In this chapter, we’re going to talk about how children affect your marriage. We’re not going to talk about how you actually produce the children in the first place. We covered that topic thoroughly in an earlier book, Babies and Other Hazards of Sex, which explores the whole area of childbirth in great detail and reaches the following scientific breakthrough conclusions:

1. It is very painful. (If you’d like additional facts on this topic, you can read the book, although it doesn’t contain any.)

For now, however, we’re going to talk about how your married life will change after you have children, so that you’ll be able to carefully and rationally weigh the pros and cons of parenthood, then barge right ahead and have children without any understanding of what you’re really getting into, just like everybody else.

What it really means to be a parent—note this carefully, because it’s the essence of the whole thing—iS: YOU Will spend an enormous portion of your time lurking outside public-toilet stalls.

For reasons that modern medical science has been unable to explain, children almost never have to go to the bathroom when they are within eight or nine miles of their own home toilets. It does no good to try to make them. Tell a child to go to the bathroom before you leave home, and the child will insist that not only does he or she not have to go now, but he or she will probably never have to go to the bathroom ever again.

And of course when you get where you’re going, let’s say a restaurant, the child will wait until your entrees are about to emerge from the kitchen, then announce that he or she has to go. Children are incredibly sensitive to approaching entrees.

So you will take the child to the bathroom, and, if it is an especially loath some bathroom, a bathroom that has clearly not been cleaned since the fall of Rome, a bathroom where the floor is littered with the skeletons of Board of Health employees who died attempting to inspect it, if it is this kind of bathroom, the child will immediately announce that he or she has to do Number Two.

And of course you must stay there with the child. The child will want you to stand right outside the toilet stall, while the child goes in there, and ... and nobody really knows. It’s a real mystery, what young children do in public-toilet stalls. Whatever it is, it takes them longer than it took you, the parents, to produce them in the first place.

What I hate about this is that restaurant men’s rooms are often fairly small and intimate places, and while I’m standing there, waiting for my son, strangers are constantly coming in to pee, and there I am, inches away from them, lurking there with no apparent purpose, like some kind of sex pervert who likes being in disgusting men’s rooms. So, to show that this is not the case, I try to keep a conversation going with my son. Except the only thing I can think of to talk to him about is how the old Number Two is going. I mean, you’d feel like an idiot in that situation, talking about the Strategic Defense Initiative. So we have these ludicrous exchanges:

ME (brightly): So! Robert! How’s it going in there?!

ROBERT (irritated): You just asked me that.

ME (grinning like a madman at the peeing stranger so as to reassure him that everything is okay): Ha ha!

Eventually, the child will emerge from the stall, when he or she is absolutely sure that the entrees are stone frozen cold. The child doesn’t care about the food, because children don’t go to restaurants to eat. They go to restaurants to go to the bathroom and play loud shrieking games under the table, so that you, the parents, are constantly ducking your heads under and hissing, “Stop that!” like some deranged species of duck. The child never actually touches the food, which is why many modern restaurants are saving money by serving reusable children’s entrees made entirely out of plastic.

Hahahahahaha. Forgive me for laughing in a bitter and cynical fashion, but you happen to have hit upon the most serious problem facing the Free World today: the international child-care crisis.

In the old days, of course, the Free World had an excellent system of high-quality, low-cost child care in this country, namely your mother. Unfortunately, however, your mother is no longer interested in caring for children. She is interested in spending what little is left of her life among furniture that does not have Hawaiian Punch stains all over it. And you, of course, can’t engage in child care, because you need to get out and have a Rewarding Career so you can have a chance to earn enough money to pay for child care.

Except there is hardly any available. You go around checking out preschool facilities, and you keep finding yourself in dank basements where the staff is missing a large percentage of its teeth and the educational materials consist of four crayons—all burnt sienna—and a GI Joe doll with most of the limbs pulled off. The result is that people are desperate. People who work in New jersey are dropping their children off each morning at child-care centers in Utah.

Fortunately there is some hope. A new company recently opened for business, called the Exactly What You Are Looking For Child Care Company. It has spacious, clean, modern, well-equipped facilities within walking distance of your home or office; it’s open from 5 A.M. until as late as you want; and it’s staffed by middle-aged British women who love children and attend church regularly and are all licensed pediatricians. The cost is $3.50 per child per day. If you’re interested in enrolling your child in this excellent program, all you have to do is kill the Wicked Witch of the West.

Children are Nature’s very own form of birth control. To illustrate how they perform this vital function, let’s take a look at a minute-by-minute schedule, showing how my wife and I put our six-year-old son, Robert, to bed on a typical evening. To make sure we have some time to ourselves, we try to have him in bed by 8 P.m., which means we start the procedure a full hour earlier:

7 P.m.—We announce to Robert that it’s time to get ready for bed.

7:04, 7:09, 7:12, 7:14, 7:17, 7:18, 7:22, 7:24, 7:25, 7:26 & 7:27—We announce to Robert that he really has to start getting ready for bed Right Now and we are Not Kidding.

7:28—Robert goes to his room and actually starts getting ready for bed.

7:29—Robert notices that his rubber Godzilla doll is missing. How he notices this, in a room containing roughly 78,500 toys, nobody can explain, but he does notice it, and of course all other activities must cease until we can resolve this matter because God forbid that a child should be required to go to bed without his rubber Godzilla doll.

7:43—We locate Godzilla and Robert begins getting ready for bed again. He is supposed to take off his clothes and put on his pajamas. He can do this All By Himself.

9:27—So far, All By Himself, Robert has removed his shirt and, if he is really on a roll, one of his shoes. I go in to help him along.

9:30—Now in his pajamas, Robert has his teeth brushed, which is the signal for him to announce that he is hungry. We tell him that this is his own fault, because he did not finish supper, and he absolutely cannot have any more food, no sir, forget it, not a chance, it’s time he learned his lesson, etc.

9:57—Robert finishes a bowl of Zoo-Roni and submits to having teeth brushed again.

10:02—We read a bedtime story, Horton Hatches the Egg, by Dr. Seuss, which takes us quite a while because we must study every page very, very carefully in case there is some tiny detail we might have possibly missed when we read it on each of the previous 267 consecutive nights.