They kept us on our toes, strung as taut as Stradivarius violins, afraid to act for fear we would do the wrong thing, afraid not to act for fear inaction would be disastrous. Pediatricians and mothers, always the same authors. Never were there any articles on the care of mother and child by a father, only by what I came to think of as the vested interests. I was slow, I admit; but what father has not been slow? Who, if he had not been slow, would be a father? The books and the articles would have been troublesome enough if the information they imparted had been accurate. But slowly I became aware that they were subtly interwoven with mis-statements. I raveled them out, I categorized them. I counted five different kinds before I convinced myself. A mother published this: "One baby takes up all your time--two can't take any more." The fallacy was obvious. A certain amount of housework was inescapable. If the mother was unable to do the work, what happened to it? Answer: somebody else did it. Who? Even in the abundance of those days, most of us couldn't afford nurses, maids, cooks, laundresses, or cleaning women. The era of the poor relation who came to help out for a few months was long past. Who did the work, then? The father, that's who. I stared deep into the shocking chasm between the mental processes of men and women. I studied the statement again. There was no mis-statement at all--if you granted the hidden premise and didn't boggle on the implication. It was perfectly valid. The hidden premise was that women did all the housework. But that hadn't been true for a generation. The husband-father had been drafted into home service, and there was no discharge for him short of death or total disability. The latter was hard to prove. But the implication was the deadly thing: in the consideration of second child, a father's time and labor counted for nothing. I remembered a shaggy little story about a farmer who held up his hog to let it eat the corn off the stalk. "Doesn't it take a long time to fatten up a hog that way?" exclaimed the efficiency expert. "Shore," said the farmer, "but what's time to a hog?" And what, in a woman's eyes, was time to a father? The second type of mis-statement was a pure omission. The thing the baby books didn't mention was that most women felt ten times worse during their second pregnancies.[1] At this time life became almost unbearable for them--and it was, as a consequence, completely unbearable for their husbands. [Footnote 1: Editor's note: This may help explain the size of the average American family: 1.6 children.--W. M.] Not one baby book or article mentioned that fact. That it was a fact I proved by a personal survey. Every mother questioned revealed that she felt horrible during her second pregnancy. She was surprised that my wife and I didn't know this.