In school, they taught us about dangling participles and gerunds and the Pythagorean Theorem and they shouted “Shoot for the stars!” and “Follow your dreams!” and “Go to college!”.

There was no class for “If you want to be a mom and clean stuff,” and no teacher ever declared, “Get ready to hire a therapist because your kids (especially the last two) are gonna cart your a$$ straight to the Funny Farm.”

Dave Ramsey never posts a cutely staged photo of a handsome bald guy smiling and excited because he’s holding cash envelopes that read, “Maxipads and Tampons”, “Hairspray”, “Milk and Cheese”.

No one really adequately prepares you for parenthood. Oh, sure, there are all the books and that chick you went to high school with might post pictures of her muscular husband doing “Kangaroo Time” with their new baby and you’ll drool, (OVER THE BABY) but the reality is, you’re going to learn to poop with an audience faster than you can fart in an elevator. 

I was previously one of those humans who had to leave school to poop at home. It just wouldn’t come out in a public venue. Post-children, I could poop on stage onto a napkin at a Linkin Park concert and probably  not even bat an eye. No one ever explains this to you prior to giving birth. 

If you sweetly announce to the family that there is a need to have a Come-to-Jesus to discuss chores not being completed or why the go-to insult is “a-hole-idiot” or why someone took a dump in the dog dish, they all race into the recesses likes rats in a restaurant. Solution: take a bath or attempt to poo. Family meetings happen while mom is in the bathtub and/or emptying her bowels. You didn’t know that?

That’s because no one mentions this. 

Carrying on with the “mom is naked in a lot of scenarios” theme – you will no longer possess any modicum of personal modesty or bodily propriety. It skitters out the hospital window and commits suicide shortly after having your nether-regions shredded by your initial Crotch Goblin and then subsequently encountering a friendly, Filipino janitor sneaking in to sweep your room after you took your first post-birth shower and you’re just standing there. 

Butt naked like a deflated balloon. 

But guess what, sis? You don’t care. You. Don’t. Care. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE has already seen it all. There were at least 7 people tugging in different directions on all your dangling participles while you were squeezing that little animal out and your husband had a front row seat. Chew on that. He got to see you poop directly from your cornhole. So, that friendly little lady janitor will just sweep and the two of you will chit chat like it’s a late summer day in the 50s.  

Another fun fact: Kids love to lick windows, doors and full-length mirrors. Sometimes doorknobs and floors. 7 year old girls will carefully apply three layers of bright red LipSense and then make-out wildly with any mirror her lips will reach. Teens will occasionally try this on for size as well. Windows and mirrors are only the beginning. Your entire world will be filthy for the rest of forever. Especially if you own a boy human or two. 

The key to parenting satisfaction? Lower all expectations to zilch. 

You’ll learn to understand and enjoy ironies such as taking a kid to the dentist and finding out she needs $500 worth of cavities filled and then immediately go out for shakes and to pick out a candy at Walmart because she was so well-behaved and accommodating during cavity search time. 

Kids will steal all your socks, sweaters, favorite hoodie, earbuds, toilet paper, the bolts to the ceiling fan, scissors, spoons, phone chargers, coins, gum, sleep and sanity. Even though they are tiny and fatless, they will steal your pants. They will be the thieves of your joy and Reese’s Pieces and leftover Panda Express noodles. 

They will leave all the lights on and they don’t shut doors. They rub boogers all over the wall next to their beds and their feet are always black and hobbit-like. They break all your stuff and don’t even feel sorry about it. They poop and don’t flush the toilet. They find your pants in the laundry and explain later, “I found these weird, giant jean shorts in the hamper and I cut them off to make ‘mom-shorts’. I didn’t know they actually were MOM’S SHORTS!” 

*hysterical laughter*

If you’re following my drift here, it’s not all beer and skittles, my friends. Parenting sucks a great majority of the time. Ironically, it is also the most fantastic hard thing that will ever happen to you and those squeaky little rats will gift unto you unparalleled joy and purpose and lead your heart to the Land of Milk and Honey. Paradoxically, they will also draw out your worst fears and insecurities and unhealed emotional anguish. Sometimes all these things happen over the course of a single day. 

Like a dirty little glutton for punishment, you will revel in the afterglow for hours when your wittle bitty 4 year old baby boy beast places his sticky, dimpled mitts on your cheeks and whispers, “I wuff you, Mama.” 

Jennifer Senior, columnist for the New York Times wrote a book about parental well-being and happiness. Its title? “All Joy and No Fun”. 

Epiphany. 

It’s a cultural assumption that we will love parenting and that procreating will emphatically improve our life satisfaction and happiness. It’s written off as a given that you, Mommy Dearest are going to transcendently love every single millisecond of raising up an offspring because it’s all going to be over faster than a knife fight in a phone booth and you’ll be left sad and purposeless and pining away for little muddy handprints and smelly butts.  

You see, humans basically require meaning in life. We need purpose and responsibility or we just smoke pot and eat nachos. There has to be a reason bigger than ourselves to get up day after day and survive the monotony. A family brings all the meaning and purpose and existential delight in heaps so huge, we can’t see over the top. But it also brings great piles of garbage and snot and sleep deprivation and laundry and crap. 

Heavy on the crap. 

Senior plowed through decades of data about human happiness and dadgummit, would you believe that children either have a net effect of zero, or they “slightly compromise their parents’ happiness”? People ranked vacuuming higher on their happiness list than caring for their own offspring. They’d literally rather clean the rug than do childcare.

I mean, I can’t disagree. *shrugs*

But here’s the thing – babies bring meaning. When man’s search for meaning is added into the equation, the “parenting paradox” suddenly makes more sense. Reproducing may majorly suck a lot of the time, but it’s highly meaningful and significant. Even though it’s also highly demanding and requires personal sacrifice and even forgoing short-term happiness, most parents say they wouldn’t give it up for anything. 

This meaning, this sense of timeless and primordial purpose is so important to us that we’ll willingly give up a portion of our own personal happiness for it. I mean, I’ve repeated the cycle 6 times. Well 5, but who’s counting? That’s a lot of portions of my happiness. I suffer so good that I keep going back for more over and over and over like it’s a disgusting Chinese buffet.  Either that or maybe I was never informed of how babies are made, according to all senior citizens in Walmart. 

Those short bursts of unmitigated joy we experience when our kid says something supremely weird or clever or sensitive or hilarious just doesn’t compare to any other type of human rapture. 

My husband and I chuckle and say that our twin boys were the best/worst thing that ever happened to us and they simultaneously render joy and horror almost at all times. I have no other words to describe this paradox and really, it seeps over into every crevice of our parenting experience. 

Our kids are fantastic and horrible, hilarious and harrowing, exhilarating and exhausting. They provide a great majority of my life’s meaning and purpose and about 97% of my pain and personal torment. One moment I think my throat will close and I’ll die of joy and rapture because I’m watching one of them sleep and they’re so incredibly beautiful and life-changing and the next, I’m ready to hurl every last one of them off a bridge if I hear one more breath of bickering. 

I feel like it’s okay, though. It’s all part of the human experience and naming and validating our emotions is one of the most important skills we can hone. I don’t always like parenting and I don’t always wake up loving being a mom. 

But guess what?

I also don’t have to feel guilty about it. I don’t have to lie or pretend like mothering completes me every day. My kids make me mad and crazy and psychotic and I’m usually one turd away from the nut hut on any given morning. 

Other times, motherhood infuses incalculable joy and euphoria and hilarity into my life which I positively could not procure elsewhere and for which I’m generally willing to keep trudging up the mountain and across the jagged stones for. Parenthood brings priceless experiences like no other job can and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be sad if I somehow woke up tomorrow weighing 110 pounds, possessing a thigh gap and no wailing or scent of fecal matter lilting on the breeze. Because, let’s face it, those are my gains and losses in a nutshell. 

I’ll leave you with this as an example of the joys to be gleaned from becoming a parent: 

Today, my 7 year old precocious daughter was sitting on the counter alone in the kitchen and giggling. I walk in and she’s got a 5 pound, first generation iPod talking into it like a phone. With a wicked little Jezebel voice she whispers into her geriatric iPod, “I’m just waiting for the mailman to come over.” 

See what I’d miss if I didn’t have children?

*Disclaimer: I asked her why she was waiting for the mailman to come over and she declared, “Because he brings the Amazon Prime boxes and I’ve got some school clothes on the way.”