Mommies Who Drink by Brett Paesel. A Review

I'm going to start this blog with a review of a book that comes highly recommended and which made me laugh out loud because it had lines like this:

"Truth is, if my vagina did anything heroic, it would be the first part of my body ever to do so"

..but before the review - an anecdote.

A couple of years back, in the weeks following our daughter's birth there was a sit. com. on BBC1 named "Blessed" which was written by Ben Elton and starred Ardal O'Hanlon. It attempted to conjure up humour out of the sleep deprived, confusing and occasionally tedious experiences of parents with a new baby. The critics hated it - partly because it was not funny and partly, I imagine, because if they had kids they probably did want to be reminded of the rough parts of parenthood and if they did not have kids they would have no interest in nappies, sleep deprivation and so on; these are the sort of things that really should be kept behind closed doors.

I loved the show though - jokes about pretending to be asleep even though it was your turn to get up, or scenes where people are getting angry at sterilisers made absolute sense to me - it was like watching a very funny reality TV show. But the show was never going to be a hit. The positives about having a baby are obvious - (so obvious in fact that it is best to keep them private). But there are negatives - the aforementioned sleep deprivation, the endless routines, the fact that everything suddenly takes ten times longer than before and the fact that your time is no longer your own.

And none of those things are funny - they are just mundane, so mundane in fact that they are as about as fertile a source for comic material as doing the washing up or cleaning the bath. So when someone recommended the book "Mommies Who Drink" as being worth reading because it is a funny take on those early days of parenthood I thought that it probably would not be that funny.

But I was wrong and it is. I guess the reason why is because the humour is about how the author mostly wants booze and adult conversation. Moreover there is some of the observational stuff about the routines that go with being a parent which she, unlike poor Ben Elton, does make funny. I particularly liked the stuff about baby groups as they have been my particular nightmare.

The arrangement that my wife and I have is that I do the childcare whilst she is at Uni. I don't mind doing it, (in fact I quite enjoy it) - but I have struggled with taking our daughter to baby groups and suddenly finding myself with a bunch of people I don't know and having to make small talk. I can make small talk if it's about football, seventies rock or The Godfather - but these tend not to be the subjects that the other adults in the room like to reflect on.

Anyway that's more than enough about me. It's a pretty funny book and I recommend it.