by Carmen

Created on: January 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

The ads are shot in black and white-a dad running after a toddler, laughing, a mother bathing her infant, laughing. The tag line is, "Having a baby changes everything." According to some of my childless girlfriends, just seeing these spots is enough to make their ovaries skip a beat. And I must admit, even I, after 18 months of actual, in-the-trenches parenting, get a little misty over them from time to time. Mostly this happens because they remind me of moments my husband and I have had with our daughter that will never happen again, like the first time she rolled over, or walked on her own. Or more recently, the first time she took my face in her little hands and gave me a real kiss.

However, these sentimental moments pass fairly quickly. There just isn't time to sit around teary-eyed and goofy when you've got a living, breathing, toy-strewing, furniture and carpet staining, dog tormenting tornado loose in your previously spotless home. So, while I recognize the effectiveness of the ad campaign, there is a perverse part of me that would dearly love to see a more realistic picture of parenthood perpetuated in the media.

Here's a big fat for instance. The dad merrily playing chase with his kid is a pretty picture. But is it really what's usually going on in most American homes? Huh-uh. In my house, it looks something like this. Mom is sitting on the sofa, either trying to enjoy a moment of hard-earned peace while the child is occupied, or mistakenly assuming that Dad has the kid corralled in the other room. Whatever the case, she loses sight of baby for a second. Suddenly, she sees a diaper-clad form streaking by. And if she's not mistaken, it's clutching a knife, fork, scissors, or some other kind of potentially life-threatening implement that managed to make it below the four foot baby proofing height limit.

The sight causes her to spring into action, simultaneously shaving about three years off her life. Tearing after the baby, she just manages to avert disaster, grabbing whatever it is milliseconds before Precious topples over and impales himself. However, Mom's triumph is short-lived when she realizes what she thought was a pair of scissors was nothing more than a shiny silver rattle.

So, she should be relieved, right? And maybe she is, for a second, before two thoughts occur to her. One, there was no reason for her to get off the couch and miss the last few seconds of Friends. And two, it might not have been scissors this time, but what about next time?

And that's the thing. I guess when you get right down to it, for all of their flaws, those ads are right on two fronts. One, your child is usually laughing when you're chasing them, even if you don't find the situation particularly amusing. And two, having a baby really does change everything. Only, it's not just in the shiny happy ways that childless people focus on.

Truthfully though, what I've described above is really as unfair a picture of parenting as the ads. Just as it isn't all baby lotion and hide-and-seek, neither is it all scissors and exhaustion. It's all of it, together. The good moments are what make us fall in love with our kids over and over again. They make us care enough to leap off the couch for the thousandth time in one day to see whether our child is running with scissors or a rattle. And the moments of sheer panic make us realize just how much we love them, and how precious those seemingly perfect moments areeven if they're fewer and farther between then we thought they'd be.

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