No Wonder My Parents Drank: Tales from a Stand-Up Dad

No Wonder My Parents Drank YOU'LL NEVER SLEEP IN THIS TOWN AGAINFrom "Saturday Night Live "to stand-up, from a blockbuster film career to the star of CBS's hit television show "Gary Unmarried, "Jay Mohr is one of the funniest people in comedy today. Now, in this down and dirty tale of modern fatherhood, Mohr shares his stories as a first-time parent. "No Wonder My Parents Drank "reveals the details behind Mohr's humiliating... Full description

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PREPARING FOR BABY

Webster’s Dictionary defines prepare as “to put in proper condition or readiness.”

Readiness? I didn’t even know that readiness was a word. But who am I to argue with Webster? What I can say with complete confidence, though, is that saying that you can be “ready” for a baby is like saying that you can be “ready” for a natural disaster. We know that things are going to get shaken up, we know we’ll be out of our element and there are supplies to be had. But really, how the hell does one “prepare” for his life to be turned completely upside down?

I wasn’t ready for my son to be born three months premature. To be honest, I wasn’t ready for him at all. I was a lout. I was a loudmouthed know-it-all who always had to have things go my way. The thought of me being in charge of another human being’s welfare was laughable. Well, it would have been laughable if it didn’t happen to me at four-thirty in the afternoon that fall day. What had once been laughable became instantly terrifying. I had no idea how to be a father. I had no idea how to do laundry or how to mix formula or how to install a car seat. I was clueless about how to change a diaper. I didn’t know how to soothe a grown-up, let alone a baby. I couldn’t even find the remote. Parenthood is probably best described by the old expression “If you want God to laugh, make plans.” I quickly learned that when it comes to parenthood there should be a change in that expression: “If you want God to laugh, have expectations.”

I’m not sure what I expected when I became a father but I do know that every day for the next seven years, my expectations and hopes would be blown out of the water daily. I am sure that if you are a parent and reading this, you are solemnly nodding your head in agreement. Having kids is like Murphy’s law taking place every day inside your heart. If you want your son to be an athlete, he will become a total spaz. If you want your daughter to be a beauty queen, she will be cross-eyed. If your wish is for your daughter to go out into the world and get a great education, she will be as dumb as a bag of hair. Parents make big plans and God laughs. Every day. You go to sleep at night and think up a big plan to take your daughter to the beach. You can hardly sleep because of how excited you are that you thought of something so cool for your kid. You reflect back on all the times you wish your parents had taken you to the beach, and you lie in the dark and silently gloat that you are going to be a better parent than your parents ever were. Then you wake up in the morning and tell your daughter the big, huge, wonderful beach news and she looks you in the eye and says, “I don’t want to go to the beach.” You stand there stunned while holding towels and wearing white shit on your nose. You think, Who the fuck doesn’t want to go to the beach? Your child doesn’t want to go to the beach because you planned a day at the beach. Welcome aboard.

So we’ve established that the moment Jackie was released from the womb, I realized—in a moment of simultaneous bliss and sheer terror—that I could never be mentally prepared for the event. But let’s call a spade a spade (where did that expression come from anyway?): my lack of “readiness” for my child began months before his birth . . . when I realized that I had to literally and physically prepare for his arrival. For the slow audience and the cheap seats, this means that I had to blow my entire life savings to buy a bunch of things that I’d never even heard of before but now “needed.”

One of the first things that I “needed” to do was “baby-proof” the house. This is a smart idea for all parents—not only morons like me who buy bachelor pads with lots of stairs and decks and then decide to raise a child in them. I actually had a baby-proofing company come to my home to give me an estimate. The man who showed up told me that I should move. Cute.

The baby-proofing company either saw me coming or I lived in the world’s most dangerous house. Aside from the stuff I could think of on my own, like putting a shield in front of the fireplace and locks on the cabinets, these guys bled me dry. When they were finished putting gates in front of the stairs and latches on closet doors they handed me a bill for 823 dollars! I said, “I asked you to baby-proof my house, not put up new fucking siding!”

The man calmly walked me out onto one of my decks and said, “You have four decks. All of them are pretty large. You needed three hundred and forty square feet of Plexiglas.”

Now, believe me when I tell you I don’t want my kid to fall from a deck, but 340 square feet of Plexiglas? Let me put that in perspective for you. That is precisely 110 feet more Plexiglas than Joan Rivers has in her face. My house looks like the whale tank at Sea World now. I wondered if I could just as easily have soldered all the doors to the patio and decks and saved myself a couple of hundred bucks. I obviously couldn’t do that, though, and my home now has the most beautiful and expansive collection of Plexiglas panels imaginable. One afternoon, after a particularly violent storm had passed, I walked out onto one of my decks and saw that three of the panels had been blown out and disappeared. Not wanting to be bludgeoned again by the baby-proofing company, I looked out between the rungs of the railing on the deck and down at the land below. I thought to myself, It’s only a couple hundred feet. There is plenty of grass and shrubbery down there, and don’t babies bounce? To their credit, the baby-proofers came back to my house and replaced the missing Plexiglas panels for “free.” When the highway robbers reemerged in my home, the guy handed me a tiny container and said, “I’m doing the Plexiglas for free because last time we were here I forgot to give you this and I could lose my job because of it.”

“Oh, that’s great. What is it?” I asked.

“It’s called ipecac. One drop and anyone will immediately vomit.”

Wow. Was this guy nuts? You don’t give a comic a vial of instant puke! I immediately searched my brain for the perfect victim. Who had crossed me and how would I distract them away from their Diet Pepsi long enough to spike it with some good old-fashioned ipecac? Maybe I could invite one of my enemies over to bury the hatchet? The bottle of ipecac still sits in the cupboard in my kitchen and I lie in wait for someone to come over and piss me off.

Once the house has been baby-proofed, the next order of business is to fill our Plexiglas cages with the many new things to buy for a baby, things we have never shopped for before—bouncy swings, rocking chairs, pacifiers, plastic bathtubs, mobiles, strollers, diaper genies, sleep sacks, changing tables, gliders, blankets, and footies, to name a few.

That’s right, there’s more than that. You will also need an SUV or a minivan to haul all this shit home from the store.

If I ever decide to open a business later on in life, I will open a store that sells only baby furniture and retire to the Caribbean after two years with billions. Cribs, daybeds, and baby-changing stations are more expensive and more valuable to a new parent than all the diamonds in South Africa.

Shortly before Jackie was born, I went shopping for all the furnishings of my soon-to-be-son’s nursery. Strict adherents to many religions will not buy baby products or open any baby shower gifts until after the child is born. They consider this an act of arrogance against God’s impending gift. But I decided to go shopping because I didn’t want my kid to be sleeping on the dining room table.

I went to a classy baby furniture boutique on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I shopped for less than one hour. I left with three pieces of furniture and all of their accessories and was quickly and pleasantly charged . . . seven thousand dollars.

Seven grand! What the hell just happened?! All I wanted was a freaking crib, and I wound up having to book an extra couple of gigs just to pay for it! I thought I was merely buying a crib. When I picked out the crib I wanted, the saleslady asked, “Do you have bumpers?”

No, I didn’t have bumpers. Not only did I not have bumpers, I didn’t even know what they were. Up until that moment, the only time I had heard the word bumpers used in a sentence was in reference to bumper cars, bowling alley bumpers, or the rear bumper that some jerk dented while I was in traffic on the 405. My house wasn’t nearly large enough for a bowling alley or bumper cars, so I was forced to do what all men hate to do in the presence of a woman. I had to ask, “Wha?”

A bumper, it turns out, is the padded pillow that runs along the side of your baby’s crib so his arm doesn’t fall between the bars and snap off. Common sense would dictate that bumpers be sold with the actual crib, but I guess when it comes to baby supplies, common sense be damned.

I needed bumpers, so I bought bumpers. It turned out that I “needed” a lot of things that day, and I bought one of each of them. I “needed” a humidifier for a perfectly moist nursery, so I bought a humidifier. I “needed” a rocking chair to sit in while feeding the baby, so I bought a rocking chair to sit in while feeding the baby. I “needed” a daybed in case we wanted to sleep in the nursery with the baby, so I bought a daybed, which “needed” a trundle to accompany it.

Wait a second. What the hell is a trundle? A trundle is the bottom part of a daybed that slides out in case two people need to sleep in the baby’s nursery. Gotcha. Trundle, check.

Shopping for my baby was like dealing with the mob. Every time I thought I was finished buying what I came in for, something else was “suggested” to me. Trust me, you don’t want to be perceived as a cheapskate when it comes to your baby’s nursery, so you wind up buying half the store. Jackie is too big for his crib now, but for three grand he had better crawl out of it the morning he wakes up to leave for college.

Aside from digging a giant, thirty-five-thousand-dollar hole for all of my kid’s living expenses before he was even born, I found that shopping for baby-related items has an enormous upside: women LOVE would-be fathers. If you think a wedding ring makes you more attractive to the opposite sex, try shopping for baby food and diapers. Holy smokes! It seems that the moment you enter into this phase of consumerism, women rappel from the ceiling to offer help.

My theory on this subject is that women find commitment alluring. A woman may be arguing with her boyfriend about when they will get married and why can’t he take out the trash and in you walk with an arm full of formula and a basket filled with Huggies number two, and the woman immediately makes a couple of assumptions that may or may not be true:

1. He is responsible! Ha. If they only knew how many times I forgot to put a dirty diaper in the outside trash cans and then watched in horror as my dog took five days to fully shit it out.

2. He is committed! Well, I should be committed . . .

But the moment I begin shopping for baby stuff, the chicks come out of the woodwork. They always lean just a little too close to tell you something, and they brush up against you as they talk. Thanks a lot, ladies. I was single for twenty-five years and had to buy enough booze for a generation of pirates. Where the hell were you then?

Here are some of the more baffling—and often disturbing—items on the baby shopping list.

BREAST PUMP

The most bizarre purchase I made due to impending fatherhood was a breast pump. Simply put, the breast pump is a medieval torture device that forcibly sucks milk from a woman’s nipples and drops what it extracts into tiny plastic bags to be refrigerated and used as food later. Even though my friends tell me it tastes like half-and-half, its technical name is “expressed milk.”

Every woman who has ever had to use a breast pump has my deepest sympathy. These contraptions look like something the Nazis designed to make couples never want to see each other naked again. It’s truly humiliating for a woman to be hooked up to one of these things. The nipples get pulled a good four inches from the breasts and then sucked dry. I can imagine it hurts like a bitch—maybe even as extreme as a swift kick in the nuts.

Also, the sound the breast pump makes is a frightening series of slurps and whooshes accompanied by the constant droning of the breast pump engine, which never seems to tire of its torture. It’s safe to say that if men ever had to be subjected to the breast pump, babies around the world would be fed strictly formula for their entire lives. Either that, or beer. Maybe Gatorade.

DIAPERS

The rule of thumb when shopping for baby products is that if it takes more than five minutes to figure out what it is or how it might be used, then you don’t need it. The one exception to this rule is diapers. Just having the word diapers on your list is an adjustment to your psyche. What was once a trip for chips, beer, and turkey patties is now a trip for formula, baby diapers, and A&D ointment. And though diapers are a very tricky purchase, you definitely need them.

Buying diapers isn’t like buying a can of soup or finding the deodorant that oozes from little holes. The margin of error is smaller than with other products. If you come home with the wrong olive oil, for example, you will probably hear something like “Oh, this isn’t the extra-virgin I usually use, but I’ll make do.”

Not with diapers. If you come home with the wrong type of diapers, I assure you that you will immediately be dispatched to the supermarket to correct the damage. Who knew the world of diapers was so vast and expansive? I sure didn’t.

Once Jackie was home, I was promptly sent out for diapers, so off I went. Little did I know that there are as many different types of diapers as there are babies. The first time I went to buy diapers, I was sweating as I perused the diaper section. I realized that I didn’t even know what they came in. Do they sell diapers in a jar? Do diapers come bound up like firewood? Are they in the frozen department? Who knows? They’re in an aisle that I’ve likely never even walked through before! And this is one of the astonishing things—there is an entire diaper aisle! Not a row or a shelf. Aisle three is all diapers! There are way too many choices! Huggies number one, Huggies number two, Huggies overnights, and of course, Huggies with wings (in case your kid is gay).

A few times I came home with the wrong diapers because I thought the baby on the package had to match the baby I had at home, like Garanimals. I would walk back and forth and mutter, “All these kids are Asian or black. Aren’t there any white baby diapers?”

What I know now is that every baby is a different size and shape, and the diaper companies put out every conceivable size and shape of diaper to accommodate them. I once saw a bag of diapers that read “Holds up to fifty pounds.” Holy mother of God! If your son goes to the bathroom and unloads fifty pounds, he doesn’t need a diaper, he needs a job. Maybe some manual labor down at the docks is more suitable for your mon...