Men are miserable when their wives are pregnant because, let’s face it, we don’t have anything to do. Present for the conception, we’re then faced with nine months of absolutely no responsibility. We have nothing else to do but wait for the baby to be born. And guys stink at having nothing to do. Fortunately, hormones can make women very demanding during pregnancy so there’s never a shortage of things to do. Whether it’s fulfilling some strange desire for Tacos or painting the baby’s room yellow because she didn’t like the shade of teal you painted it last week, there are jobs to do. There are so many layers of paint in the baby’s room that I can now touch both walls with my hands while standing in the middle of the room. But that’s ok. Men want jobs.

Now there’s one exception to my little job rule. My wife asked me to read a parenting book and it sat on my nightstand for months. Every few days I’d cleverly shift it or just leave it open at a random page so she’d think I was reading. I don’t do instruction manuals. I figure that I’ll figure it out. But because I’d never read a single thing about how babies are born, when my precious baby daughter was first presented to me for the first time by the nurse all I could think was “What’s all this gunk all over her? Nobody said anything about gunk. There’s no gunk on babies in movies.”

And then the doctor handed me a pair of scissors to which my thought was “No. It’s a girl. We don’t need these.” Yeah, I had no idea what I was doing.

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