Anderson Cooper missed his son’s major milestone because he was at work

Working parents know all too well the frustration of missing major milestones in your kids’ lives. Too often, our little ones smile, crawl, or walk for the first time with other caretakers because we’re at work. Anderson Cooper recently touched on this very real, very common pain point in parenting, because he missed his 13-month-old son Wyatt‘s first steps.

He had a good sense of humor about it (because what else can you do?), though he did admit he was a little…unsettled over the fact that his ex, and Wyatt’s other dad, Benjamin Maisani, didn’t think twice about telling Cooper what he missed.

FYI: This is a great tip for all those who are co-parenting little ones, or if you have family/friends that watch your babies while you’re at work—just lie about the milestones. PLEASE. JUST LIE.

“I was doing an interview and I get this text from Wyatt’s other dad, Benjamin, and he said, ‘He just walked… exclamation mark, exclamation mark,” Cooper told Stephen Colbert on an episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” this week. “My reaction was fury. I was like, ‘I can’t believe I missed this.’ I got really pissed at Benjamin. In my household when I grew up, you would lie about everything. He should have just lied.”

There are times when lying is actually the kind thing to do, and this is one of them. “Do I look bad in this outfit?” “Does my hair look crazy today?” “Did my first baby, who I have obsessively been milestone monitoring, take their first steps today while I was at work missing them all day?” all fall under the Acceptable Lies umbrella.

Hopefully, Cooper’s ex got the “Lying Is Polite Sometimes, Actually” memo for any future milestones! It’s OK though, he was probably ecstatic and naturally just wanted to share the good news with his son’s other parent, which is excellent co-parenting.

He also opened up about how painful Father’s Day used to be for him, for most of his life, because of the loss of his dad when he was a child—but that all changed when he became a dad himself.

“I just did not acknowledge it,” he said. “Father’s Day when you don’t have a dad, it’s not even bittersweet. It’s inexplicable. The pain was so great for my most of my life,” he revealed. “And yet, the interesting thing for me about having son, a child, is it has made me connect with my dad… in a way that I’d never really anticipated. I remember things about my dad that I never remembered before because I’m experiencing them with Wyatt.”

Well Happy Father’s Day to you, Anderson Cooper. Thanks for keeping it real (and really emotional) for the rest of us.