You’re a dad. You’re forgetful. It’s only natural. Your spawn deprives you of years’ worth of sleep with their abject refusal to recognize and observe an reasonable bedtime. Dehumanizes you through endless cleaning of their bodily fluids. Abuses you with an interminable barrage of questions and demands and gibberish statements. If you didn’t love them, it could reasonably be called torture.

So you can be cut some slack when you forget what day it is, or fail to turn in that permission slip, or leave the extra change of clothes at home. And it’s probably no big deal if you don’t notice things that the sharper members of the species might pick up on: the expired milk lurking in the back of the fridge, the due date for your next oil change, the fact that your kids’ clothes don’t match. You’re a dad. You’ve got a lot going on. I feel you.

But I also have you beat.

Through absolutely no fault of my own*, I put my daughter’s favorite book through the washing machine the other day.

In a fit of cleaning house, I spirited the laundry basket downstairs, dumped it in the machine, and shuffled back upstairs to lay down in the bed for thirty seconds pretending I’m the sort of guy who can lay down for a nap in the middle of a Saturday.

Have you ever done that? You haven’t, because even if you’re a sleep-deprived, tantrum-weary guy like me, you at least know to check what’s in the laundry hamper before you dump it in the wash.

Not me.

Advance the tape an hour.

Wife: Hey, did you mean to put a book through the laundry?

Me: What? I didn’t put a book through the laundry.

Wife: Yeah, you did.

Me: I’m sure I wouldn’t.

Wife: Well, I didn’t do it. Did you put this load of clothes in?

She holds up a wad of laundry. It looks like a toddler’s papier-mache project, if the toddler chewed up the papier-mache and spit it out again before starting to sculpt it.

Me: (thinking long and hard about what I could possibly say that isn’t “yes” because I obviously did) (replaying dumping the laundry into the washing machine in my head) (seeming to recall that there may have been a “clunk” that I didn’t bother to investigate) (recalling watching my daughter drop the book into the laundry basket earlier in the day and not doing anything about it right then because for god’s sake, it’s Saturday and I just can’t) …yeah.

Wife: (nodding in a way that’s not entirely sympathetic) …So.

Me: (nodding for lack of anything useful to say) …yep.

Wife: You know that’s her favorite book, right?

Me: I did not know that.

Wife: Uh-huh.

Me: In my defense —

Wife: No.

Me: Sorry?

Wife: You’re about to say, “in my defense, what’s a book doing in the laundry basket?”

Me: Yeah, obviously.

Wife: So it’s the book’s fault?

Me: …Kind of?

Wife: Just clean it up.

When a book gets wet, it goes all soggy and wobbly and wavy as the pages try to expand but can’t, really, as they get in each other’s way. Then when it dries out, it stays kind of wobbly and wavy and, strangely, brittle, forever bearing the mark of whatever negligence caused it to become wet in the first place.

When a book goes through the washing machine, it basically explodes. Half the book — the bit nearest the binding, including much (but not all) of the cover — was intact and in soggy-book state. The rest of it looked like it had been shredded for confetti and fired out of a high pressure cannon into the washing machine at close range. Bits of pulpy paper were stuck to the inside of the basin. The clothes were saturated with the stuff, soggy paper gluing the load of clothes together like a giant, nasty hairball. Fragments of the illustrations glared at me with disembodied eyes and wings and feet. (How they stared with wings and feet isn’t my problem — I felt thoroughly glared at. Though that may have just been my wife.)

Point is, dads, we have it rough. We catch a lot of blame for things that aren’t our fault.

But at least you didn’t wash your daughter’s favorite book.

*may have been entirely my fault