Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

Sorry if that was a little tangential. I just realized I hadn’t said anything racist in a few pages, and I don’t want you kids to be confused.

A QUICK SPOILERalert for my parents: If you’re reading this, just skip this chapter; you’ll be offended.

Who the fuck am I kidding? They didn’t read my last three books, why buck the trend?

A few years back, I was in a store with my dad. Coincidentally, I was on the cover of Wired magazine that month. My dad noticed it in the store, picked it up, glanced at it for a second and then, without a word, put it back down. I was mere feet away from him and he never uttered, “When did this come out?” or “Hey, did you see this?” or anything at all. He picked up that magazine, looked at it as if Tony Hawk was on the cover, and moved on.

So if my folks are breaking with tradition, reading this and are offended, well, they rolled the dice. They thought at best I’d be talking shit about them to day laborers on a construction site. They never imagined I’d have millions of listeners to absorb my vitriol about them. I’ve called my dad a pussy and my mom a basket case a hundred and twenty-seven thousand times on the radio and podcasts. Why change now?

Besides, I’m writing this for you, my fellow parents, who still have the chance to improve. My mom and dad’s parenting skills were DOA.

As you know from my previous literary efforts, I was raised like a hamster. My parents just put some wood shavings on the floor and shut the door, and I walked around in a circle until my eighteenth birthday.

They’re not bad people; they’re just not into family. Ironically, family is not in their DNA. My dad had two brothers that I never met. It wasn’t like there was some Italian family feud going back to the old country. He didn’t have a beef with them, as far as I know. It’s just that a bus ticket or a long-distance phone call costs money. His dad had died when he was a teen, so he never had a real relationship with him. And, as I’ve spoken about many times, my mother was raised by her grandparents, due to a situation I’m still not clear on, but involved child protective services. This went on until she was ten and moved back in with her mom, my grandmother. Until then, she thought her mom was just a family friend who stopped by on occasion. Again, I’m not sure of all the details, but I guess at some point, my grandmother just popped out with, “Oh, and by the way, I’m actually your mother.” As a result, my mom for her whole life called my grandmother by her first name, Helen. It was like how Bart Simpson calls his dad Homer. It was never Mom, it was Helen. That should tell you everything you need to know about my parents and how the trickle-down emotional economics worked in my family.

It’s kind of surprising that my parents had kids at all. For all I know, I could have been an accident. I never asked, and I’m never going to. I think that most likely my parents thought they wanted a child, but then realized they didn’t want everything that comes with it. Kind of like how a kid wants a puppy, but doesn’t want to clean up all the pee and poop.

One thing my parents did do was lower the bar on raising kids. If my parents can do it, then anybody can. We’re so narcissistic when it comes to child rearing. Don’t give yourselves too much credit, parents. By the time you finish this sentence twenty thousand kids will have been crapped out. The majority of them are going to turn out fine. A few are going to be abused and end up as addicts, but the rest are going to settle into standard-issue, unnoticed, suburban lives. So to all the potential parents out there, stop getting up in your head. You can do this. If you’re on the fence about having kids, just do it. That indecisiveness means that you’re at least giving it some thought before you actually create a human being, and will therefore give enough of a shit to parent pretty well. It’s the people who don’t consider whether they should have kids who shouldn’t. These folks are the ones for whom a child is just the thing that happens after you blow your wad and move on to fucking another Floridian.

My brilliant plan to keep these morons from reproducing is this: a kid petting zoo. Parents that are fair to middling can drop their kids off all day and, for a few bucks, the couples who aren’t sure if they’re ready to be parents can come in and pet the kids a little (not in a sexual way). They can toss around a couple Nerf balls, pull them around in a little red wagon and, for a quarter, get a scoop of Chex Mix to feed them. The kid gets the attention they’re missing at home, and the couples who were on the fence get a little taste of parenthood.

So, to be honest, I was kind of afraid to have kids because of how lackluster my parenting was. I waited a long time to reproduce because I wasn’t sure I was going to take to children. I didn’t want to ignore my children like I had been ignored. And I wanted to get my career on track. As an entertainer, a career is very difficult to get on said track. It either takes a while or never happens at all. It took me until my early-to-mid-thirties to get to a point where I felt comfortable that I could make a living doing comedy, and that I had career momentum. I also felt that I needed more therapy, so I could try to be a little more normal. So Lynette and I didn’t end up having kids until later in life. And, as such, it took us a long time to conceive the twins.

Our in-vitro fertility-clinic saga has been well documented. I’d like to make an observation about the rise of this in our culture. Almost everybody I know had to go the fertility-clinic route to have their kid. All the guys had to do the thing where they go into the little room and jack off into the cup using the well-worn porn provided by the clinic. It recently occurred to me that there’s now a whole generation of kids who were conceived while their fathers were looking at a woman who isn’t their mom. When they get old enough to ask where they came from, we’re going to have to sit down and tell them in a heartfelt tone, “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy pays thirty-five thousand dollars and goes to the bathroom of a place in Encino that used to sell flooring and watches Ron Jeremy do Jenna Jameson in the ass.”

Getting out of my family’s negative cycle and having kids has been rewarding on a number of levels, but also frustrating — not just from the stuff I’ve been talking about in previous chapters, but also because of the context. Knowing how much I enjoy spending time with the twins makes me hate my parents even more. Speaking of context…

Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s with my parents was rough, especially when I’d watch television. That was the era of The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family . I’d sit on the floor and watch these shows in which happy families all hashed out their problems and had great bonding moments in a half hour every week. Meanwhile, my sister had run away, and my parents lived in separate rooms, thinking of ways to kill themselves and end the misery. My house was a chaotic, filthy mess, with sofas covered in sheets and people who didn’t talk to each other. The Bradys would have Alice the maid (another luxury they had that the Carollas could never have imagined) call everyone down for dinner and the happy kids would run down and sit around the table.