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noises, peekaboo, scary stories, hide-and-seek, blocks, water balloons, and anything that involves batteries. Your child will gradually discover your talents in these areas, and he or she will become your biggest fan. In those magical early years, you will be, to your child, the coolest person on the planet, with the possible exception of the Wiggles. 8 The two of you will form a bond—a permanent, unbreakable bond that will connect the two of you, powerfully and forever, until your child reaches age eleven and realizes that you’re a dork.
    But you’ll get through that when the time comes. The point is, something is going to happen between you and your baby, and it will be like nothing that ever happened to you before, which is why nobody, least of all me, can even begin to explain to you why it’s so great. But it is; just wait. The longer you live, the more clearly you’ll see that no matter what else you’ve accomplished in life, the best thing you ever did, simple as it sounds, was be a dad.
    And someday, decades from now, when your kids have all grown up and moved out, you and your wife (if you’re lucky enough to still be together) will turn to each other and think back to how the two of you set out, totally clueless, on this amazing adventure. You’ll shake your heads, and you’ll smile. You might even kiss.
    And then, if you’re really lucky, she’ll put down her Taser.

Dance Recital

    H ere’s a simple and fun experiment:
    Select, at random, a man who has one or more daughters. Place a gun to this man’s head and tell him he must do one of two things:
    1. Have his prostate examined by a scorpion.
    2. Attend a dance recital.
    He’s going scorpion. Yes, he knows it will be unpleasant. But he also knows that eventually it will end. This is not necessarily true of the dance recital.
    I speak as a father who has attended three major recitals, each of which, for all I know, is still going on. Don’t get me wrong: I love to watch my daughter dance. I’m just not crazy about watching the entire daughter population of North America dance. But you have no choice, under the recital system as practiced in my neck of the woods. Here’s how it works:
    Every week, for many weeks, you take your daughter to the dance studio, which is a building in a strip mall almost entirely obscured by a giant cloud of estrogen. There your daughter learns, step by step, two dance routines, selected from the major dance genres: Ballet, Tap, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Modernistic, and Weird.
    Your daughter will perform her two routines at the recital, so she has to practice them at home. This means that she—and therefore you—must listen to the same two songs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, to the point where, even if you liked the songs originally, you start fantasizing about getting a time machine and going back into the past and whacking the composers. You might also take Hitler out while you were back there in the past, but your highest priority would definitely be the composers.
    Finally the day of the recital arrives. The morning is entirely taken up with preparation, which is very stressful for everybody involved, by which I mean your wife. There’s a lot to do. For one thing, there are the costumes. Your daughter must wear a different costume for each routine, because God forbid she should appear onstage twice with the same costume. So for each routine, you are required to buy a costume, which your daughter will never ever wear again, because that is the system used by the dance-recital-costume industry, following a business model originally developed by crack dealers.
    Your daughter will also need makeup, as specified by strict written dance-studio guidelines, which require that, because these are young girls with flawless skin, they must wear a sufficient quantity of cosmetic products to cover a regulation volleyball court, or, to put it another way, Cher. Also your