How do we explain my husband's cross-dressing to our child?

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Dear Prudence,
I have been happily married for several years, and we are expecting our first child. The only problem is that my husband is a cross-dresser. This is a fetish that I know he could never give up. We keep this behind closed doors so as not to alienate friends and family and to keep his work associates from finding out (if they did, he could lose his job). Our question is how do we incorporate this facet of our life with a new child? If we keep it hidden, our child will most likely find out someday—when mom is doing the wash for two dress sizes—and then feel betrayed and hurt. If we keep on as we are, then our child will likely tell someone that daddy wears dresses, and it wouldn't be fair to burden anyone with that secret. What is the best thing for us to do?

—Daddy in Dresses

Dear Daddy in Dresses,
I know that when you're expecting, you feel a need to get everything perfect for your new addition, but you're getting way ahead of yourself if you think you should dress a teddy bear in a peignoir so you can start explaining to the baby that, just like Teddy, Daddy likes to wear pretty ladies' clothes. Let's say you two were into bondage and had a closetful of whips and chains. I would advise you to keep the closet secured and get a heavy-duty lock for the bedroom door, rather than try to "incorporate this facet" of your life with your child by teaching your toddler how to snap Daddy into handcuffs for Mommy. If your husband lounges around at home every night in a bustier, palazzo pants, and a wig, then I'm voting for repression. It's time for your husband to limit his dressing up to times when he's not with the baby. As your child gets older and mobile, your husband will have to take more steps to separate his fetish from your family life. Perhaps he will need to check into a motel occasionally when he just can't stifle the need to dress up as Madonna. Your husband has to live with this compulsion, but surely you both want to do your best to keep your child from growing up amid such sexual confusion. You feel this aspect of your private lives is none of your family's business, or your husband's colleagues', and that is an excellent attitude to maintain with your child.

—Prudie

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Dear Prudence,
My dear, highly educated husband has written a book. While he has many talents, writing isn't among them. He paid someone to edit the book, which helped it somewhat, but it's still awful. I've gone through it as well and cleaned it up the best I could without completely rewriting it. The problem is my attitude—I don't feel it's my place to crush my husband's dream but find it hard to just sit there with a smile on my face while he goes on and on about how life will change when he's a best-selling author. It's not going to happen. I realize that at one point a publisher (or a stack of rejection letters) will make the point without me doing so, but I'm not quite sure how to act now. I love him and want to be supportive of him following his dreams, but I don't want him to waste his time. Do I stand by and lie, or break the news to him somehow?

—Vanity Press

Dear Vanity,
Watch out, Malcolm Gladwell, you're about to be knocked off the top of the best-seller list by Tales of an Actuarial: Stochastic Models and Distribution Parameters. You say you don't want your husband to waste his time, but he's already written the thing, and if it's as bad as you say, the time's already been wasted. But consider that while almost everyone thinks they can write a book (if you go to a bookstore you will think everyone has written a book), most people never actually do it, so give your guy credit for sitting down and putting his dream—his dreary, eye-glazing dream—on paper. I can't tell if your husband's fantasies are sweetly pathetic or disturbingly delusional. But it says something odd about the state of your marriage that you could go so far as to edit this manuscript without your husband noticing you shared Ambrose Bierce's sentiment: "The covers of this book are too far apart." You don't need to crush your husband—you're right, the marketplace will take care of that task—but you should be honest. The next time he starts talking about what he's going to say to Meredith Vieira when she's interviewing him on the Today show, you need to convey that the chances of anyone's book becoming a best-seller are vanishingly small, and his are less than that.

—Prudie