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

It’s not the money. That was eight bucks or something. It’s the principle. We have this whole spread in front of us that, again, is free and they still want more. There was a Mexican guy in a hat who would make you any kind of omelet you want. Nope. She needed the one thing they didn’t have. There were Belgian waffles, toast, sticky buns, biscuits — every combination of flour, eggs, sugar and butter imaginable, except pancakes. Come to think of it, there might have been pancakes but no chocolate chips. Thus, she needed the chocolate-chip pancakes.

The next day, Natalia wanted chocolate-chip pancakes again. I put my foot down. I wanted to send a message. The terrorists hate us because of what was in that buffet. There were two hundred and thirty-three food options. I wasn’t going to let something that would have been the greatest day of my childhood be so wildly unappreciated. I told her to go find something and eat. She walked in, grabbed a sticky bun and a little melon and was fine. But I got a heaping helping of the stink eye from Lynette.

The whole trip, and my whole point, really came into focus when we were going home. After leaving Tahoe and heading towards the airport in Reno to fly back, we passed a big billboard with my picture advertising the shows. I said “Hey, kids, look. See your old man up there?” They were completely unfazed. It might as well have been a billboard for a local RV dealership. I banged a U-turn and went back for a second lap to see if I could muster a modicum of enthusiasm from the kids. But like so many who have gone to Reno before, I came up snake eyes.

That story might make you think I’m a horrible dad and a greedy asshole ogre. But by the end of this book I also hope to lay out a strong defense for why being a dad in today’s society will drive me insane and possibly to an early grave.

I am reminded of a conversation I once had with Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray. Mark is a great guy and genuinely funny. One Sunday afternoon we were sitting around at Kimmel’s watching football and shooting the shit. In that conversation I asked him where Sugar Ray was playing and he joked about their fall from stardom and that they were now playing “anywhere you can smell funnel cake.” Nothing beats a nice and humble guy. But the thing he said that sums up perfectly how I feel about my current lot in life as a father and husband is this. Mark is also a father of twins and stated perfectly the thing that is constantly on my mind: “Since when did making all the money count for nothing?”

He’s right. Keeping the lights on, paying the mortgage, feeding the kids, going out and earning all day at whatever profession you have is now a zero. That gets you back to even. This is not an indictment of our families; it’s just how our culture has gone. It’s like smoking pot. Back in the 1950s it was considered an activity second only to bestiality in how deplorable it was. Now everyone is firing up everywhere, no problem. You can’t go to the Mac store without getting a contact high. What would have been unimaginable and shameful back in the day is common and accepted.

Divorce lawyers, start your engines. If any part of this book is going to lead to the end of my marriage, it’s what I’m going to say next. But it has to be said: women are no longer holding up their part of the societal bargain. Men were supposed to bring home the bacon and women were supposed to cook it. That just isn’t the case these days.

One morning, I walked in to see Lynette watching a rerun of I Love Lucy . It was an episode in which Ricky was complaining to Lucy about how hard it was being a working man, and Lucy returning the complaint that it is very hard cooking, cleaning and keeping up a house. Then it went into the hackneyed sitcom premise of them switching roles. I feel like that lame-ass idea was part of every sitcom produced before 1990. Lucy had to get out the help-wanted ads and find a job, which she inevitably failed at, but Ricky also learned a valuable lesson by fucking up the eggs and toast that he had to make for his breadwinner wife.

So I’m watching Lynette watch this show about gender roles after having made my own coffee and breakfast, which consisted of dumping some Planters peanuts into a cup. I realized that this premise would never fly today. Men have work-work and housework. It’s demeaning for women to cook and clean. But if a man decided he wasn’t going to go out and earn a living, he’d be considered a deadbeat. My house has a maid, and my kids have a nanny that I pay for. If my wife was the one out working, and I was the one getting mani-pedis and sushi while the maid cleaned and the nanny took the kids to soccer practice, all her friends would say, “Why are you still with that moocher?”

Not an exaggeration, by the way. I came home from a gig at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, probably the biggest venue I’ve ever played, to find green and blue nail polish on Sonny’s fingers and toes. The androgyny part aside, the thing that really pissed me off was that Lynette had taken herself and the kids for mani-pedis, while I was sweating my ass off onstage with Jay Mohr in front of 1,850 people.

Nowadays, telling your wife “I have to work” gets you a disappointed sigh. This is the worst period in history to be a dad. It used to be that if you worked and provided that was enough. On the weekend, you tossed the ball around with your boy or had a tea party with your little girl, and that was plenty. Now we’re expected to be present for every kindergarten graduation and bowel movement our kid makes, applauding them the entire time, while simultaneously keeping the bank account full. And all the loser dads who have trust funds or wives who bring home all the money make earners like me look like shit.

So I don’t agree with the assertion that I’m an asshole misogynist because I think it would be nice to smell a little pot roast when I come home. Going through a ten-hour day, and then coming home to flip a coin to see who’s going to head down the hill and pick up the Chinese food that then eliminates the money earned in the last hour of that ten-hour day just sucks.

I suspect that this is because the workplace has changed. At the turn of the last century, guys used to go to work in a hole in the ground or out on a farm or in a factory. They’d come home covered in coal dust, except for the salt outline from their sweat stains. That was if they even came home at all. Work was more dangerous back then, and thus was appreciated. So when their ass hit that wooden chair at the dinner table at the end of the day, there was some fucking lasagna waiting.

My problem is that coming home with makeup on and complaining about the satellite delay to The O’Reilly Factor doesn’t garner me much sympathy. I nearly killed myself doing construction before show business, but the fact is that I’m killing myself now, too. It sucks sometimes, and I need my family to know this.

An example of the disconnect between my kids’ lifestyle and how I provide it for them came this year when I was filming my show, Catch a Contractor . For those who haven’t seen the series, the premise is that I go to houses that have been destroyed by shoddy/shady/shitty contractors who show up just long enough to get the people’s money and then leave them in a death trap. Me and my co-host, a talented licensed contractor, Skip, lure the contractor into a sting house, present him with the evidence of his hack work and make him fix it under our supervision. It’s a good premise and unlike many of my prior TV projects is executed very well. But it’s also filmed in the middle of fucking nowhere. The commutes to and from these dumps are many, many hours in Southern California traffic. I then have the pleasure of confronting sociopaths and comforting destroyed families. It’s a real drain. I literally had to break up a fight between two ex-Marines, one being a contractor who screwed over an old service buddy, leaving him with fire-hazard wiring and his ten-month-old daughter crawling around on asbestos-covered floors.