Hi, I'm Zivie Owens, and you're listening to the Webby-Nominated podcast, Moms

don't have time to read books.

Hi, everyone.

I wrote an article recently.

I've been spending some time in the ER. Everybody's fine, but it's just

been one of those summers where things keep happening. So I wrote this article called School

Didn't Prepare Me for Parenting. And I wondered if maybe any of you felt the same way. So let

me know, Zibby at Zibby Owens.com. Here's the article. I published it on Medium. I've been in the ER a lot lately. With four kids, any day one of them isn't sick, is a good day. I've had a lot of time to sit and stew while waiting for endless tests and treatments. Here's what I've realized. School didn't prepare me for parenting at all. Sure, I learned enough to help my big kids with their math homework, so that's nice.

But the real things that help in a crisis, not so much. Forget my useless BA, MBA, and good grades. Here's what I wish I'd learned instead. One, how to read an ultrasound. It starts the moment you see you're going to be apparent, a feeling of complete inadequacy. The white-coated technician wielding the ultrasound probe with the gravitas of a judge's gavel knows what she's looking at and the black and white swirly see on the screen. Somehow she sees a baby. I see fuzz. I took a lot of art history classes in college. I spent hours standing in 200-year-old stone halls in front of walls of images, memorizing the artist, the date, the

place. Let me tell you, the fact that I could tell the difference between a Rubens and a

Rembrandt means absolutely nothing compared to this text gift of differentiating between an arm and a penis.

Two, how to diagnose anything. Why didn't I go to med school? Oh, wait, because I got a C in biology

in ninth grade and still haven't recovered from the hit my GPA took. If only I'd been interested in organic chemistry instead of the art of the personal essay, instead of Googling symptoms on my phone in the middle of the night with one hand, while applying a cold compress to my son's burning forehead with the other, I might be able to diagnose him, heal him, relieve him of some pain,

this fever. If only I'd spent my 20s dissecting cadavers and studying for the medical boards

instead of watching ER on Thursday nights after wasting time learning how to brine a chicken

in cooking class, which, by the way, I have never once attempted to do since, then maybe I could

tell my son what was wrong and relieve his anxiety.

Three, how to detect dyslexia, any learning disorder, or a mental illness.

I actually was a psychology major. At Yale, I was on the intensive track, on my way to

becoming a clinical psychologist. I ran my own study on the application of social comparison

theory to eating situations for the Yale Center for

Eating and Weight Disorders. Shocker, the more you compare what you eat to those around you,

...