For parents of sleepless young ones, the celebrity of Adam Mansbach is hard to overstate. Bleary-eyed and maybe a little despairing, that first time a parent picks up his tome Go the F*ck to Sleep can be a little transcendent. The irreverent picture book perfectly captures the complex feelings we all experience with toddlers — of being trapped in an exhausting simmering pot of cuddles and dependence and sweetness and frustration. Mansbach let it boil over and we parents found a cathartic laugh. 15 years later, Mansbach is tapping once again into the impossible feelings of parents who are about to send off their children — now teens — to the world, to college. Go the F*ck to College, which is available now everywhere you gets books, is just as sweet, sardonic, and endearingly cathartic as Go the F*ck to Sleep. Even for those of us with pre-teens, it’s a wonderful reminder that the parenting journey is long and fraught, difficult and beautiful — and that it would do use good to find a little humor in it. Here, Adam Mansbach reflects, with fewer curse words and no pictures, on the swirling state he finds himself in as he grapples with just how ready his child is to embark on their own into the world. – Tyghe Trimble, Fatherly
A few weeks ago, as I sat at my desk ordering a cap and gown for my graduating high school senior, the kid in question sent me a text:
Do I really have to go to college?
My heart rate soared as I typed an answer: I mean, we already bought the sweatshirts. (Those sweatshirts say Bard College – their dream school, to which they’d been accepted months earlier. We bought like twelve of them.)
But you know I’m in favor of a gap year, I added. What are you thinking?
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I just want to live at home. I could be a barista.
Fine with me, I said, trying to play it cool.
Maybe sell weed? Vivien wrote.
Market’s kind of saturated, I replied. You’d be better off selling tomatoes.
Sorry Papa, April Fool’s.
Hahahahahahaha, I wrote, not laughing.
Thank you for being so supportive, Vivien wrote back. That was heartwarming. Ur f*cking lying, bro.
Parenting is all about embracing paradox. If you can’t hold opposite ideas in your mind, you might go insane.
The thing is, I wasn’t lying. I wish I had been, but my excitement, my racing heart, my fake nonchalance — they were all because my true (and truly embarrassing) reaction was Yesssssss! They’re not leaving! Everything can stay the same forever! In that moment, I was perfectly willing to trade the exultation I felt when I thought about all the ways Vivien’s world was about to get beautifully big for the safe, the familiar, and unlimited free lattes.
It was a good reminder that parenting is all about embracing paradox. If you can’t hold opposite ideas in your mind, you might go insane.
When your kids are small, the paradoxes are simple – being consumed with blinding rage when their refusal to go to sleep leaves you trapped in a two-hour snuggle with the person you love most, for example, as I wrote about in a little book called Go the F*ck to Sleep.
A decade later, the paradox might be wrapping your head around the fact that a twelve-year-old is sometimes eighteen and sometimes six – or, as a friend of mine summarized the middle school parenting experience, f*ck you, tuck me in. By high school, it’s the realization that the only thing more infuriating than seeing your kid lost in their phone is texting them and not getting a reply within four nanoseconds.
“The biggest paradox is wanting to do the most parenting when the least is needed.”
And as the clock ticks down on graduation, adulthood, independence, the paradoxes grow thornier. For me — beyond the interplay of exultation and melancholy that turned an April Fools joke inside out, or the complexity of letting my kid know they can always come home while also informing them that I’m turning their bedroom into a gym — the biggest paradox is wanting to do the most parenting when the least is needed.
The moment I realized I could no longer solve all Vivien’s problems stands out vividly in my mind. It was fourth grade, and their favorite teacher had announced that she was leaving the school. Vivien felt betrayed and crushed — and because I was powerless to affect the situation, I did something I find far more difficult: sat and listened and went through it with them. However, because I am solution-oriented, or a knucklehead, or because I hate to see my kids in pain, the lesson didn’t stick. And so year after year, I’ve erred on the side of saying here’s what you need to do instead of that sounds hard and I’m sure you’ll figure it out.
Eventually, I got a little better at it. And Vivien turned out capable and resourceful anyway — not least because I taught them to stand up to overbearing authority figures, by which I mean me. But now, with college looming, I find myself scrambling to impart all the wisdom I’ve grown wise enough to shut up and keep to myself. The problem is, it’s either stuff they already know ("No pills, no powders"), precious nuggets that reveal themselves as idiotic the second I say them out loud ("take classes about things you think are interesting!") or jewels whose importance are rivaled only by the impossibility of trying to turn them into prescriptive advice ("learn to quickly discern who is a trustworthy friend who will push you to be the best version of yourself and who is drawn to you because they’re an emotional vampire and you’re an emotional blood source!")
These final months are no time to establish a new exercise routine or learn basic auto maintenance; they’re about enjoying each other’s company and purchasing copious bedding.
So as tempted as I am, I’m not giving my kid a last-minute crash course in everything before I drop them off at college. These final months are no time to establish a new exercise routine or learn basic auto maintenance; they’re about enjoying each other’s company and purchasing copious bedding. College is the crash course in everything, and nobody’s a finished product — not Vivien at eighteen, not me at forty-nine. And maybe the paradox that matters most is that your kid is still your kid even when they’re on their own. Or perhaps it’s that we grow from the inside out; more than anything, I want Vivien to hold tight to their kidness — the wonder, the silliness, the simple but beautiful moral code they learned in preschool — as they take those first steps into adulthood.
Besides, somebody else at Bard will probably know how to change a tire.
