A few months after our older daughter was born, we set up an appointment to meet with a lawyer for "the talk." No, not that talk...the one where you make a hypothetical plan for your child, should you and your spouse be suddenly abducted by aliens at exactly the same moment. Or you know, something worse.

My husband and I were in total agreement on every decision we made regarding our wills and life insurance, especially the one where we never wanted to use them in the first place. After every question our poor lawyer asked, we'd reply, "Well, of course we'll never need it, but hypothetically, we'd like to..." I'm surprised he didn't write it in all caps at the top of the forms we got back: YOU PROBABLY WON'T NEED THESE BUT HERE THEY ARE JUST IN CASE. That would have made me feel better as I stuffed them into my filing cabinet for safe keeping.

Funny man Kevin Nealon, who found fame by creating hilarious characters like "The Subliminal Man" on SNL and the incorrigible but utterly hysterical Doug Wilson on Showtime's Weeds, found himself facing the role of his life at age 52...Daddy.




In his new book Yes, You're Pregnant, But What About Me?, Nealon shares how he handled impending fatherhood with his signature dry wit. In the following excerpt, Nealon and his wife Susan set up a trust fund for their baby. The meeting quickly spirals into a direction I'm sure Susan wished it hadn't, but then again living with Kevin Nealon, she's probably used to this sort of thing. Take a look:

Your child is going to be a total, irresponsible idiot - a complete loser," the lawyer told us. "This is what you have to assume when you're planning for its future. That's what the entire trust-fund philosophy is based on."

If we had any money left after this lawyer billed us, our goal was to work out a plan to eventually leave it to our child. I was told that a trust fund is a must. You never know when you might buy the farm, so it's a good idea to have a plan that will financially protect your surviving family members and your estate.

"A loser?" my wife asked.

"I guess you have a point," I said to the lawyer, trying to sound interested. "I mean, even when the baby is inside the mother, it's being a total parasite. It might as well be sitting on the couch and not paying any rent."

I glanced over to Susan and couldn't help notice her dismay at the hypothetical assumption that our baby would be subpar in some fashion. Now I was jumping on the bandwagon.

"It's sponging off of her every day," I said, "absorbing nutrients and minerals, right?"

"Absolutely," replied the lawyer. "And why do you think that is going to change once the baby is born?"

We had decided to draw up a trust that would include a list of demands our child must meet before he or she got the money we would eventually be leaving. This trust, of course, is all predicated on the notion that you and your wife have died - and your child hasn't killed you. We would also have to decide how we wanted our child to receive our assets. First and foremost, we don't want it to be known as a "trust-fund baby." They're considered spoiled, rich kids, getting through life with Mommy and Daddy's money. Most counselors and attorneys suggest some type of plan where they don't get all the money at once in their teen years, since they will probably squander it away on stupid stuff like parties, cars, eBay junk, and friends.

"Having lots of money available at an early age, with no restrictions, is a recipe for disaster," the lawyer added as he glanced at his ringing cell phone. "They won't have the desire to actually go out in the world to work and make something of themselves."

With these words, the lawyer had gotten me all fired up. "I am not about to let this punk kid piss away our life savings!" I said to Susan.

Noting the ridiculousness of this conversation, Susan cynically injected, "Well, we might as well put our loser kid into rehab as soon as it's delivered, or send it to a reform school - maybe hire a parole officer and set aside some bail money."

"Absolutely," the lawyer chimed in, not getting her cynicism. "That's the supposition you have to make when planning a trust fund for your baby."

You and your partner also have to decide who is going to take care of your child if anything ever happens to both of you, e.g., you die in a horrible fiery car accident. This person will be known as your child's guardian. As with the godparent situation, we had a difficult time coming up with someone suitable. We also needed a trustee. This was someone who would oversee how the money was distributed to the guardian. Everything had to be spelled out to a T, since once again, you have to assume that your appointed guardian and trustee are complete imbeciles.

As our meeting progressed, we found ourselves coming up with many unrealistic requirements for our yet-to-be-born problem child. This kid was definitely gonna have to jump through some hoops. We'd decided that our pathetic loser kid wouldn't receive one penny of our hard-earned money until he was at least thirty-five years old, had gotten through college with a 4.0 GPA, could bowl above 200 on a consistent basis, and had swum the English Channel while defending his doctorate dissertation from Harvard. For good measure I added a clause stating that the child should be able to juggle six pins. That way, at the very least, he would always be able to make money as a bowling ringer or in a sidewalk clown juggling act. Maybe by then he would have grown out of his slacker attitude and understand what it's like to be an adult.

Kids today don't know the value of hard work. Most people don't know this, but many of history's famous explorers or inventors were trust-fund babies, and also wouldn't have known the value of hard work if their parents hadn't stipulated their demands in the trust. Do you think they would have done what they did if there wasn't a financial reward? No, their parents knew that and stipulated in the trust exactly what they wanted. For some, their kid couldn't collect his trust unless he discovered a Northwest Passage. For others it was a lightbulb, a cotton gin, an airplane -the list goes on and on. Who would want to subject themselves to harsh living conditions and potential Indian attacks if it weren't for the trust fund?

Either way, just by holding this conversation, we had already undermined our baby's self-esteem. Though he was still in the womb, he was no doubt listening; forget the cost of setting up a trust, this was now going to cost a fortune in trips to the therapist.

We really wanted to be able to trust that our child would have common sense, but I could understand the need for such precautions. If I had been left a large sum of money in my early twenties, I too would probably have squandered it all away. But even though you would have done that, you don't want to assume that your child would. You'd like to think that your child will be this bigger, better, brighter version of you. That your child is You 2.0, all the same fun with none of the failings. You don't want to think that the same mistakes you would have made are genetically transferable.

"The trust fund will ensure how your assets will be distributed," the lawyer went on. "It will minimize your taxes, expenses, and blah, blah, blah . . ." I hate having to focus this much on anything financial; I couldn't wait to get out of there. The lawyer droned on as I drifted off. I found myself thinking about my early twenties and how decisions I made probably would have been pretty different if I'd had a trust fund.

Excerpted from YES, YOU'RE PREGNANT, BUT WHAT ABOUT ME? by Kevin Nealon. Copyright © 2008 by Kevin Nealon. Reprinted with permission by Harper Entertainment, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.