Your Newfound Inability to Determine What is Interesting to Other People

One apparent casualty of becoming a father is that you lose your ability to determine what is going to be interesting to childless people and what isn’t. If you start telling stories about your kids too much, your bachelor friends will start bitching about your “fucking kiddie stories” behind your back. And there are some fathers that really do tell shitty kiddie stories.

Indeed, many might say that the existence of this blog in and of itself is a great example of a father’s inability to keep the boring details of his life as a father to himself. (and if you had that thought before reading the last sentence, you can go to hell.)

But sometimes, the stories are actually fucking good. Or at least I think they are. Sometimes I feel like telling my buddies “Dude, don’t stop listening just because it’s about my kids. It might actually be funny shit.” But I feel like the switch turns off as soon as the word “kid” is uttered. And I'm not sure if this is their fault or mine.

For example, at some point in the first two years of your child’s life, there will be a week or so during which they will consume approximately as many calories of food as you do. They will throw back two and a half donuts one morning. They’ll eat 3 slices of a large pizza in one sitting. They’ll suck down a whole can of pop.

During a week like this, the amount of food your kid will eat will be tremendously impressive. Take the pop. When you extrapolate that out, a 20 pounder drinking a can of pop is like a 200 pounder drinking a pair of two liters. Two of them! At age 14 or so, me and several friends actually had a competition to see who could drink a single 2-liter of root beer the fastest; I think I was the fastest, and it took me 40 minutes and I puked within 30 seconds of finishing; it’s a hell of a lot harder than you’d think. When it comes to guy topics, eating large quantities of food is certainly a guy topic. Guys should be into this. But whenever I brag about how much my kids eat, people seem bored (although even I recognized that this was not a story people would be into when my kids were breastfeeding).

Maybe it’s the perceived bragging. When it comes to a lot of fatherstories, there is a certain amount of narcissism inherent in them. No father would talk about themselves in the prideful way that they talk about their kids. I think what us dads generally don’t recognize is how talking about our kids seems to other people to be bragging about ourselves, whereas to us, it seems like we’re complimenting another person. It took me a long time to figure that out.

But knowing that, I thought: “Well if I can’t talk about the cool shit my kids can do, maybe I can talk about the funny or stupid shit that they do.”

So I tried that tack. For example, my four-year old son says the word “girl” as if it rhymed with squirrel: gwirrel. That’s funny shit. If you see a four-year old tossing around the term “gwirrel” with a stone cold straight face, that goes a long way. So I figured that if I tried to explain this, maybe something might get lost in the delivery, but I figured it should still hold up; it should still be funny. So what happens? I go out to lunch with the work dudes and say “Dudes, stop talking about sports and check this shit out. My son says ‘gwirrel’ instead of ‘girl.’ What a fucking retard!” And does anyone laugh? No. Nobody laughed. You can’t fucking win with some people.

OK, so I didn’t really do that, but I went through, in my head, how I might possibly talk about this kind of shit in front of my regular-style childless buddies, and I was just completely at a loss as to how to get this across in a way that might actually cause them to pay attention. It just made stark to me the divide between those with kids and those without.

So unless the stories are just phenomenally good, I’ve concluded that you’re pretty much can’t talk about your kids with your buddies. It just doesn't work.

They just won’t give a damn.