Your front-row seat to my nervous breakdown

About four months ago, I tried to sell my kids. Except, not really.

Over the weekend, I noticed a spike in traffic to the “Kids for Sale” blog entry, and subsequently discovered that it was coming from HappilyChildFree.com and Childfreedom.com, two sites that apparently are kind of like support groups for people who have decided to not have children.

“Here is some mandatory reading for anyone considering having kids!” wrote the author of Happily Childfree. “I know he thinks this is funny, but the fact that most of it is true kinda makes it scary.”

Let’s get something straight, Happily Childfree: I don’t think what I wrote is funny; I know what I wrote is fucking hysterical … and don’t you forget it.

Childfreedom was more cognizant of my comedic brilliance: “He’s a blogger dad who’s just venting and being funny,” he/she wrote, “but you know the humor comes from the fact that it’s all true.”

Well, OK, I can’t argue with that.

Beth, one of the so-called happily childfree-ers left a comment on my “Kids for Sale” blog entry in which she wrote, “This is why I’m childfree.” Fair enough, but then she added, “And to the person who complains but is pregnant with another, you made your bed, now lie in it and stop whining.”

Someone else over at Childfreedom left a similar comment about what I had written: “Bed. Made. Lie.”

Now, if there’s one thing I’ve found to be unfathomably helpful over the past six-or-so years, it’s getting tough-love advice about how to be a parent from people who don’t have any children of their own.

You see, Happily Childfree-ers, parenting is hard. In fact, it’s more challenging than anything you’ll ever do in your entire child-free life. I can’t expect you to realize that, but trust me.

Since you don’t have children, let me ask you a question: have you ever complained about, say, your job? I’m willing to bet one of my testicles that you have … and I’m willing to bet the other of my testicles that you didn’t quit your job and say to yourself, “I’m never going to have another job,” or kept your job and said to yourself, “I can’t complain about my job because I made my bed and now I must lie in it and stop whining.”

Now, imagine something immeasurably more important to you than your job or any other thing you’ve ever possessed in your entire child-free life … something that simultaneously is the most rewarding and most difficult thing you’ve ever done. Whatever that thing is, it is neither as challenging nor as rewarding as raising a child, so you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that you would complain about the difficulty … oh, yes, you’d complain ad nauseum … and yet, you would never in a million years want to not have that thing about which you were complaining.

The complaining and the having-kids-anyway is the way it works, my little ones … and you should be damn glad for it, because if the only choice we were offered was to either have kids and not complain about them, or to not have kids at all, then the human race would be fucked.

So, since I apparently wrote something that, at first blush, appeared to be a manifesto for why people shouldn’t have children, allow me to balance things out a bit.

Here’s an excerpt from the first letter I wrote to my son on this blog:

Your ability to test my patience is nothing short of spectacular. You often are not interested in doing what your mother and I ask of you, and you protest with all the fury of a crack-smoking banshee when you don’t get your way.

All of that washes away, however, when you spontaneously say “I love you, Daddy,” which is something you have taken to doing in the past couple of months. In the moment after you utter that sentence, you could ask me for a pony and I would get it for you. I’m glad you haven’t figured that out yet.

I cannot tell you what an absolutely humbling experience it is to have your unconditional love.

I cannot properly describe how much I love you. Spread your arms as wide as you can and say, “This big, Daddy?” No, even more than that.

I cannot put into words how blessed I feel that you are my son.

Here are a couple of photos that maybe do a better job of illustrating what I mean than words ever could:

In closing, childfree-ers: I respect your decision to not have children; in fact, I think the world is probably much better off when people who know they do not have the capacity to be a parent don’t become one anyway. But please, don’t assume parenthood is a bad thing just because I complain about it. Those complaints are more than offset by the depth and breadth of the incomparable love I feel for my children, and the incredible experience it has been to make and raise them with the woman I love.

If given the chance to go back and be child free, or be exactly where I am right now, I wouldn’t change a single thing.