I was asking my friend who has children, "What if I have a baby and I dedicate my life to it and it grows up to hate me. And it blames everything wrong with its life on me." And she said, "What do you mean, 'if'?"

Rudner’s joke turns on the gap between an anxious, hypothetical fear of motherhood and a parent’s seasoned cynicism. The speaker imagines total devotion to a child as a guarantee of gratitude; the friend’s punchline—treating the feared outcome as inevitable—satirizes the cultural script in which adult children attribute their problems to their parents. The humor comes from deflating romantic ideals of parenting and exposing a darker, common expectation: that parental sacrifice does not inoculate one against resentment. Beneath the laugh is a commentary on blame, generational conflict, and the impossibility of controlling another person’s narrative about their own life.