Babyproofing Your Marriage: The Interview
by: Janell Gulstad

Here is the one thing you need to know about Babyproofing Your Marriage before you pick it up. Anyone who reads it with an open mind is going to recognize themselves and/or their spouse somewhere in this book. (The quotes alone are priceless.)

Co-authored by three friends: Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O’Neill and Julia Stone, BPYM takes to heart the basic philosophy that the secret to raising happy children is to have a happy marriage. While latent feminists may be aggravated by the authors’ open acknowledgement of the differences between the sexes, it’s refreshing to read in print what we have known all along: men are different, and motherhood makes women nuts.

In some ways, this is an equal opportunity instruction manual; with easy to digest chapters that even the most macho of husbands should be able to appreciate. The authors may be women, but they talked to a lot of husbands in their efforts to be balanced. And although it’s impossible to identify wholly with every example, the book challenges readers by its very simplicity. For instance, any parent who ever had in-laws will see some small ghost of themselves in the chapter: In-Laws and Outlaws: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

And yes, there’s a whole chapter about sex.

In a recent phone interview, Stacie Cockrell talked about the writing the book, interviewing 500 people, some on airplanes and in checkout lines, to get a feel for the universal experience of adjusting to the shock of parenthood. “This book is really bigger than the three of us,” she says. Three years ago, the three women each had one baby, and all had all read books like A Fly on the Wall and Tell it Like it Is, but over dinner one night, discussed the fact that they all felt they were speaking a different language from their husbands. They decided there should be a Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus for married people, and the idea for a book of their own was born.

So they started talking to people. Anyone. Everyone. And the people that they talked to had a lot to say. In fact, as Stacie recalls, “They wouldn’t stop talking. Women would stay until midnight. As for the men, we thought they’d never talk to us about their sex lives, but they did.”

 Who did what, in writing the book?

We did a lot of brainstorm sessions. (We) ran our own focus groups. A lot of us came up with our own humorous, quirky ideas that would lighten the tone.

All three of us wrote sections and then we swapped. Everybody edited each other’s stuff. We called it the 24/7 sausage making factory. Sometimes it was an ugly process, but by the end, we liked the final product. Cathy and I were night owls. I had my third baby while this was going on, so I would be drinking my Red Bull at two in the morning, and so would Cathy, and then we’d kick it to Julia, because she’s a morning person. She’d get up at 5 a.m.

That’s basically how we did it. Some of us were more passionate about certain topics than others. Some of us had better ideas on the topic, or were more humorous about it. And then we got a lot of our material from the focus groups. I don’t think we would have come up with the 10 o’clock shoulder tap. In a focus group this guy said, “Yeah, my son gives his wife the 10 o’clock shoulder tap,” and I said, whoa, stop right there. What is that?

That became a big theme of our book.