The Bachelor is social currency where I work. You watch it, you come in the next day, and you tear it apart like a wake of hungry buzzards on a fresh pile of road kill. But I wasn’t always a member of Bachelor Nation.

“What do you mean you don’t watch it?” my boss once asked me.

I tried to explain that it just wasn’t for me. Two hours? Every week? How the heck would I fit in True Hollywood Stories and Real Housewives?

“You make it work,” she said as she wrote, Needs to work on multitasking and ability to meet deadlines on my mid-year review.

And thus my love affair with The Bachelor/Bachelorette began, and will steadfastly continue as long as Chris Harrison delivers drunk girls, hot tubs filled with cheap sequins, and a weekly reminder of Spring Break 1993 and why six dumbasses from the Northeast should thank the Patron Saint of Conception for putting them in college during a time when there was no Internet. Ahem. But I digress.

Watching this train wreck TV show is different now that I am a mom. It’s not just good old-fashioned smug, feel-better-about-yourself mockery. Thanks to social media these people have no boundaries and thanks to that, they’ve shunned conventional methods of meeting their mates. I mean, really? Whatever happened to getting shitfaced at the local bar and doing it in a bathroom stall? Jeesh, kids these days.

I can’t help but think about all those parents watching the fruits of their loins exiting a limousine in a slutty Nordstrom Rack step-mother-of-the-bride gown on national television believing they’re on the road to finding love or better yet, a little notoriety on the pages of UsWeekly. Watching other people make terrible life choices serves as a constant reminder of all the things I want to warn my son, Quinn, against such as:

  • Never trust a woman who calls out another woman’s crow’s feet.
  • If the first thing she says to you grants permission to “plow her field,” Mommy isn’t going to bequeath her any of grandma’s jewelry.
  • If a woman shows up for a first date on a unicycle, she’s overcompensating for something; run for the hills, son. (How hard can it be to beat a woman peddling a unicycle uphill?)

Time to pause The Happiest Baby on the Block and home video of the hospital nurses swaddling your newborn. The Bachelor should be required viewing for new parents. It’s as important a decision as which car seat to spend your monthly mortgage on or which preschool will reject your child because you didn’t have the foresight to get their name on a waitlist six years before they were conceived. The Bachelor gives parents front row seats into the psyches of women who have irreparably damaged relationships with their primary caregivers and the men who will eventually appear on Dancing with the Stars.

So yes, I am going to watch every single episode of The Bachelor this season for the sole purpose of mining it for nuggets of good rearing (yeah, you can take that a couple different ways), and post my recaps/parenting tips here In the Powder Room. Here’s your first lesson, Children of the Future: Mommies lie. This show is GOLD! I’d watch it anyway. But knowing I can impart such important life lessons makes me feel a little better about my entertainment choices (which is more than I can say for the woman who winds up ass over chardonnay-soaked Spanx on a flagstone walkway thirteen minutes into the first cocktail party.) Kids, no rose for that girl. Then again, Christmas Eve with her in the family could get a whole lot more fun.