By Rick Epstein

“Was first you were a kid, then you were a mommy?” That was Sally at age 3 asking my wife Betsy for her resume. It was Mother’s Day and Sally was lounging in our bed after presenting her mom with a tiny handprint in terra cotta.

“That’s right,” said Betsy. “First a kid, then a mommy.”

Up until then Sally had been entertaining the possibility that children and parents are two different species, like ponies and horses. I don’t remember Sally’s follow-up questions, but she might have wondered: “What turned you from an ordinary sister-teasing, door-slamming child into a temperature-taking, homework-finding Mom?”

Time and pressure are all it takes to turn coal into diamonds – a cheap trick by comparison.

When I first met Betsy, she was still a kid at 24. And you couldn’t blame her; except for a few summers of making French fries at a root-beer stand, she’d never done anything but go to school. Her conversation was heavy with anecdotes of her semester in Spain and tales of boozy college antics.

The night we met, it was hard to imagine Betsy as a tough, wise and loving mother of three, but she had GIRLFRIEND written all over her! (Did I mention we were at a toga party and that Betsy was wearing a mint-green bedsheet that left one lovely shoulder bare?)

About four years later, when we were married and getting serious about raising a family, Betsy was studying up – reading books and watching other parents in action. For her, shopping malls and family gatherings became galleries of the grotesque and laboratories for clinical study.

“Are you catching this scene?” she asked one day when we were sitting in the food court of a big mall. At the next table, a mother and her 5-year-old son were eating chocolate ice-cream cones. “It’s dripping down this side,” the mother advised, pointing.  Then: “Don’t tip it like that, the ice cream will fall off. Now it’s dripping down THIS side.” The kid applied his tongue to each emergency, brow furrowed. The mom licked her ice cream absently; her concentration was on the kid’s performance. But she failed to prevent a classic blunder – the boy tipped his head back and bit off the cone’s point. “Now you’ve done it! It’ll drip all over everything!” she said. And the little boy dropped the cone on the table and started to cry.

The fact is, many people DO lose their minds when they have kids. I know I did. For most loving parents, a child is our hope for the future, our monument to the past, and the clay from which we are sculpting our masterpiece.

As the mom dragged him out of the shop, Betsy whispered to me, “Do people lose their minds when they have kids?”

The explosion of the airship “Hindenburg” was a disaster all right, but for carnage of the emotional kind, check Wikipedia for The Birthday Candles Incident.

Cousin Thomas was a serious and intense little boy. The year he turned 8, his dad put trick candles on his cake. With the extended family gathered around, Thomas blew out the candles with manly expertise, only to have them spark back into life. Rattled, he blew them out again, but they kept re-lighting. It was funny for about 15 seconds; but the moment got longer and longer while Thomas huffed and puffed with a desperate intensity you rarely see outside of Little League games or torture chambers. Fun had died. I kept waiting for his parents to break in. When Thomas ran from the room in tears, his dad called after him, “C’mon, Thomas, can’t you take a joke?”

The fact is, many people DO lose their minds when they have kids. I know I did. For most loving parents, a child is our hope for the future, our monument to the past, and the clay from which we are sculpting our masterpiece.

I looked at Betsy and she made a little gun out of her thumb and forefinger and pretended to shoot her brother-in-law.

The fact is, many people DO lose their minds when they have kids. I know I did. For most loving parents, a child is our hope for the future, our monument to the past, and the clay from which we are sculpting our masterpiece. A child is our bid for immortality and our second chance at Getting It Right. And when we discover that we’ve invested all that in someone who can’t even operate an ice-cream cone, we can’t handle it.

The trick is to use the same kind of common sense in dealing with our kids that we’d apply to buying a DVD player or baking a cookie. It’s not easy. But if you need a quick lesson, just look around – like it or not, we are living in the lab.

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Rick Epstein can be reached at rickepstein@yahoo.com.