Tsabary’s book will evoke such nostalgia in mothers who have passed early parenthood. A clinical psychologist in the US, she discards scholarliness for a frank account of her own experiences.
The section on the new dad is particularly nice. Shefali’s husband is in Canada and her child is refusing to fall asleep. After hours of trying and nearly dead with exhaustion, she imagines him "tucked into his crisp hotel sheets" and calls him up: "Do you know how much work this is? And you never appreciate me...just don’t care...don’t help me enough and...complain that I don’t have enough sex with you, well this is why...you should take care of your child for just one full day and you’ll see how it feels."
But do new mothers really read this stuff when it matters? While you read up extensively when pregnant, after the baby arrives, a) you never have the time to do anything apart from hardcore baby work or catching up on sleep and b) you don’t want to look at another book which will make sense of your wet, poop-smeared, sleepless, miserable existence.
