Babyhood (9780062098788) Page 12

  Or maybe even, “I don’t know why he’s wasting his time with me when there is a perfectly good yellow ducky right here.”

  Boy Meets Dog

  For many years, our dog had a very cushy job. He lived in a nice house, had his own designated chair to sleep in, had not one but two doting, loving, grown-up humans who without fail (okay—almost without fail) made it their business to feed him, walk him, scratch him, buy chewy toys, and generally take care of his every need. In exchange, he had merely to look cute, be furry, periodically retrieve a tennis ball, and—and this is the important one—try really hard to not take a dump on the carpets. And even if he did besmirch an irreplaceable rug that used to belong to my grandmother’s mother, he knew that after a few minutes of yelling on our part and some long-eyed, sorrowful looks on his part, everything would be forgiven and life would return to its rosy self. His position was secure; he was the Child of the House.

  Boom! Enter an actual child, and see how quickly that changes. Instantly, the hierarchy and social order of a dog’s universe are irreparably and permanently thrown askew.

  The moment we returned home carrying our newborn child, our dog became—for the first time in his life—a dog. He took a huge tumble down the evolutionary ladder. The days of trying to pass himself off as just-another-member-of-the-family-who-happens-to-be-able-to-lick-himself-into-a-pretzel were now over.

  The poor thing should have seen it coming. The writing was on the walls. Month after month of deteriorating Quality Time. Walks overlooked. Treats distributed with less frequency and far less enthusiasm . . . Something was clearly amiss.

  Some people I know actually tried to prepare their dog for the Big Day by bringing home baby clothes and baby toys for the dog to smell. The theory was that by breeding a sense of familiarity, the dog wouldn’t be shocked by the infant’s arrival and, more importantly, wouldn’t attack it in the driveway. Now, while you certainly have to admire this kind of forethought, who’s going to do that? You don’t do it for any other guests that come by. You never say, “Brandy, next week the Gendlemans are coming for dinner, so just so you won’t be thrown, here’s a pair of their pants. These are actual slacks worn only yesterday by Mr. Gendleman. And for dessert, here’s a pair of socks from the Mrs.”

  Chances are, the dog will adjust. But keep in mind, though they can sense change, they can’t always determine exactly what the change is. For example, when our son came home, the dog definitely knew something was up. All the attention that used to be his was now spent on the newcomer, which, as far as the dog could make out, was a nicely wrapped blanket. That’s all he could see. A faint blue blur that was whisked past his head, handed from person to person with the utmost care, and never once placed below dog’s-eye level. The only conclusion he could come to was, “Boy, they sure love that blanket . . . I’ve never seen anything like it . . . They’re protecting that blanket with their lives . . . Hey, maybe there’s something valuable inside the blanket . . . I bet it’s wrapped around roast beef.”

  When our child finally did emerge from the blanket, the dog used his standard approach to anything new: “Is it Foe, Friend, or Food?” The three F’s into which everything in a dog’s world can be categorized.

  At first, the dog was cautious; perhaps this alien creature could harm him. He sniffed, prodded, and circled until information was gathered.

  When he realized that Blanket Boy was no Foe, the clever pooch switched to his other primary instinct and stared at the baby with just one thought on his simple mind:

  “Maybe I could eat him. He’s soft and chubby and, if I’m not mistaken, currently sleeping.”

  One time, I was looking after my newborn child, who was sleeping blissfully in one of the seventy-three seating contraptions we now had, when from the corner of my eye I noticed the dog creeping slowly toward the baby, dragging himself by the elbows like an infantryman in a bad World War II movie. When he finally got there, his head hovering alarmingly close to my only child, I saw—or thought I saw—the dog’s jaws open to reveal a flash of canine incisors, and I will tell you this: Though I’m not necessarily known for my speed and agility, if the Olympics had a “hurl-a-Labrador-across-a-living-room” event, I would’ve done very well. Even the dog was impressed. As he ricocheted off a cushy armchair, he looked at me as if to say, “I had no idea you could do that.”

  I immediately took him aside, apologized, and tried to explain the regulations inherent in our new Dog/Human Being contract. He seemed to understand. He at least knew enough to pretend to understand so as to win a free piece of cheese.

  Shortly thereafter, he did indeed adjust. He finally made Friends with the baby. When he approached, he did so with respect and caution. He lapped at the baby with big, loving doggie licks. And when informed he couldn’t lick the face, he restricted himself to arms and legs. (Or, as they appeared in his mind, “the drumsticks.”) He even took to sleeping under the crib, growling gentle warnings when anyone but us wandered too close to the boy. My wife and I beamed with pride as he began to tag along wherever we carried the baby, plopping himself down at every stop. We were thrilled to see the affection and concern he consistently displayed. However, when we noticed that at mealtimes he was not only predictably right alongside the high chair but actually brought his own knife and fork, we understood the truth: He was looking for food. After seeing the baby eat often enough, he knew that by simply being in the right place at the right time, he could score a nice array of fruits, vegetables, applesauce, and stray crackers. Between the stuff bouncing off the baby’s face or dripping from his chin, and the fistfuls of goodies thrown down like sticky manna from heaven, our child had become essentially a Dog Buffet. An all-you-can-drop salad bar.

  So even if the baby turned out not to be actual food, he at least was a generous dispenser of food. If not a food source, certainly a nice source of food.

  And to a dog, that’s really what friends are for.

  Why Dads Aren’t Moms

  There was a period, when our son was still brand-new, when I walked around beaming with pride in my new role as father, but could also, on that very same day, totally forget that I had a kid at all.

  I’d be in a casual conversation with someone and they’d say, “Do you have kids yourself?”

  And I’d say, “Nope . . . No, wait—I do, I do . . . yes, we have a son. He’s six weeks old, and I love him more than anything in the world. I forgot . . . Would you like to see a picture?”

  My wife has no such memory lapses. There is never an instant when she is not thinking about, talking about, or in some way connected, on an organic, cellular level, to the child she so artfully bore. And it’s beyond her comprehension that the child’s other parent isn’t the same way.

  Time after time, I was confronted with evidence suggesting that, try though I might, I wasn’t as naturally gifted a parent as my wife. We may both love our child with equal passion, but she was better at doing something about it. Still, I refused to accept defeat. I was determined to be the Best Parent Anyone Ever Heard Of. Or at least as good as her.

  But it wasn’t easy. This girl was good. For example, my son’s mother can, at any point in the day, tell you precisely what he ate, how much, how recently, and how long it took him to eat it. I can’t really do that.

  Now, in partial defense of my gender, I think some of this innate talent is related to women’s ability to breastfeed. It certainly helps to keep you connected to your child if your body parts swell up and ache whenever the kid is hungry. I suspect that if five minutes before my child was due for a sandwich, I got a persistent throbbing in my testicles, I’d be more on top of things, too.

  To compensate for my lack of natural gift, I turned to Science. I bought an absurdly complicated watch for the express purpose of timing all child-related data. And for a few days, I was like NASA. I could give you readings accurate to several hundred decimal points as well as open up the trash compactor on Apollo 12. I started timing everything. I was hitting that
start button so many times, I began to lose track of what it was I was timing. I’d hand the baby over to my wife and prepare for the briefing.

  “Did he eat? How long has he been up? Does he need to be changed?”

  I’d proudly check my watch.

  “It just so happens that exactly three hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twelve-point-five seconds ago . . . um . . . something happened. I don’t know exactly what. But it’s been going on for quite some time, I’ll tell you that.”

  As this was not the first time I was unable to provide the information requested, my wife—the no-nonsense Headmistress of the School of Our Recent Child—paused, shook her head, and remarked, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

  Okay, first of all, let me tell you how much that particular sentence bugs me. From anyone.

  “You just don’t get it.”

  They haven’t yet invented a conversation stopper more offensive, more hostile, or more completely dismissive. And it’s become quite popular. You hear it all over the place. At work, in social situations, in the midst of the most amiable discourse, a difference of opinion is discovered, and it all comes to a crashing halt with someone declaring that someone else “just doesn’t get it.”

  The implication is “I don’t care enough to explain this any other way. And furthermore, it’s my contention that you are literally impaired intellectually to the point that you do not get things that, to almost everyone else, are quite evident.”

  It’s all the more irritating coming from the one person you would think likes you; who would think that the two of you “get” the same things. Which is kind of why you’re together in the first place.

  And there’s not even a decent comeback line for “You just don’t get it.” What can you say?

  “Oh, I get it. I just . . . I just . . . I just don’t get it right now.”

  Sensing that she had hit a frayed nerve, my wife softened.

  “Maybe we’re just different,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “You . . . me . . . men . . . women . . . maybe we’re just different.”

  Suddenly, I felt so relieved.

  “Okay,” I thought. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe she can do things that I can’t, just like I can do some things maybe she can’t . . . We may be different . . .”

  I sure liked that better than “You just don’t get it.”

  And while I certainly wasn’t going to stop trying to get better at this Dad thing, I felt liberated from having to master it by lunch.

  Tough Love

  In the beginning, whatever creative sleeping schedule your baby makes up, you accept. If they like to sleep in the morning and be up all night, fine. After all, they just arrived on the planet, their clocks are bound to be screwed up for a while.

  But after a few months, for the sake of the child’s development—not to mention your own sanity—you have to take matters into your own hands.

  “Look, you’ve been here long enough to know this is the way it works: We’re up in the morning and we sleep at night—which you’ll remember is the dark part of the day. If you want to take a nap or two in the afternoon, that’s fine. But basically, them’s the rules, and you better straighten up and fly right.”

  Traditionally, their response is: “Hey, I could give a crap about your rules. These are my rules, so why don’t you get with the program?”

  And thus ensues a hideous tug-of-war in which everybody loses.

  The first hurdle was the “Does the baby sleep in bed with us or in his own bed?” discussion.

  There are strong arguments for both. Initially, we loved the idea of all sleeping in one big familial bed, but soon discovered that between the baby waking us up and then having to sleep on eggshells so as to not wake him or roll right over him, the net result was we weren’t sleeping all that great.

  On the other hand, when he’s in the next room screaming at four in the morning and one of you has to stumble out of your warm bed to deal with it, it seems a lot more desirable to have him lying between you so all you have to do is simply flop a lazy arm across his pajamas and pat him back to sleep from deep within your own sleep. But we were determined to do things the “right way.” We read the books, we asked around.

  It turns out there’s a popular school of thought that maintains the best thing you can do for your child is to teach them to soothe themselves to sleep. In short—let ’em cry. That’s the whole trick; leave them alone.

  Now, if you were the worst parent in the world, you would do that automatically. You’d hear your infant cry and just disregard it. If, however, you’re a halfway reasonable person, you run to their side and do whatever it takes to get them to sleep. You make sure they’re fed, changed, comfortable, warm-but-not-too-warm, cozy, read to, sung to, patted, rocked, cuddled—do every trick in the book.

  But not this guy’s book. Here’s a book, written by a medical doctor, a highly regarded professional pediatrician, that says, “No, don’t do that. Just walk away. They’ll stop eventually.”

  Now, our son had developed a particularly ambitious routine. He went down every night at about 8:00 P.M. and was up at 5:30 the next morning, but had several shows in between, customarily at 10:30, 1:30, 3:15, 4:00, and 4:40. Seven shows a night, my son was basically Vaudeville with Diapers. So we decided this hard-nosed approach was just what we needed. (The other option—shooting ourselves—seemed ultimately unreasonable.)

  So we put the young prince to bed, tucked him in, sang to him, and started to sneak quietly away from his crib. Before we got to the door, he started to wail. We looked at each other—“You’ve got to be strong, soldier.”

  The book says you’re supposed to let them cry for five minutes, then you can pat them a little bit.

  I didn’t last long.

  “I’m going in.”

  “Don’t.”

  “But he’s crying.”

  “I know, but the book said . . .”

  “I don’t care about the book, he’s crying!”

  “If we don’t do it, we’re going to be his slaves for the rest of our lives. Do you want that?”

  “No, but—”

  “Okay, so let’s wait.”

  As he continued to cry, we sat on the floor just outside his door and stared at our watches.

  “Is it five minutes yet?”

  “No.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Eleven seconds.”

  “Can’t be.”

  “Twelve seconds, now.”

  My son was no doubt thinking, “Where are those two? . . . They always come when I cry . . . Maybe I’m not crying loud enough . . . Let me try this: ‘WWWWAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!’ ”

  Miraculously, we made it to five minutes, then went in, calmed him down, proved to him that we hadn’t left the country, and once he’d stopped crying, walked away again—this time for six minutes.

  He cried as loud as a person that size is physically able to. We sat outside the door biting our knuckles.

  “I hate this.”

  “I know. Me, too.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Forty-one seconds.”

  “LIAR.”

  “I swear to you—it’s not yet a minute.”

  When his six minutes of prescribed misery was up, we went in again, calmed him down, assured him that his Mommy and Daddy were there for him for always and ever, no matter what . . . and as soon as he bought it, ran away again.

  If you get to the point of making him cry for seven and then eight minutes in a row—and what parent wouldn’t be proud of that?—then you’re supposed to go into their room, but not touch them.

  This was more torture.

  “We see you crying, we know what you want, and we’d love to give it to you, but sadly, we’re not allowed.”

  Back in the hall, now a solid forty-five minutes into this sadistic and as of this point wildly ineffective discipline, we sat on the floor, in tears, arms wrapped around our knees, rocking gently bac
k and forth and cursing this freak of a doctor who had written the book. The reality is we were physically restraining ourselves from comforting the only person we loved this much, the only person who will ever need us this much, the only one who gives us the wonderful feeling of being needed this much, denying ourselves the joy of being able to instantly and thoroughly put another person at peace by merely showing up and being who we are . . . all of that we were willing to forgo just so we could see if the $12.95 we spent on the stupid book was worth it.

  Our son, whose face was by now caked in dried-up tears and assorted nosey fluids, had come to a new understanding.

  “Well, this changes everything. The one thing I knew was that if I needed anything, I could count on them. Especially her. But I see now I was wrong. I am alone in this world, and I will never trust anyone again. Ever. WWWWAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  Little did he know how close by we were, or how miserable we were ourselves. As we sat there not lifting a finger to help, I wondered if I went through this when I was a baby. All those times I cried, were my parents really there but deliberately not letting me know it? Did they really have the solution to my happiness but for some reason resist the urge to give it to me?

  And if so, how long did that last?

  When I was seven, were they still outside my door, withholding the very things I wanted?

  “Son, we know you want the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, and the Secret Avenger Espionage Attaché Case with retractable water pistols and three-way walkie-talkie set . . . and in fact we have it right here. We bought it, but we’re not going to let you have it. And by the way, that girl you like in arithmetic class? We have her here, too. Right outside the door. But we read this book that said you can’t have her either.”

  So we made a compromise. He could come sleep in our bed, but he couldn’t nurse. We didn’t realize immediately how monumentally stupid this was. It was roughly the same as inviting a twelve-year-old to a video arcade and locking up the quarters. But we had to break him of his nasty habits.