its diaper, pull it open, peer in, and see if you can see any feces. And even if you can’t, you’re going to have to pat its bottom to try to feel if any urine soaked through. Assuming that’s the issue, strip off the diaper, wipe, sprinkle with baby powder, and strap a fresh diap on it. Male babies tend to urinate when that fresh cool air hits their tiny baby dicks, so make sure you’re out of the line of fire.

Here’s another tip: Wipe away from the genitals.

One last tip: You’re going to want to dispose of that dirty diaper immediately. Either buy one of those expensive smell-proof trash cans built exclusively for diaps, or, if you’re on a budget, take it outside and throw it away in your neighbor’s garbage bin.

Try to train your infant to use the bathroom as soon as possible. Bathrooms are like large, self-cleaning litter boxes. If you’re doing it right, they require very little cleaning and maintenance to keep from smelling badly. They’re pretty sweet.

3. Attention

We all need to be loved.

Dogs are the least chill about it. They’ll run up and sniff your crotch, they’ll bark until you play with them, they’ll stare at you and whimper until you scratch their ear, they’ll dryhump your leg. They don’t give a fuck.

Cats will sit on your laptop while you’re typing, say, a blog about how to raise children.

Your baby will just cry.

Sometimes you can talk your baby out of it. Try singing, or cooing in hushed tones, “Listen, love of my life, fulfillment of both my dreams and biological imperative, you mean everything to me, but if you don’t stop crying for just a brief spell I’m going wring your adorable goddam neck.” But because babies do not understand English, sometimes you have to try to use other means to show them affection.

This is why you see people bouncing babies all the time. The physical sensation of being held and then falling and then not falling distracts them from what they were crying about in the first place. The good news is that because you are so sleep deprived, the irony of the situation—using physical stimuli to distract from loneliness, which is what led to the sex that led to the baby in the first place—will be lost on you!

4. Mystery cry

If you own a cat, you’re familiar with this last batch of meows. Your cat will cock its head, look at you, and meow plaintively. It usually takes a few months to realize that this one is because there is a bug in the apartment that the cat cannot catch.

We’ll call this one unrealized ambition.

Luckily, humans develop extremely slowly. Most aren’t even capable of holding a compelling conversation until they are 25 years old. So this likely won’t be an issue until they are too old to cry in public, and therefore it’s not your damn problem.

Like, for instance, once your baby is old enough to have a baby of its own, and it has been wearing the same pair of barf-stained sweats for 3 days straight, and can’t get the damn kid to stop crying, and its boss is giving it shit about taking the full 3 months of parental leave, and it goes into the bathroom to sob daily, that’s not really your concern anymore! All you have to do, now as grandparents, is stop by once every couple of weeks, pump the infant full of sugar, and peel out giggling that comeuppance is a sumbitch, leaving your child to deal with the sobbing grandkid you’ve left behind.

With the cat, just kill the bug to solve both of your problems.

Conclusion

Okay! Now you know the four types of mammal cries. Why don’t they develop language and specify between the different concerns, you ask? Who the hell knows. That’s not really important. What is important, now that you’ve gotten your child changed and fed and asleep for a few brief hours before it wakes up and starts screaming again, is that you find whatever bed your cat has been hiding under, slide down there quickly, and go to sleep before your spouse can see where you’re hiding and tell you that it’s your turn again.

Posted on September 11, 2018 - How to raise a child, Tunes - No Comments » Share