Guest Post: Parenting Is the Great Equalizer

I’m very pleased to bring you a guest post today by Dawn Dais, author of The Sh!t No One Tells You: A Guide to Surviving Your Baby’s First Year, which I reviewed earlier this week. Dawn is a lesbian mom, but wrote the book for a general audience, because . . . well, I’ll let her explain.

Parenting Is the Great Equalizer 

Several years ago I wrote a book about my humorous and often ridiculous attempts at tackling the sport of running. It is the only running book on the market that has a recliner on the cover, to give you an idea of my general slant on the topic. The book has done well over the years, mostly because in it I tell my tales from the back of the pack with quite a bit of honesty and that honestly is often quite funny (other people’s pain and suffering can be very entertaining, as it turns out).

A few years later I revisited my general format when I took on the sport of cycling. Again the book mixed my personal tales with helpful advice for those heading out on their journeys.

As soon as I brought home my first child I started jotting down notes about my newest ridiculous undertaking: Keeping a Child Alive. It became very clear that this new adventure could become my next book. But despite the very fertile writing ground a newborn provided I was a little hesitant on how to approach executing the book.

You see, my kid has two mommies and I didn’t know if I was really ready to put our family out on display for the masses. But at the same time my readers have always connected with my “warts and all” personal stories in my books. And there would be no way to really tell my story without including the whole truth. So out on display we went.

As I’ve read the different reviews that have come through for the book none of them mention that it’s written by a lesbian mom. I think that demonstrates 1) how little anyone cares about the sexual orientation of an author and more so 2) how little sexual orientation has to do with parenting.

I didn’t set out to write a “gay” or “straight” parenting book, I just wanted to write something that spoke to my experiences and struggles in a way that was accessible to anyone tackling new parenting.

I feature stories and advice in the book from several other moms, all of whom have different family situations, but all of whom are moms first and foremost. By including their points of view I was trying to offer various opinions on the topics I covered, but also trying to demonstrate how universal all of our parenting experiences were, no matter what our families look like.

Parenting has to be the single most confusing undertaking in life, from an emotional perspective. On the one hand you are head over heels in love with this new little person you’ve brought home. On the other hand they are absolutely ruining your life.

You will be struggling with a combination of sleep deprivation, out of control hormones and your fears of failing miserably. Breastfeeding might not take as easily as you expected it would, you might not have the instant bond with your child that everyone talks about and you might have no idea whatsoever why you are crying all day (please see “out of control hormones,” mentioned above).

On top of all this you are pretty sure that you are the only parent in the history of time to feel anything but parental peace when blessed with a shiny newborn.

My book itself, with the title The Sh!t No One Tells You, is obviously supposed to be funny. But that humor exists mostly because I have a bit of distance now from the first year of parenting that I’m delving into. And distance does a lot to increase the humor of situations that may have once seemed very, very unamusing.

My general hope for the book is that its humor can provide a bit of levity for new moms as they dive into the world of parenting. And more than that I hope they can find some comfort in the fact that all the crap they are dealing with (both literal and figurative) has been dealt with (and survived!) by all the moms that came before them.

I’m proud of the book I put out for the masses, and that the masses seem to enjoy it for its humor and honesty. I’m also really proud that we are now living in a time when the fact that I’m a mom seems to be a lot more important to readers than that fact that my kid has two mommies. It gives me hope for the world I’ve brought my child into, and hope that I can continue to milk my children for book content for the rest of their childhoods.

— Dawn Dais

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