Coping strategies for baby brain dads.

Fuuuuuck!!!

There is no other way to start talking about this.

Fuck is right!

My second baby is here, and I couldn’t be happier, but fuuuuuck, this is hard!

People are afraid the vaccine will turn them into zombies when in reality, having more than one kid will do that to you. That’s why we should all be hesitant about procreation. We should all be anti-kixxers. As soon as I have the energy, I’m making a banner, “my mental health, my choice.”

I feel like a zombie, and it hasn’t even been two weeks since my second one arrived. I’m in such a state of disorientation that I’d probably believe anything right now.

Now I understand why the Mormons are so gullible. That many wives and kids are bound to fry your brain like a poorly cooked sunny-side-up. “Oh, yeah, evil people are of darker complexion like me. I can believe tha… Mateo, get the fuck down from there before I change my mind about spanking.”

I knew this would be exponentially hard, but I had no idea how exponentially. My mind is poor at multiplying that kind of magnitudes.

Technology is saving me.

If it weren’t for Grammarly, my colleagues at work receiving my emails would be calling 911 because they would think I was having a stroke.

I’m happy Zoom doesn’t have a wider lens because if not, my clients would see I couldn’t find any pants after my newborn took a spraying dump in the last clean ones as I was changing her diaper.

But there is nothing tech can do for my mental health.

I’m having a losing argument with my mind as to whether or not I’m wiping after going to the bathroom. And I can’t figure out where that smell is coming from, and I refuse to find out because then I will for sure lose the argument with my mind.

I tell my wife that I’m taking my older daughter, and I will get bacon. She tells me she doesn’t understand Spanish, and I don’t correct her to tell her that I wasn’t grunting in Spanish but an unintelligible form of caveman-ese.

But move ahead because I know where I need to go.

I need to go to my local grocery store and get bacon from their food bar. Just the promise of bacon makes my brain a little more compassionate towards me. Coffee won’t do that for me right now. Coffee won’t even keep me awake anymore because that’s not the kind of relationship I have with coffee.

It is said that people can go eight days without food, three days without water, and, in my case, only six hours without coffee. It would be fatal for me since I’m sure someone would shoot me because I’m such an asshat without caffeine running through my veins. That’s why I never stop drinking it.

But bacon is different. It rewires my brain. It plays cat’s cradle with my dopamine centers. I can see the world through crispy colored glasses and I know everything will be alright.

I would marry bacon if it were a person. My wife believes she is my soulmate, and I don’t correct her as she would be my soulmate if bacon didn’t exist. She is most definitely the human version of my soulmate and an overall runner-up.

I make it to the grocery store, but there is no bacon. However, they have sausage patties and links. Meat is there for me, and it is an okay replacement. I don’t fret because, after all, as you have come to find out from this sensible explanation, I am a reasonable and flexible man.

I don’t know what I would’ve done if meat wasn’t there today.

I don’t know how vegans do it. If they do it at all. I’m sure the body shuts down fertility after years of not eating meat. It’s evolutionary. Science. The body just says, “having kids is hard, but with nothing but soybean protein is impossible.”

Before you bombard me with facts about the China Study or meatless Mondays or how Dr. MacDougall has a body fat enviable by all firefighters even though he is as old as Moses. Let me save your also-limited seitan-fueled energy. I don’t care. I’d dare if I had energy. But I don’t, so I don’t.

All I care about right now is that I’m eating cured, salty, and delicious meat.

And in a heartbeat, in an oddly unhealthy irregular heartbeat, I feel the fat tingling through my brain. I start to feel like a hybrid of Anthony Robbins and Conan the Barbarian, and I am beginning to believe that maybe I can do this. Maybe. Maybe!

Meat is just that good to me. It makes me write haikus.

Almighty bacon,
shrunk by the frying pan heat
salty, fatty, sweet!

Meat is just that good to me. Meat will help me to contribute to the government’s retirement scheme because why else would anyone have kids other than to help society replenish the retirement funds it has already used.

I’m helping the government on this one because while our motto is “pay it forward,” their motto is, “use it forward.”

But it doesn’t matter as long as I can eat meat.

Meat is just that good to me.

Fuuuuuck!!!

Because there is no other way to stop talking about this.