Babyhood (9780062098788) Page 8

  One of the wonderful aspects of these various emissions is that they serve to bond and unite all new parents. I can now spot new parents on the street—even without their kids. Just look for a three-by-four-inch damp patch on their shirts between their shoulders and ribs, the part where very recently a youngster’s head was resting and emitted a steady flow of sweet, sticky babyness. They leave a trail—not unlike snails. And this trail becomes an emblem, a team logo, a crest to be worn with pride. And a towel.

  Way before your kid even gets here, everyone in sight does their level best to scare you about diapers.

  “Oh, I can’t wait to see you handling diapers . . . Hey, everybody—can you imagine him changing diapers? . . . Getting up in the middle of the night to change those diapers . . . you’ll see . . . I mean, have you ever actually changed a diaper? . . . Boy, you’re not going to like changing diapers . . .”

  Okay, first of all, let me say this: Thank God for diapers. Because the alternative is unthinkable. Would you want to live in a world where there were no diapers? A world where the very items intended to be accumulated by diapers were not accumulating but rather flying through the air undeterred? I, for one, would not.

  Second of all, let’s get a grip here; it’s not that big a deal. Especially in the beginning. I understand that once you hit the two-year-old point, diapering is pretty much like changing pants on a hobo. But on a newborn, it’s almost a pleasure.

  Admittedly, the actual skill takes a few practice rounds. The first time I tried to put a new diaper on my baby, I yanked the little Velcro strap too jerkily and actually punched the little guy in the jaw. A real solid shot, too. I knew instinctively that this could not be correct. Unless you’re specifically trying to raise a welterweight, continual deliverance of powerful uppercuts is not advised when handling newborns.

  And, of course, we had the Great Diaper Debate—cloth versus disposable. We wanted to be environmentally sensitive, considering that the accumulation of disposable diapers is now engulfing a good one-third of the world’s landmass. In descending order of size, I believe it’s now Asia, North America, and then Huggies.

  So we vowed to eschew the convenience of these Earth-chokers and instead use only recyclable cloth diapers, nobly shouldering the added responsibility of constant laundering and increased waste-product handling. This lasted literally an hour. The first time you handle a particularly offensive diaper, you want it out of your hands and out of your house so fast that you’re more than glad to look the other way and let someone else’s parents save the planet.

  Some people—and it’s usually older people—are still genuinely amused by the idea of men changing diapers. It’s hard to remember that not too long ago, fathers weren’t big diaperers. As we approach the millennium, however, no guy—unless he’s been cryogenically frozen since 1957—can possibly get away with not changing diapers.

  Having said that, the instinct within men to throw the job over to women is alive and well. One night, we were sitting around the house with some friends, enjoying a Sunday afternoon, His Royal Infantness playing happily on the floor nearby.

  Suddenly, a powerful aroma, not unlike that of a construction site Porta Potti, permeated the room. And someone had to change it.

  In theory, I wouldn’t presume for a second that it necessarily would be my wife’s responsibility, but nonetheless, I turned to my wife and said, “Honey . . . ? ,” the implication unmistakably being, “Take care of that, would you?”

  My wife, interestingly enough, was giving me the very same look.

  And it is here that you learn the three words that become the chief verbal staple of any household with a baby: It’s Your Turn.

  This phrase is the theme song of any marriage once it goes from Two to Three.

  “I just changed him twenty minutes ago . . . It’s your turn.”

  “I’ve been watching him all day. It’s your turn!”

  “I simply cannot stand up; it’s your turn!”

  This all-purpose phrase also works as a marital greeting. The “Hi-sweetie-how-was-your-day” of yesteryear is now replaced with the more simple, direct, and mildly irritated “It’s your turn.”

  Before you have a child, you and your spouse are many things to each other: friends, lovers, competitors, partners . . . Upon producing a child, you relate to each other primarily as sentries.

  The two of you are guards who rotate shifts monitoring and protecting your new charge.

  When Baby enters your world, there’s no time for intimate conversation between Husband and Wife. In fact, the extent of conversation often consists solely of the reporting of Baby’s “eating-sleeping-pooping” status—just before the changing of the guard.

  “Hi.”

  “He ate, he napped, he needs to be changed.”

  “I just walked in. Can I take a shower?”

  “You should’ve showered before we had a kid. It’s your turn.”

  Then, like buck privates relieving one another at Guantanamo, you’re on duty and your wife gets a four-hour pass.

  When it comes to knowing when to change your child, there are four essential tools: smelling, looking, squeezing, and peeking.

  It usually begins with the smell—a kind of “silent alarm” that lets you know it’s time for a fresh diaper.

  In an attempt to keep the “hands on” part of the diapering experience to an absolute minimum, you next eyeball the diaper. Is it drooping? Perhaps swaying a bit? Does the child look like he’s been riding a horse for many days? If so, it may be changing time.

  But sometimes looks can be deceiving. So, for further confirmation, you unceremoniously lift your child up and sniff him like a cantaloupe.

  “Sniff, sniff . . . he either needs to be changed or won’t be ready to serve for three or four days.”

  Then you’ve got your squeezers, the parents who take the melon analogy to the extreme, and frankly should take a good hard look at themselves.

  And for the final test—you peek. No niceties, no subtlety, you just pick up the child, pull back his pants, and look inside.

  If you’re right, and the child needs changing, you’re vindicated.

  If he doesn’t need changing, you both feel a bit foolish. You, for being so off the mark and harassing a perfectly innocent child, and the child, of course, because someone’s pulling back their pants and looking in. Usually the baby will turn back to you as if to say, “May I help you?” And your honest answer is, “No, thanks, we’re just looking.”

  The only good thing to come out of this embarrassing standoff is that for a fleeting moment, you get a freebie look at a cute naked baby bottom. And it’s never a disappointing visual. Especially in this circumstance, where you’re looking from above and can see only the top half—the net result of which looks like a miniature Ten Commandments.

  It should be noted, also, that changing diapers is not without its entertainment value.

  When you’re changing a diaper, one of the things you have to do is lift the baby’s little legs, bend them, and swivel them. Sort of like when you’re cooking a chicken and you look underneath to see how the potatoes are doing.

  Now, sometimes, if you swivel a little too far, a special little gust of wind will whiz by your knuckles. An appreciative, resonant “Ode to Lunch.” What I discovered is that if, at this time, you continue to bend their knees and rotate them from the waist down, you can alter not only the tone but the duration of the sound. It’s not unlike the mechanics of a bagpipe—though without the woolen kilt and sense of celebration. But musical nonetheless.

  With the proper technique, you can get them to sing entire tunes. Well, not “sing” exactly, but I did extract from my son’s bottom the first few bars of “Nearer My God to Thee,” and, if I’m not mistaken, a lovely medley from Carousel.

  And this is a newborn—imagine if he took a lesson.

  And one more thing (and I swear this is the last thing I’m going to say about poop). Sometimes when you’re changing the ba
by, you may notice that there is a—and I’m really not trying to be rude—but sometimes you notice a big stain in the middle of the baby’s back. Not a continuous stain, mind you. Not a trail from the diaper all the way up his pajamas, but rather a little special area in the middle, stretched out in the shape of Cuba. Above it and below, it’s totally clean.

  So first of all, I have to ask—how do you poop up? It’s not like the baby was swinging upside down. He wasn’t hanging by his feet from a trapeze and the roar of the crowd made him lose it. He was sitting down, like a regular person, and this stuff flew up.

  But even more mystifying to me, how did it skip the area leading up to the spot? Right before Cuba, it’s clean and laundered. The little Gulf of Mexico area is unscathed. It’s a phenomenon.

  My theory—because I have given this thought—is that this particular skill may be a remnant of prehistoric times that slowly, as we’ve evolved, became obsolete. Something we no longer needed—like the Tail. Maybe thousands of years ago it was important. To a lizard. It’s possible that to a lizard, pooping straight up was not only vital to survival, but perhaps even a sign of impressive upbringing. Picture two lizards at the sink in the ladies’ room.

  “And this guy I just met, he is so cool. Really great skin, totally scaly, and long. And get this: He can poop 140 feet straight up. Standing on the ground, he can actually hit a pterodactyl in the throat.”

  “What a dreamboat . . .”

  The Big Tired Elephant

  When you’re the parents of a new child, all the craving and desire you’ve ever felt for sex is transferred over to sleep. It’s like somebody sneaked into your brain, found the wires going to the sex button and the sleep button, and just switched them.

  I didn’t realize how extensive the change was till I found myself one day staring at a lingerie ad with a photo of a beautiful, seductive, young woman sprawled practically naked across a satin-sheeted bed, and all I could think was, “Man, that bed looks comfortable.”

  I’ve Never Been

  This Tired, Ever

  No question about it, sleep deprivation is the worst thing about being a new parent. Period, end of discussion. Given the choice, I would gladly diaper my kid into his late twenties if for those same years you promised me a solid eight hours a night.

  Being sleep deprived (or the politically correct “consciousness challenged”) is like undergoing a medical experiment. One by one, you watch your mental faculties slip away.

  The first to go is language. Sometime during those forty-five minutes between feedings when you actually are asleep, a little man comes and takes your nouns away.

  “Honey, when you go to the uh . . .”

  “To the what?”

  “To the . . . whad’ya call it . . . the place? With the things . . . they have things that you can buy . . .”

  “The store?”

  “Yes, thank you. To the store . . . Make sure we pick up some . . . some, uh . . .”

  “What?”

  “Little . . . um . . .”

  “What do you want?”

  “You know. They’re small, you stick them in the ears . . .”

  “Earrings?”

  “No. Fuzzy things.”

  “Q-Tips?”

  “Yes, exactly. Q-Tips.”

  This, of course, presumes you have the strength to get that much of a sentence out. During our child’s first few months, my wife and I both thought we were going deaf. We literally could not hear half of every sentence spoken. It turns out we were just out of steam, too weak to speak audibly.

  “I spoke to fhmwlmmn . . .”

  “What?”

  “Yesterday. I spoke to fhmlawhlawhmn . . .”

  “Okay, stop right there, look me in the face and say that again slowly.”

  “I SPOKE TO THE PHARMACIST. THE PHARMACIST. What’s the MATTER with you?”

  Which brings us to the next unfortunate deterioration. You’re reduced to mankind’s most elemental mode of survival—crankiness. Just when you need each other most, you’re snapping at each other like sarcastic little turtles.

  “Is this your underwear?”

  “No, it’s Margaret Thatcher’s. And I can’t tell you why I have it.”

  Ugly rivalries break out like wildfire. When the baby wakes up in the middle of the night, for example, one of you has to get up and deal with it. And each of you will do anything not to be that one.

  The game goes like this:

  The baby starts crying. You both pretend you’re asleep and don’t hear a thing. But the baby is crying; he needs to see somebody. So, while still pretending to be asleep, you “accidentally” poke your elbow into your loved one’s ribs. If that fails to prod them awake, you nonchalantly roll over and slam into them, making a few fake snoring noises to show how asleep you are.

  Not to be outdone, your partner then rolls into you, throwing a hand in your face while “stretching.” The person who knocks the other person out of bed first wins. However, never under any circumstances ask, “You awake?” Because then all your partner has to do is lie there, and they win.

  As the volume of your child’s cries intensifies, you both feel progressively more guilty lying in bed—even though only seconds have actually elapsed. So Round Two begins, in which you both give up the charade of being asleep and instead compete over who’s got the best excuse not to get up.

  “Would you get up and see why he’s crying? I’ve got a big meeting tomorrow morning.”

  “So do I.”

  “Yes, but is your meeting at the Kremlin? . . . I didn’t think so.”

  Just because a baby cries, I discovered, doesn’t mean there’s always something wrong. Sometimes babies wake up for no real reason. They just want to check if they’re doing it right.

  “This is Sleeping, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I just lie here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay.”

  Then back to sleep they go.

  And then there’s the very specific condition that only babies get called “overtired,” where they’re too tired—and frankly, too stupid—to just sleep.

  “Why’s he crying?”

  “He’s tired.”

  “Why doesn’t he go to sleep?”

  “He’s too tired. He’s over-tired.”

  “Too tired to sleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why don’t I go to sleep, and he can watch me for a while?”

  See, grown-ups don’t have this problem. If I’m tired, just give me a chair and a room where people aren’t specifically shouting, and I will fall asleep. It doesn’t take a lot of experience or dexterity to do this. It’s not like “hungry,” where babies sadly lack the means to feed themselves. Sleeping is simple. Just shut your eyes and see what happens. But babies have not yet figured out that Sleep is the antidote to Tired.

  For many new parents, a Sleeping Baby becomes all they ask out of life.

  “Please go to sleep . . . I beg you to go to sleep . . . everybody shut up, so he can go to sleep . . . Okay, he just fell asleep . . . hurry up and pat him so he stays asleep . . . Now if anyone wakes my baby up, I will shoot them.”

  You get nuts. I started barking at people in public places. Restaurants, malls, stadiums—places where it’s one’s God-given right to converse—I’ve actually gone over to strangers and “shushed” them.

  “I see you’re having a party, but couldn’t you all sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to your mom in the parking lot? My kid is trying to sleep—shhhh!!!”

  I became the world’s librarian.

  The most popular piece of advice we got from our friends was, “When your baby sleeps, you better sleep, too. It’s your only chance.”

  The second most popular piece of advice was, “When your baby sleeps, you better hurry up and do everything you want to do, because when they’re up, you won’t have a chance.”

  So, according to the experts, when your baby sleeps, you have to go to s
leep, while simultaneously doing everything you couldn’t do when the baby was awake.

  Any way you figure it, those precious windows of opportunity between “He’s cranky because he wants to sleep” and “He’s cranky because he just woke up” are to be treasured. And maximizing this Golden Time requires precision planning.

  “Okay, if we feed him now, he should be asleep in the car. Maybe we can have a conversation. If we take him out of the car just right, he’ll very likely sleep through soup, salad, and possibly the main course. He’ll definitely be stirring by coffee. Flip him over quick, that’ll knock him out for dessert.”

  Getting your child to sleep becomes such a blinding obsession, I myself would often lose sight of the big picture: What is the actual goal here? Constant sleep? No awake-time? Zero consciousness?

  I mean, we must accept that at some point babies have to be awake. They didn’t come to the planet just to sleep. Are we determined to get them asleep just so we can get a taste of what life was like before we had kids?

  Because if we are, then tell me again—why did we have a kid? Just to lie there and look soft and fuzzy? We could have just gotten, say, a peach. A Saint Bernard. A narcoleptic houseguest. Or why not just get a huge chenille bathrobe? Chenille bathrobes are fuzzy and just lie there—why don’t we just get us one of those and name it Michael? And the great thing about a bathrobe is, no matter how hard you slam a door, it ain’t getting up.

  The Mad Patter

  I used to think that patting babies on the back was simply to “burp” them: to coax little gas bubbles out of their tiny digestive systems. But, oh, it is so much more.