Ah, the quarter-life crisis. Will I ever write the Great American Novel? Is it too late to become an architect? What about the Peace Corps? How have I already fallen so far behind my classmates on the socioeconomic ladder?

Please. You want a crisis? How about this: you're out with the family when your baby blows out his diaper for the second time today, and you're out of spare outfits. You don't have the car seat with you -- just the stroller -- so you can't hail a cab, and you're a bus and two subway transfers from home.

Or this: to send your child to college, you have to save roughly half a million dollars over the next 18 years -- and you're barely covering your mortgage as it is (that's for the house that isn't quite big enough for the theoretical second child).

And then there's this one: try as you might, you just can't get him to sleep. Overtired and stressed, he cries hysterically whenever he's put down. Even when he loses consciousness from sheer exhaustion, he wakes up a few minutes later, screaming and thrashing in the crib. Exhausted after days of round-the-clock chaos, you and your wife rifle the pages of one baby book after another, firing contradictory advice at each other, each secretly beginning to fear and loathe everything about your life together.

I don't want to sound unsympathetic to twentysomething soul searchers. I understand the peculiar existential burden of being free from responsibility and awash in limitless options. There is still the possibility of Greatness, of what Fitzgerald called "some sort of epic grandeur," if you can only perceive your opportunity and dare to seize it. I, myself, quit my job at 27 to write the you-know-what, thumbing my nose with confidence born of Manifest Destiny at my $30,000 credit card debt. Indeed, youth is a precious thing.

And when you have a baby, it's over. It's not about you anymore, and it never will be again for the rest of your life.

Amy and I were so determined to forestall the onset of adulthood, we waited five years to get married, then moved across the country to evade the stork for a couple more. We lived it up in the dot-com days, then wallowed after the crash in fin-de-siecle self-indulgence. We splashed merrily down life's river, drawing ever nearer to the fertility waterfall the magazine articles all warn about, and then finally, at the last sane moment, released that intrepid swimmer back upstream. In His infinite mercy, we were even granted a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy to prolong the party just a little longer.

In the early days, when the only evidence is a pink line on a plastic stick and a smudge on a sonogram, it's still too unreal to sink in. But once you're out of the don't-tell-anyone-but-you-do-anyway first trimester and Mommy's tummy isn't quite as flat as it used to be, you start to realize what you're in for. Every part of your life falls under new scrutiny: your household income and expenses, health insurance coverage, moral suitability as a role model, wardrobe, religious faith or lack thereof, athletic skills, ability to make minor household repairs and fix flat tires without the help of better dads, your standing in the community and the looks you draw from strangers on the street, capacity for love and generosity, hairline, the pettiness you try so hard to deny, your nerve. And every day the little bug grows larger, now the size of a pea, now a peanut, now an orange, now a grapefruit, now a cantaloupe.

Architecture school and the Peace Corps are the furthest things from your mind.

Then boom! You're in the hospital. (Leave the all-natural birthing centers to the younger mommies who don't yet know the abundance of pain life will provide). One moment is legs-up pushing and encouragement, and the next is crying and toweling and cutting the cord and oh my god -- there he is. The two of you must provide or somehow arrange every meal for this child for the next 18 years, whether it's breastfeeding or smashed carrots or just making sure he has some money in his pocket when he leaves the house for he-won't-say-where. You're responsible for everything he learns, everything she experiences, the roof over his head, the medical care she receives (what's this business about splitting up the Measles-Mumps-Rubella shot in case it causes autism?). You're on duty, and by the time you clock out, you'll be closer in age to your parents and a generation and a half out of the Chosen Demographic.

All spontaneity has been extracted from your life. Your outings will fall into two categories: those where you take the baby with you, and those where you've made specific arrangements in advance to leave him with someone else (Are you kidding? The little angel, alone with a stranger?). Even if you do get a night out a deux, you'd better count your drinks. What if something happens?

You can forget about rotisserie baseball, CD shopping, gourmet cooking, antiquing -- all those quaint pastimes that once filled your days. From now on, your hobbies will be chosen for you, and they will include the art and science of swaddling, pre-verbal linguistics and handicapping competing term life insurance policies. Your book club will be replaced by a Mommy's Group and a Daddy's Group, and the next title you read will be the Sears Baby Book, followed by Bestfeeding, The Child Whisperer and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Your friends will regard you with mystification from the other side of the Great Divide, unable to fully comprehend the change that's come over you, cruelly oblivious to your need for them to go home hours earlier than your dinner parties used to end.

Oh sure, it's a miracle. You'll find out all about that soon enough. But you want some advice in the meantime? Have sex in the afternoon if you're even slightly in the mood. Pay too much rent for a nicer apartment than you need. Decide on Thursday evening to take off for the weekend to the country -- or to another country entirely. Spend the day in bed reading Love in the Time of Cholera in Spanish.

And don't ever let me hear you whine about any fucking quarter-life crisis.

J. Daniel Janzen is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn with his wife Amy and son Bobby.

In 10 years, he expects to be agitating at school board meetings, pricing used minivans, and fist fighting with other Little League dads.