There's a thing people do when they reach some sort of milestone where all of the sudden they're really engaged by certain topics, where conversation about stuff like gas water heaters, the optimal level of collision coverage or male incontinence becomes really engrossing and the players turn very animated. It's this thing where someone's like, "I just had a guy come and lay tile," and the other person will be like, "Oh, wow, what kind of grout did he use?" and basically if you don't have a bathroom — or care about owning one — you're kind of like, "Can't we just talk about the latest episode of Homeland or something, you know, important that I might actually care about?"
All of which is to say, when I started reading Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough, the one thing I couldn't get out of my head was how this writer — who is a single parent with a young child — found the time to write this book.
The point of the book is not that she's a single parent but rather that she's single, period. And that the reason she's single, she explains, is that she spent too much time before she got old and mommed being a big bitch about who she would or wouldn't deign to go out with until one day only 50-plus men would ask her out.
But for the first 100 or so pages I could only perseverate on the fact that even as a single parent, she had all this time to go interview groups of women and men in bars, visit with matchmakers and dating consultants and generally do this gumshoe investigative reporting about how women in their 20s and early 30s are, before they know it, in danger of becoming old and single, or at least only attractive to prospective AARP members. Seriously, even with a nanny or or whoever, how do you write an entire book? Because all I can find time to do when I'm home with Monkey is answer a few emails and maybe finally brush my teeth at some point mid-morning — either that or eat. It sucks. And that's why I'm up doing bullshit at 2 a.m.
It was highly distracting — You can speed date and read Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb 800 times a week? Like, how? — until I finally gave in and figured that there's probably some boarding school somewhere that accepts 18-month-olds. That and I got totally sucked into Gottlieb's pitch-perfect self-deprecating style, which evokes much less scorn than straight-up pity and really does work as a tale that cautions.
The genius thing about its utility as a cautionary tale, for guys at least, is how much dudes (and bros and, yes, even jabrones) can root for this lady to tell these bitches what we've been trying to say for years, which is that they're sure as shit not gonna get any prettier, which will only make it that much harder to check out of that miserable relationship with that dickhead financial services scum once she discovers he's been cheating on her for, like, the eighth time or whatever, which is why she should lock up a good thing now — i.e., this — and give the bald, the poor, the fuzzy asses a chance — one, lousy, goddam chance — with a beautiful baby for once, Jesus H. Christ and Harry S. Truman's Syphilitic Son.
The message for the intended audience is I guess a little different, which is roughly something along the lines of when high-achieving children have been groomed to expect only the best in their education or careers, it is only natural for her to expect "the best" in her relationships as well, which is why women carry around a giant laundry list of necessary characteristics for a mate, a list comprehensive enough to ensure that no man could possibly work, or if one does, he has approximately 48 million potential women to choose from. And so women spend their optimal mating years either ignoring basically good solid men or (and) going after men who aren't good matches for them and then all of the sudden the 32-year-old who gets asked out more times each week than there are days in the week becomes the 38-year-old who guys — i.e., the solid, upstanding marrying kind of guys — wouldn't ever want to bother with.
It's common sense, but like so many self-help or self-helpful books show, there is a big market to be reminded about common sense. I should add, though, that part of the book's power is that it's — I think at least — calling out common sense that people with sense don't want to hear or think it's bad to mention, which probably accounts for much of the negative reaction to the book (or at least the provocative title). I didn't read the negative reaction because a) I don't really give a fuck what some no-sex-having bitches think when they're confronted by the truth and b) I actually don't think the book is saying what people think it's saying (though the provocative title of that and the original article don't help assuage people's skepticism).
There is a funny point in Marry Him where Gottlieb interviews some of the men in her life who probably were "good enough" but who she never ended up with. One in particular — who she was friendly with and who she says she probably should have ended up with — talks about his "settling" in ways that seem a little depressing. Maybe that's a gender thing? It's noticeable that the book's female examples generally describe feeling a stronger and stronger connection with the schlubby men they settle for but this guy — who marries a "bland" lady — simply starts focusing on other qualities: "'She's bland in ways that aren't important int he big picture,' he said. 'I'm a talker, and I love the banter, and I'm intense about things, and she's just not. It mattered more when we were dating. It still would be nice to have in a spouse, but it has so little to do with the day-to-day of marriage that it matters very little now.'" I hope this guy is a composite because his wife should be pissed the way she's described in the book.
Another small thing that you start to notice after a while is how Gottlieb is usually very careful to note that there is always "physical chemistry" in whatever settled couple she uses as an example. It's noticeable because she sort of seems to add it in as a parenthetical a lot, which makes you question how often it's actually there. You know, like, if you keep having to mention it, etc. . . . At the very least I wondered if it's not maybe always there and doesn't it sort of undercut the argument? Those are unknown unknowns though.
Ultimately, Marry Him succeeds in two ways: One, it's a huge literary feat that you, the reader, somehow by the end of the book start to feel your heart hurt for this person who is not such a huge jackass that she didn't understand that having a child via sperm donor in her late 30s wouldn't lead to dimmed dating prospects but that she — like all of us — kept holding on to this idea that she could still feel a spark with someone who was the love of her life. You feel for her. And then she admits that she is turned off by a match she is presented with because he went to San Diego State. And you're, like, wow, you're kind of an idiot, because while I'm sure the California public higher education system is under great financial stress right now, the difference between SDSU and UC-Berkeley is not that great that you shouldn't be able to just suck it the fuck up. I mean, Jesus H. Christ and Harry S. Truman's Syphilitic Son you come off like a hose beast. To continue One (above), you read this selp-helpful book thinking she's going to triumph at the end with a real nice guy and then when she doesn't it's such a huge muted-trumpet moment that you almost — not quite! — feel teary-eyed when you hear that the Mr. "Good Enough" she finally found, after hundreds of pages of trials and travails and child-neglect, was forced to move away for the good of his family. It's written very smartly that way.
Two (I nearly forgot what "Two" was) — and this is a message that Atlantic editors probably care like not at all to emphasize, which is why Gottlieb is somehow vilified — is that ultimately Marry Him is about being kind. In this case, to dumpy men with limited financial prospects but who will help out around the house and take their sons to soccer practice. On behalf of dumpy men with limited financial prospects but who will help out around the house, I want to personally thank Gottlieb for encouraging hot young chicks to get real about some of these dandies they insist on bringing home and instead indulge in the dark arts of the League of Bald-Headed Men. Thanks bro! We owe you (a bunch)! She's like a more useful Foundation For A Better Life, in that with FFABL, all I get is some jock to pick up the books I dropped in the hallway; with Gottlieb, at least I get some yoni out of the deal, you know? Seriously men, she's doing some Yeoman's work up in this heeze.
Just a couple of questions though. One, because while society — we! — applauds — applaud! — fathers who put their children at risk of severe injury or possibly even death in order to catch a foul ball, where are the mothers here? Those heads are soft!
I guess it's just that when it doesn't go right, then it really doesn't go right. Like with this guy:
One thing you'll notice between the successes and failures is the age of the baby. When it comes to those miraculous YouTubable catches, the babies seem pretty young — some just a matter of months it seems. And the one thing we know about kids this age, maybe the only thing we understand about kids this age is that they're veritable sacks of flour. In fact, soft heads aside, I bet it's easier to make those catches with a baby than with a beer, much less a full tray of food, between your legs.
If the baby is older, you run the risk of having him or her lunge after the ball him or herself, or grab at your glasses while you're trying to track the ball, or even stick his or her fingers in your nose while you're trying to catch it. Which is why some things — like having HBO on after midnight while you feed your son a bottle — are best left to immobility and developmental immaturity.
Which is to say, this season I would have tried catching that ball. Next season, I'm sitting way up in the third level far, far from where foul balls travel. I'm happy not to have gotten away with one this time.
When your child is a newborn basically the only advice anyone in a position of authority has is something along the lines of, when a kid is crying, for God's sake, fix it. Because like we said before, and even though I can't find where exactly I said this before, I know I've said it before, which brings up a funny thing about memory: When you're sleep deprived you're 750 percent more likely to sound like a huge dickhead.
OK, let's reset that paragraph because "we" lost our train of thought: Because like "we" said before, babies cry for clear reasons: They're tired, they're hungry, they shit themselves, they have to burp, they're wet and because their daddies overuse colons when they write. So it was a little bit of a shock when we rolled into the pediatrician's office and he suggested that it might be time for Mr. Baby to "cry it out."
If you're a parent, you know that "cry it out" is a loaded term, a point of contention between veterans who know that a baby needs to learn how to handle shit and soft first-timers who feel like it's important to coddle their little monsters.
It's not that "we're" opposed to babies crying, it's just that after six months of hearing that you need to attend to babies when they cry, it's kind of a shock to hear that that's no longer an operating principle.
Because what it really means when your baby needs to cry it out is that he or she is finally emerging from a newborn's stupor, that their brains are not only hooked up, but fully online and ultimately you're on the clock. In short, they know better and you can teach them that.
I don't necessarily subscribe to this, mind you. To me, Mr. Baby is clearly becoming more and more sentient but I don't always get the sense that he is able to take away lessons from this cold, cruel world. But that said, there was something about the visit to the pediatrician's office that was a little different.
It all started out innocently enough: We got to the office on time, which we actually couldn't do at first. After we were there for a while, a newborn showed up and I was too curious, so I asked the parents how old he/she was. It was their second visit — the one that happens five days after the baby is born. Then the dad asked how we were sleeping. That of course opened the floodgates — I'm all too happy to talk about how badly we're sleeping, which is sort of unfair because since we switched to disposable overnight diapers, I don't ever have to get up.
A friend with an older kid prefaced a bit of advice with that old saw, "Opinions are like assholes . . ." and that didn't not go through my head as I talked to these folks, but like I said, I couldn't help myself. And besides, it cut the sting of going to the doctor's office and seeing that your newborn wasn't the youngest newborn in the room. Interestingly, I'm reading on the Googles that the definition of "newborn" seems to be a baby under four weeks old.
So I'm right in the middle of expounding on the virtues of a co-sleeper when the Vaudeville hook appeared and we were summoned back to the examination room, where, honestly, I feel like we were put to save everyone else from ourselves.
So here's what happens when you're at the pediatrician's office, at least if your kid is a newborn baby: They first weigh and measure your baby, which means that they tell you to strip the kid to their diaper in order to prepare them to get fully naked. After they're done — and hopefully your kid doesn't pee on the scale, which happened to us and which is I think the reason why the one nurse there doesn't see Mr. Baby anymore — you put the kid back into his or her diaper and wait for the doctor to examine him or her.
While we were waiting, Mr. Baby was his typical joyous self — goofing, smiling, sort of laughing, or at least what passes for laughing now. Then the nurse came in and she started to prepare the vaccinations, which were going to be two shots, one on each thigh. And Mr. Baby suddenly got just a little bit curious about what the lady was doing. And then he got a little more quiet. And then when the doctor came in and started examining him, it sort of looked like he knew what was up.
Now you hear about this when it comes to pets. Our childhood cats hated the ancient cat carrier we had, which we kept in the hot storage room off the garage and which always signaled to them that they were about to go get their sex organs harvested, or some such horrible fate. Jen's dog also disliked the vet, and as a Bichon, a fairly "smart" breed, seemed to understand days in advance what was going to happen.
But it never occurred to me, not in the six short months we've owned our child, that he was this "with it." Mr. Baby let out a squeal and a cry at one point, and I had to hold him. Basically, not only did he know, he totally knew, which made Jen and me a little bit nervous when we considered what else he might possibly have retained along the way.
This was exactly when the pediatrician asked us how Mr. Baby was sleeping. Or maybe this was when we asked the pediatrician about Mr. Baby's sleeping patterns. At any rate, the matter of sleeping was raised.
The takeaway, which we took away, or rather slunk away dragging it behind us like a fifty-pound bag of fertilizer, was that we needed to put Mr. Baby in a different room when he sleeps.
Now you might be all, Boo-fucking-hoo — kids aren't supposed to sleep in their parents' room, and like, yeah, well, sure, of course. But it's also so much easier to scoop up your child and nurse him or her to sleep. Babysitting becomes a slight issue of course, but you get my point: We needed to get our shit together and give this boy some tougher love.
But as the pediatrician pointed out, this makes everything else that much more difficult: Feeding, naps, ever being able to leave the house as an adult ever again.
So I guess we're supposed to let him "cry it out." And just to be clear, the doctor wasn't saying to lock him in a room and let him squeal himself to sleep. It's more subtle than that. Though I'm not sure how . . . I guess it's more subtle by a matter of minutes is all.
And it strikes me as pretty funny to think about the language: "Let" him cry it out. Like you say "I'll let you go now . . ." when you're trying to get off the phone with someone. It's like, oh, how magnanimous of me to "let" my baby "cry it out." What a privilege!
The other thing about Mr. Baby being six months old — exactly six months old tomorrow, actually — is that he's firmly passed over the line between "baby" and "baby who can do a lot more stuff." Chief of which is eating so-called "solid" foods, which aren't really that solid once we fix them up into a baby-safe slurry of single-ingredient-plus-breast-milk-and-sometimes-baby-cereal. And then there's the stroller.
Now we registered for a less-expensive version of a "nice" stroller, the Maclaren Volo, which I especially liked for its light weight, back when I foolishly believed I'd be going all over the city with Mr. Baby in tow, and I could effortlessly swing the stroller over my shoulder while I carried Mr. Baby up and down subway stairs. Maybe we will do this at some point, but for now, it's all I can do to get done whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing for money, plus keeping the house in check while Jen is away and of course raising a young child. In short, it's like, "Fuck," which was basically what I was thinking when the pediatrician revealed that our son has the developmental ability to fuck with our sleep patterns and keep us awake at night.
The other thing about the Maclaren Volo is that it's only for a child six months or up, in part because it is designed for a child who can hold his or her neck up on his or her own. So we had to wait on using it. I used it for the first time today.
Now the last thing you want to hear from a new parent is that he or she is feeling kind of sad, but I was feeling kind of sad about the idea that we would have to torture our child by isolating him in his own space while he "cried it out." I wanted to go down to the park and sit there by the river where it was slightly cooler than our living room. Maybe I wanted to read a little while Mr. Baby enjoyed his time in the stroller. That didn't happen — I took him out of the stroller and played with him on a blanket — but I wanted to do something a little different today. Not really sure why, but I did.
And that was all well and good and we had a good time and Mr. Baby was sleeping in the stroller when on our way home when a well-intentioned lady stopped me and directed my attention to the weird lump of baby slumped in his stroller in a scary way: I guess I didn't put him in the stroller correctly and then when I got home I realized I had the totally wrong setting for the strap.
We have way more work to do, and somewhat more time, and we'll eventually figure it out but for the time being I think we need to keep him happy and joyous and (mostly) immobile. And hopefully he won't be too scarred by the whole thing in the end.
