The common misconception of childless, alcohol-imbibing party guests and cyber-ether baby-haters alike is that parents blabber constantly out of some arrogance or indulgent desire to show off their great kids and their perfect parenthood. Nothing could be further from the truth. We parents have so little now; the children have taken so much. We just have nothing left to say. We sometimes hear ourselves and know how we must sound to others, and we feel great shame. Our children have broken us and turned us into single-subject simpletons. They've accomplished this feat in what is supposed to be the prime of our intellectual life.

Parenthood be not proud.

After 14 uninterrupted hours of childcare, making the transition from Diego and diaper cream to Jim Lehrer and Paul Krugman is an exhausting prospect. If I ever muster the energy to investigate what is going on in the world outside the baby bunker, I find it impossible not to see that world through the deceptively warped lens of how my children fit into it.

I would love nothing more than to write an insightful article about healthcare reform, but I'm dumb now. Anything I write relating to healthcare would end up as a screed about why my children have to take a back seat on getting their flu shots to a bunch of kids with “respiratory disorders.” Why are kids who can't breathe right so much more important than my own kids? My kids love to breathe, and they're good at it, and they should be rewarded for their aptitude in breathing. But I digress.

Aside from totally skewing my worldview and politics, my kids also obstruct my ability to feed my mind in the way I used to. I can't tell you the last time I read something that wasn't about hippos going berserk. That being said, I'd still jump at the opportunity to discuss the subtext of the book "Hippos Go Berserk" with another adult, because you take what you can get when you're a parent. But even that discussion would not be very long since Sandra Boynton, the author of "Hippos Go Berserk," doesn't shroud the meaning of her tome in layers of literary subterfuge: “One hippo alone once more ... misses the other forty-four.” The point is, of course, that the hippo doesn't know what he's got till it's gone, like Joni Mitchell with her parking lot (wait, am I remembering that song right?) or like me with my smartness. So you see -- I'm the hippo.

My view of parenting and its effect on the adult mind is particularly sour right now since my daughter has just entered into the most difficult stage of development. She is 10 months old, and while most people would point to the fabled “terrible twos” as the most challenging and exhausting time with their young ones, the interval between 8 and 15 months is almost indescribably difficult for me, especially because it is making me not good at words plus how to use them.

At least the terrible twos come with a certain destructive streak fueled by imagination and creativity. The current state my daughter finds herself in is one of complete and abject dependence, combined with a totally unhealthy understanding of self-preservation, combined with newfound mobility, combined with an almost complete lack of comprehension. If I put my daughter down to attend to the needs off my son (or my bladder) within seconds she will be yards from her drop point and will have discovered the most harmful object in a three-room radius. If it can be pulled onto her head, choked on, ignited, shattered or used to gouge herself (or the dog), my daughter will be magnetically drawn to it. There is no reasoning with her. There is no stopping her. Anything short of constant vigilance will end in a trip to the emergency room or a panicked call to the fire department (or the vet).

There must be a biological imperative that babies be at their cutest during these months. At 8 to 15 months they shed the anonymous blobbiness of infancy but have not yet achieved the sticky-fingered, snot-caked grossness of toddlerdom. That they are at their most adorable means that parents are less likely to abandon them to their own devices for more than five minutes (or altogether), because going longer than five minutes at this age is akin to a death sentence. It also means that your children become the equivalent of the Overlook Hotel from "The Shining": You can never escape their icy grip.

Even the once relaxing pastime of following my favorite sports teams has become an exercise in futility. I was so exhausted from my days of hauling around 30 pounds of baby girl and 40 pounds of toddler boy that trying to watch the World Series was like trying to listen to my wife explain how my new phone works while being waterboarded. I'm still not entirely sure that the Phillies aren't world champions. Chase Utley won it all by tying Jesse Jackson's World Series home run record, right?

Don't get me wrong: Even with the physical strain, the job of stay-at-home parent is better than any other job I've had, because it's not really A Job. But the trade-off for this freedom is severe. For the moment, the children have transformed me into a one-dimensional dullard. My son's recent question, “Do we hammer on cats?” not only seems perfectly reasonable to me at this stage in my life, but now also warrants some serious consideration.

I am not proud that much of my daily brain power is dedicated to figuring out whether the mysterious object in my daughter's mouth can be swallowed and digested or whether it will become lodged in her throat. But this is the life I've made for myself, and it is either talk about that or take a vow of silence. As I tell my uncomprehending daughter, “You can't put something mysterious in your mouth and then cry about it when it doesn't taste good or blocks your airway.”

I have to believe that as my children become less dependent on me, my higher brain functions will return to some semblance of normalcy. It is my sincere hope that four years from now I'll be writing about "opting back in."

I can just imagine it: “Mr. Traister, you haven't held a job in seven years. What makes you think you're Ground Round fry-cook material?”

“Well Pete, I know it's a school night, and you have homework to get to, but I'd like to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: Do we hammer on cats?”

So next time you find yourself tearing into a friend or acquaintance who can't shut up about their kids, the next time you find yourself ready to fire off an angry missive about the unrelenting surging tide of mommy blogs, remember that you're hammering a dead cat. We know it's sort of sad, but it's all we have until the kids become a little older. Allow me and my kin to engage in our one conversation, even if it's just to stay in practice for when we emerge from the bunker. Maybe you can even find it in yourselves to muster a little understanding for us next time you're out past 10 p.m. at one of your fancy childless keg parties where you discuss the new Philip Roth and the Phillies' amazing World Series defense. Because, who knows? You may find yourself dumb like me someday.

But those days, like Luca Brasi, swim with the fishes. Boys are falling behind in the workforce, in higher education, and at primary academics. According to the Associated Press, even the sprawling crime syndicates of Italy are now enjoying an era of unmatched chromosomal diversity at their highest levels. With the ascension of the double X and the supposed decline of the Y, you might expect the birth of a girl to be heralded with, at least, an equal sort of excitement to the announcement of the birth of a boy. And yet, as 18 million cracks appear on the highest of ceilings, perhaps we should train our gaze a little lower to the first ceiling our daughters encounter: the middling enthusiasm toward the impending arrival of a baby girl.

Or maybe it's just me.

I remember the sonogram tech revealing that our first child was a masculine child, in the same way I remember Oprah revealing she had given her audience members cars. "Look under your seats and you'll find your ... BAY-BEE'S PEEE-NIS!!”

I screamed until I lost my voice and nearly knocked out the sonogram tech jumping up and down wildly, crying while clutching my keys close to my chest.

To be fair, “baby” was a foreign enough concept for my 27-year-old brain to deal with. Telling me that I had to figure out how to raise a “girl” -- one of the other great mysteries of my life -- would have seemed about as intimidating as informing me that it was my job to figure out how to fix the Large Hadron Collider. It would have ended with me living under an assumed name outside of New Braunfels, Texas.

Regardless, I found myself doing the baby boy victory lap. 

I was excited about having a boy, but I was also excited because I had endured a good deal of ball-breaking from my guy friends before the gender had been determined. My buddies ribbed me about having a yucky girl baby. One friend went so far as to assure me my wife and I would only have girl babies for future pregnancies as well. It would be a plague on my house -- a plague of girls.

When it turned out the curse had been lifted -- or, more precisely, that it never existed -- I admit: I crowed.

After that opening salvo of macho banter, I began to wonder if we speak about the sex of our impending children in vastly different ways and if the reservations about baby girls were not just limited to juvenile 20-something dudes. But it wasn't until we were expecting our second child, two years later, that the question transitioned from a passing curiosity to a legitimate concern.

From the time my wife announced her pregnancy, I knew she'd be having a girl. At 29, I had begun to experience a personal sea change, as the motivational speakers say. And maybe, on some level, I had known for a while a baby girl was coming, and I didn't want her to grow up with a lefty hypocrite father: “Baby girl, you can be anything you want to be ... as long as it doesn't interfere with your brother's success.” After all, I want my children to grow up and resent me for the right reasons, like my emotional unavailability and my middle-class white male rage.

The first eight months of my wife's pregnancy were full of bizarre and polarizing gender issues outside our home, unfolding as it did during the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. The less-than-stellar response to an estrogen-fused battle for the White House seemed to parallel, on a macro level, my one-time fear of welcoming a baby girl into my own house. And I found myself shifting from being a Howard Dean-style frat-house Democrat to a Jezebel-reading, Hillary-supporting Democrat who no longer used the word "bitch." Well, not every 15 minutes, anyway.

Armed with this new sense of feminine awareness (and, perhaps, a lingering embarrassment about my previous attitude), I became hypersensitive of how other people reacted to our little girl's imminent arrival.

 A kind of pitying, you-lose sentiment was common among dads without daughters. They always delivered some polite variation of, “Dude, that sucks." Or, "What are you gonna do with a girl?” I remember talking to a friend whose second son was born with a heart defect that required two open-heart surgeries before the kid's first birthday. When I mentioned how impressed I was with the way he and his wife shouldered such difficulty he said, with a sigh,"It's been rough." He then slapped me on the back before continuing, "I'm just glad we didn't have a girl. Good luck with all that!"

As for women, well, they never went that far, but even their enthusiasm seemed dialed down. During our son's birth, the blue-haired waitresses at our favorite diner had been kind enough to act as my wife's unofficial pregnancy support group. They doled out advice on anything from sleep deprivation to breast-feeding. And when it came to gender, the decision was unanimous from every waitress in the joint: Boys are easier than girls, and girls are difficult and demanding, and then they turn into teenage girls and then they're at their worst.

 This line of thinking was not confined to the old-school atmosphere of Bob's Diner either. I remember one of our hipper neighbors responding to our news by griping about how easy her three boys were versus her 11-year-old daughter, a constant source of aggravation. The girl rolled her eyes but bore this proclamation with a surprising dignity, considering that her mother was standing next to her at the time.

Even my perpetually sensible Indian pediatrician ended my daughter's first checkup by saying, “Little girls are very special. But then they turn into teenage girls, and you want them to just go away.”

This wasn't exactly the stuff of Maurice Chevalier.

It's true that an occasional mom without a daughter experienced an obvious moment of longing. Dads who already had girls were congratulatory enough. But dads who only had girls seemed, at times, to be overcompensating, trying too hard to prove just how cool they were with it. One gentleman earnestly regaled me with the hidden charms of "High School Musical" and the Jonas Brothers. It was petrifying. It just didn't seem like anyone was that pumped about the whole thing. I refuse to include grandparents here; they would have been happy if my wife had delivered a Labrador.

Maybe the reactions were muted for practical reasons. This was, after all, our second child. As a second child myself, I am acutely aware of the dip in excitement between the first kid and the second. (Although my sister might argue that she is acutely aware of the way boys are received as opposed to the way girls are.)

When my wife and I told people we were having a boy, their faces would light up, their eye-smiles would have made Tyra Banks proud. People radiated a sincere and palpable joy at the idea that another Y chromosome would be added to the global gene pool. But when it came to my daughter the only unbridled enthusiasm I remember came in relation to the fact that we already had a boy -- thus creating the “Rich Man's Family” (a very important concept in my Philadelphia neighborhood). I'd never heard of it before. I have heard about it almost weekly since my daughter was born.

For my part, I can honestly say I was just as excited about my daughter as I was about my son. And she's even better out of the belly. Turns out, while we have years before we have to negotiate her first bare-midriff prom dress, none of the dire prophecies about her demands or attitude have come to pass. In fact, she is a calming counterbalance to my son, who takes after his hyperactive mother. My daughter is laid-back. At 10 months old, she's grunty and built like a linebacker and beautiful and perfect, and she makes me want to be a better father, one who takes risks and stakes out my own success. Her first real word was "Orca," as in the whale, and that is awesome. I love her with every rapidly aging fiber of my being.

But I sometimes wonder if I would feel the same way if I did not already have my masculine child. If she had come first. Would I have been as excited about her arrival? Would I love her just as much? Or would I feel like something was missing?  

Or you’re a blond pop star in the midst of a comeback after some impressive screw-ups, and then Fox gets wind that you’re so “out of it” you just do whatever your manager father tells you to.

Or you’re the most famous 16-year-old in the world who just feels like taking a Twitter break, and then your dad starts tweeting about how he wants you to stay.

All of this, by the way, is within days of Jon Gosselin's getting sued by TLC for his rampant media appearances, and Richard Heene facing criminal charges for the balloon boy fiasco.

Stop it, dad, you’re embarrassing me!

The creepy showbiz dad has been with us since Hildegard of Bingen’s parents pimped her out to the convent. But no longer content to stand on the sidelines, a new breed of doting father has emerged -- tireless, opinionated, and possibly more desperate for attention than his famous offspring. And the fact that so many of these TMI-dispensing dads are talking about their young, famous and notoriously troubled daughters just adds an extra coating of ick to the whole business.

In a week of shameless spotlight hogging, it’s Mr. Michael Lohan who has distinguished himself most. First, he appeared on Friday’s "Maury Povich Show" to share how he cries that his daughter has become a “hollow, hollow person.” Then told X17online.com, “If I can't get a conservatorship, then I'm going to take her to an undisclosed location and get her straight. But I know I'm gonna get charged with kidnapping.” Today, he  has an open letter to Lindsay in the new InTouch that reads in part, “Let me help you get your life back so that you can build it to where you once were."

Lindsay, meanwhile, has displayed a charming lack of self-awareness by telling Us magazine, “I'm so hurt that someone who calls himself my father needs to use the press to communicate with me." 

For troubled stars on the other side of the pond, however, things are looking up. During an interview Wednesday on a British morning talk show, Mitch Winehouse spoke of the need for more funding for drug rehab in the U.K. and daughter Amy’s own recovery. He then digressed about the singer’s “fantastic” new boobs, adding his relief that he didn’t have to pay for them. Joe Simpson, your previous comments about daughter Jessica’s “double D’s” have just been massively owned.

No one would suggest that Lindsay Lohan, still smarting from her disastrous debut as Ungaro’s artistic director, is experiencing the best of times. When the 23-year-old showed up at a gala in New York this week, her haggard, apparently cosmetically enhanced appearance was front-page news. (Let’s put it this way: She made Donatella Versace look good.) And Winehouse, who is at work on a new album, has her own history of questionable judgment. It's just that after a few reckless sound bites from Dad, one begins to wonder where they get it.

Of course not every show business daughter has a disturbing tell-all memoir in her future, and far be it from us to suggest a cause and effect between dubious parenting and a penchant for driving into sidewalks or heckling Bono. But if I had the kind of father who went around talking about how fabulous my breasts are, I’d be shitfaced 24/7.

Why do these guys do it? Good dads, we believe, love their daughters -- they let them dance on their feet when they’re little and fret over their suitors when they’re big. When the relationship is healthy and appropriate, there’s an almost romantic element of mutual adoration.

But the weird dad is in a class all his own. He too easily reminds us of the shudder-inducing older man/much younger woman cliché, then he makes it all that much more vivid by gassing on about his beautiful, troubled daughter’s physical attributes or wanting to “detox her myself.”  I'd say it’s a fine line, but honest to God, it’s not that hard. And it smacks of bonus jealousy and competitiveness and, if she’s over 18, some intense control issues.

There’s nothing worse for a parent than to stand by helplessly and see your child in pain. But anybody who thinks that going on Maury is going to make it better is perhaps not being entirely honest. The bottomless public appetite for scandalous celebrities makes it unnervingly easy to get airtime or magazine space on a famous daughter's gin-soaked coattails. Easy to be a hanger-on first and a parent second. The world is chock-full of girls going wild because they didn’t feel they got enough attention from their fathers. Congratulations, Lindsay and Amy, your antics have commanded the attention of yours. And in the process they just happen to be soaking up plenty for themselves.

Although the film is drawn from a memoir by Simon Carr and is thus, as they say, "based on a true story," Schwarzbaum notes that the movie version "dulls whatever edge the story has in conveying the bewilderment of an overwhelmed single father." In other words, what we're seeing is the typical Hollywood version of fatherhood -- wacky, childish and occasionally dangerous -- minus the standard killjoy Mom for balance.

Judah Schiller, writing in the London Times this weekend, offers a much more realistic portrayal of unexpected and tragic single fatherhood. After his wife died from complications of giving birth to their third child, Schiller struggled not only with profound grief, but the realization that he had, until that point, been nothing like an equal partner in parenting. "A friend took [baby] Satya every day for a solid year while I was at work. But I had to learn how to be a parent and not merely a working father who lets the mother do all the parenting ... I had failed to appreciate how hard [my wife] had worked to raise the children and take care of the house. Many men grossly undervalue their wives' contributions. So I tried to pay attention to that: How do I reinvent my life to be a better person?"

Schiller was charged with raising three children and becoming a better person while mourning his beloved wife, an element of the story that's often elided from the Hollywood version of loss, or at least glossed over. In "The Boys Are Back," Joe has conversations with his dead wife, as both real and fictional people will, but thanks to movie magic, the wife is right there with him, diminishing the sense of loss. (Ebert: "please, please, give us a break from the scenes where the ghost of the departed turns up and starts talking as if she's not dead.") Schiller, on the other hand, writes that "for the first six months, it was difficult for me to cradle Satya without tears streaming down my face, silently screaming that his mother could not hold her baby." Like many grieving people, he was overwhelmed by an outpouring of support -- but only at first." After three months, however, the support died down, and the number of people who remembered grew fewer and fewer. I felt isolated as a father among mothers, and seeing families together was so poignant. I didn't go to the mums' groups. I think mothers found me difficult to approach, so they just got on with their lives." As it turns out, widowhood isn't just a 24/7 party with no stinky girls allowed.

I haven't read Carr's memoir, but reviews suggest it, too, is far more truthful about the grief, frustration and fear that went along with his "manly" neglect of tidiness and refusal to be overprotective. In an age and culture where we routinely shame both "helicopter parents" and those trying to raise "free-range kids" -- and where mothers usually bear the brunt of that shaming, feeling pressure to do not only what they believe is right for their children but what will be perceived as right -- such a perspective from a single father can add much to the conversation. Is it really such a sin to leave the living room a mess? To let the kid play on the monkey bars even if he might fall off? And why are we so likely to give men a pass on those things, yet mothers who evince a similar laissez-faire attitude are demonized? These are important, interesting questions about parenting, gender roles, how we see ourselves and what we teach our children. But when an honest memoir about single fatherhood gets shellacked, as Schwarzbaum puts it, "with a gloss of sunshiny affirmation," what we're left with only reinforces the same old stereotype of the contemporary dad: Bighearted yet intractably doofy, and so congenitally ill-suited to adult responsibility, a stabilizing (read: buzzkilling) female influence is necessary to save his children from malnutrition and suspicious hygiene, if not death by misadventure.

Moms and dads alike, single and partnered -- not to mention their children -- deserve more than this myth that women instinctively know what they're doing with kids while men, left to their own devices, will neglect their young at all times except at playtime. In reality, the world contains terrible mothers, amazing fathers and a whole lot of people in between, just trying to do their best. As long as we keep promoting the fiction that women are naturally nurturing and capable, and men are naturally reckless and self-centered, moms won't get all the help they deserve -- and dads won't get all the credit they do. Even casting single fathers as heroes for stepping up and becoming primary caregivers when the only alternatives would be unthinkable to most, is disturbingly patronizing. Under the circumstances, says Schiller, "How could I do anything but step up and try to be an amazing parent?"