Children are mysterious creatures. Literally the top two best things a person could possibly do — sleep and eat — are the two things a child is least likely to be cool about doing. Author Adam Mansbach mined the former infuriating oddity for the number one New York Times bestseller Go The Fuck To Sleep, a 2011 singsong-y picture book laced with profanity and illustrated by Ricardo Cortés that documented the Odyssean struggle that is convincing someone who is still too young to appreciate the glory of socially-sanctioned napping and early bedtimes to, well, go the fuck to sleep.
Mansbach announced today that he’ll be following up his hit with a new illustrator and another slant of light on that other most exasperating element of parenting: it shall be named You Have To Fucking Eat, with pictures by Owen Brozman. You may have seen Brozman’s art in Scholastic, Time Out New York, and National Geographic.
“There’s been plenty of enthusiasm for a sequel over the years (and plenty of suggestions!) but I always said I’d only do one if it rang true to me — if I felt like I could imbue it with the same kind of honesty, love, and frustration as the first book. And eating is the other universal source of parental anxiety, a battle of wills just as pitched as sleep can be. From my own experiences and plenty of conversations with other parents, it seemed like a topic folks could use a laugh and a bit of catharsis about.”
This, coincidentally, comes on the heels of two excellent magazine stories about the choice to not become a parent. There’s Meghan Daum’s story in The New Yorker, “Difference Maker,” about her time as a mentor in “Big Brothers Big Sisters” and, after that, as a court-appointed advocate for kids in the foster care system, both projects she opted to undergo in lieu of having children of her own:
“thought I’d undertaken volunteer work with kids because I was, above all, a realist. I thought it showed the depth of my understanding of my own psyche. I thought it was a way of turning my limitations, specifically my reluctance to have children, into new and useful possibilities… But now I know that I was under the sway of my own complicated form of baby craziness. Wary as I’ve always been of our culture’s reflexive idealization — even obsessive sanctification — of the bond between parent and child, it seems that I fell for another kind of myth. I fell for the myth of the village. I fell for the idea that nurture from a loving adoptive community could erase or at least heal the abuses of horrible natural parents.”
And, at Dame Magazine, Kate Harding has a piece with the zeitgeisty title of “I Am More Than OK With Not ‘Having It All.’” She chronicles her ambivalence toward childbearing hardening into resolve, due in large part to her concern about the diseases and disorders her child would be likely to inherit:
“But technically, officially, I remained ambivalent! For years, even as I privately, obsessively weighed all of our options, Al and I kept agreeing to dismiss the topic with “Well, never say never!” And I still hadn’t said, “Never.”
…Here is the paradox I kept struggling with: I loved this child who didn’t exist too much to let it exist. How could I inflict all of that potential suffering on the most important person in my life?”
It’s heartening to see that we’re getting to a place where we have room for more than just two narratives on having children: “I chose yes and everything is amazing; children are a source of endless joy and wonder” or “I chose no and I already know I’ll regret this decision until I’m old and incontinent with no one to take care of me.” Here’s to the rise of nuance.