How to Fail Every Day

One simple trick, doctors hate it, etc.

I often find myself thinking about Doomsday.

Not the end of the world, mind you—rather, the DC Comics character Doomsday, a supervillain introduced in 1992 and the central antagonist in the Death of Superman saga of 1992-93. First introduced as a mysterious, terrifying and nearly indestructible beast, Doomsday is eventually explained to be a mad scientist’s experiment in accelerated evolution.

Each day, the scientist would release a humanoid into the hellish environment of prehistoric Krypton, and each day it would be torn to shreds. Each evening, the scientist would collect what remained, and produce a clone from it. Each clone would be stronger than the last, but each day it would be destroyed anew. Eventually, the creature would evolve into the invincible monstrosity that rampaged through Metropolis and killed Superman.

Until then, though, he just got ripped to shreds every day.

I think that’s a pretty good summary of what it’s like to be a parent; repeated brutal failures slowly shaping you into something incrementally stronger and more capable.

(Except instead of the process encoding within your genes a desire to destroy all Kryptonians, it just turns you into the kind of person who cries at car commercials.)

When you first become a parent, people—relatives, friends, absolute strangers, all presumably well-meaning people—will suddenly barrage you with not-so-subtle reminders that you should be having a Very Good Time right now.

Aren’t they a little treasure?

This age is just the best, isn’t it?

Oh, appreciate these times, they go by so fast!

The intent may be pure, and come from a place of sincere nostalgia for their own child-rearing days past, but the actual effect is to make you feel like a failure for not appreciating this magic period in your life in the way that you should because you’re near death from lack of sleep.

There’s no time to dwell on that, though, because it’s just the first of many failures.

Did you let the baby fall asleep on top of you instead of in the crib? Failure.

Did you leave the house without putting a hat on the baby? Failure.

Did you feed the baby formula instead of breast milk? Failure.¹

Did you let your child perceive a screen, if only for the briefest of moments, a fleeting apparition of a television in their peripheral vision? Oh, you’d better believe that’s a failure.

I wish that the earliest days of my children’s lives existed in my mind as soft-focus highlight reel of magic bonding moments set to twinkling piano music.

The reality is that my clearest memory of the first two months of parenthood was having a breakdown in my office’s parking lot because I dropped my iced coffee, an iced coffee I had very much been counting on to do eight hours of work for me that day.

I had failed to sleep, and I would now fail to work, all the while failing to be at home helping my wife with the baby.²

Here’s a short and incomplete list of the ways I have failed as a parent since.

I let my daughter fall off the changing table.

She shows no ill effects from it now, which is good. I swear I was always careful when she was on the table; I never turned my back on her when changing her diaper, never stepped aside, never left her unattended.

But, as the IRA famously said to Margaret Thatcher, “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

That’s how my daughter viewed me keeping her from rolling off a three-foot-high surface, and frankly, it’s still how she views it now. She got lucky once.

(Okay, fine: several times.)

I taught my kids to swear.

Not on purpose, of course.

In fact, I’ve tried as best I can to clean up my language since impressionable ears entered the equation, but the thing about impressionable ears is they hear everything, especially the things you hoped they wouldn’t.

I realized this the hard way when my then-toddler son squatted in the grass next to his Fisher-Price lawnmower, threw up his hands and said “goddammit”.³

I explained what that strange noise was when we were sitting in the backyard, enjoying a nice evening roasting marshmallows around the fire pit.

Was I not supposed to say that that sounded like a coyote killing a deer in the nearby woods? Because that’s definitely what it was. I thought they would find nature interesting.

“Interesting” was not, it turns out, how they found it.

I made my son cry when I didn’t let him win at Super Smash Bros.

I try to let him win, but if a golden hammer shows up I’m gonna take it, tears be damned. Those things don’t come around often.

I made them a pizza that had hot dogs, macaroni and cheese and French fries on it.

Oops, this one got misplaced from the “huge victories” column.

I hit my son in the face with a football while playing catch.

One could argue that he should have just caught the ball, but whose genes prevented him from doing that in the first place? Checkmate, me.

I put green food coloring in the toilet on St. Patrick’s Day.

Apparently this is a thing now. You put green food coloring in the toilet water and it demonstrates to the kids that a leprechaun has been there and peed in the toilet, and this is supposed to be a good thing. My daughter found out about this at preschool last year and told me excitedly about it over the phone from my wife’s car on the way home.

So, before they arrived home, I did it in their bathroom.

She was elated for exactly three seconds, and then shifted to abject terror at the intrusion on our once-safe home. I spent the next week-plus assuring them that leprechauns are not real and if they were we would have to trust our dogs to kill them.

Getty Images / Carlos Gimenez Ruiz

This is something they don’t tell you to expect when you’re expecting: you will feel like a failure every day.

You will constantly feel like you haven’t done enough for them, and you will feel like the things you have done have been wrong. You will feel like you’re not being the role model they need. You will feel like you’re prioritizing the wrong things in their lives and yours. You will feel like they haven’t gotten enough outside time or story time or exposure to classical music or math tutoring or riboflavin. You will spend evenings after they’ve gone to sleep collapsed on the couch in defeat or lying awake in bed thinking about all the ways you’ve failed them.

And all of these things will happen when you’re doing a good job.

I write this while sitting in a hotel room 500 miles away from my kids on Valentine’s Day. I did not choose to be on this trip, nor was I especially enthused about taking it—it was just a necessary bit of travel for my non-writing job, one that could not be avoided.

Despite knowing this in my heart, it still felt like a failure of parenting to leave them.

My children are rank sentimentalists—a quality they got honest from both mother and father—and they love holidays more than anything. Being away from them, even on a holiday that I’ve never much cared for, felt like a betrayal of their innocent wonder, a failure to be there for them on one of the two dozen most special days of the year.

Before I heading off to a day full of meetings this morning, I opened up my suitcase and found a handwritten note from my six-year-old daughter, carefully written in marker in her blocky childhood scrawl.

“Dear Daddy,

I’m sorry you didn’t get to spend Valentim’s [sic] Day at home. I love you.”

Here’s the other thing they don’t tell you:

Sometimes, it’s worth every single failure.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

1. As a cis man, I am not in the position to weigh in first-hand on the Breast vs. Bottle battle, but let me just say this: baby formula was invented to keep babies from dying of malnutrition and anyone who makes you feel bad for using it to keep a baby fed and healthy can fuck right off.

2. Paternity leave is good! It was not offered at this job, which I no longer work at. A superior at the company proudly recounted to me how he was back at work by noon the day his daughter was born, and all I could think to say was “I believe that about you”.

3. There are many reasons I appreciate Bluey, but perhaps the most practical reason is that the show has taught my kids to say “oh, biscuits!” when frustrated instead of “goddammit”.