Babyhood (9780062098788) Read online

First and foremost, it is primarily a tool of Distraction. Anytime you see them on the brink of waking up or crying, or detect even the slightest hint of displeasure, start patting. Essentially, you want to talk them out of it. They can be ready to absolutely bawl and explode into a dissertation on “Why Everything Sucks,” but if you pat them just right, they’ll stop and turn to you, slightly confused, as if you bumped into them in a crowded airport.

  “Hmm? Beg your pardon? . . . Somebody say something? . . .”

  Then they spend the next few moments trying to isolate the patting. “Where’s that damn rattling coming from? . . . Anybody else feel a shaking? Like a ‘thump, thump, thump, thump?’ . . . Nobody? Okay, maybe it’s just me . . . as I was about to say . . . Waaahhh . . .” And then they go ahead and cry anyway. But for a second there, you feel very clever. You momentarily outwitted an infant.

  If you keep it going long enough, you sort of retune their entire body frequency to the rhythm of your patting. They will ultimately surrender, and go for a ride on your little percussive train.

  Sometimes, I must admit, I get carried away. Because patting out the same, rhythmic thump can get a bit monotonous. So you find ways to amuse yourself. You add a few syncopations. You double up the beat, change the feel, transition into a little waltz time, jazz it up, thump out the opening drumbeat of the “Sergeant Pepper” reprise—whatever your mood dictates. But you can become mesmerized by your own thumping prowess. One time I had the baby in my arms, didn’t realize I had already successfully patted him to sleep, and for another thirty minutes banged out an entire Tito Puente album on his spine.

  Nobody wants to see a baby cry. But the truth of the matter is that, sometimes, on their way to crying, babies warm up for a cry, and it can be pretty damn cute.

  Usually, when they just wake up, babies feel obligated to cry about something, even if they’re not sure what. So they scan their little brains, thinking of a viable source of discontent. Plus, they don’t have quite the energy one needs to cry, so they just start to squint their eyes and lower the corners of their mouth, until the entire mouth becomes a downward-facing curve. Like the sales chart of a company about to go under. Or the “Tragedy” half of the Comedy/Tragedy masks.

  The challenge I set for myself is, How long can I let that drama-award face go before allowing actual tears? How close to the edge of hysterical can I let him get? What you want to do is catch him just a microsecond before he spills over into a wail. Timing is crucial: If you wait too long, you leave the category of “Fun-Loving Parent” and enter the world of “Cruel for No Damn Reason.” It’s a game of risk, the parental version of bungee jumping.

  There are those who would belittle my expertise in the art of Baby Patting, and argue that thumping someone’s torso continuously is not that difficult. If I weren’t around, they maintain, the job could easily be performed by a metronome with an oven mitt. But they underestimate what I have accomplished. I’ve become more than a mere tapper, more than a pedestrian thumper. I’ve become, in essence, a great hypnotist. The Amazing Daderino.

  “Give me a baby on the brink, I will do the rest.”

  Even if they’re totally awake, I can put them down.

  “Look into my eyes . . . Are you looking? . . . Just a moment . . . wait a minute . . . and . . . Voilà—ladies and gentlemen, I give you: a Sleeping Baby.”

  It used to be, if you put people to sleep, you were considered Dull; now, it’s a Gift.

  Once your child is asleep, however, if you’re not careful transferring him out of your arms, you’ll wake him up. Then you have to start your act all over again.

  Many is the time I’ve patted my son to sleep on my chest, and then, too scared to wake him, I elect to just lie there. Whatever I had planned to do I forgo and prostrate myself with a small human being clinging to my neck, doing my best to remain perfectly inert. Like Sean Connery and the tarantula in Dr. No. (Although with a tarantula, you get bitten and it’s over. With a baby, if they start crying, your whole afternoon is shot.)

  Not that lying with a sleeping baby on your chest is the worst thing in the world, either. In fact, it’s one of the sweetest pleasures I’ve ever tasted. An entire person curled up between your collar bone and stomach, covering and warming your heart, all the while breathing little bursts of perfect air onto your neck. It’s not hard to imagine why moms love the sensation of breast-feeding. For dads, breast-napping is about as close as we get.

  While you hold your sleeping child, you envision all the wonderful things you hope to do, and all the details of the charmed life you have planned together.

  And then they wake up and have no idea who you are. Babies awaken slightly disoriented, with a look that’s half Angel and half Lost Tourist. They look up at you like you’re vaguely familiar, but they can’t quite place the face.

  “And you are . . . ?”

  “I’m Dad.”

  “No, that’s not it . . .”

  “It’s me. Your daddy.”

  “Were you here earlier?”

  “Of course, don’t you remember? I tapped you to sleep . . . Half an hour ago . . . ? Tall guy . . . ? Married to Mom . . .”

  It starts to ring a bell.

  “Mom . . .”

  “The one with the milk.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, of course . . . Dad! How are you?”

  Step Aside, Please

  Given how much more naturally competent my wife is at almost all areas of parenting, if I do discover an area where I may have a leg up, I jump on it. I pounce on it like a lion on meat.

  One day I walked by to see my wife changing our son’s diaper, and I witnessed what, for my money, was a rather perfunctory once-around of the boy’s young privates. I said, “Babe, what are you doing?”

  She was thrown.

  “Why?”

  I stepped in with unwavering authority.

  “That is not how we wash balls.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sweetie, I’ve been changing diapers pretty consistently for a while now, and . . .”

  “Maybe. But let me ask you something.”

  “What.”

  “D’ya have balls yourself?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “All right, then.”

  “So what? That doesn’t mean that—”

  “Well, I think I know a lit-tle bit more about the subject than you do. So . . . do you mind?”

  “Fine.”

  And as she stepped away, I took over.

  “Thank you.”

  When she was out of the room, I looked down at my son, who I’m pretty sure was smiling at me appreciatively, and I winked at him. It was the first time I’m aware of having a specifically male bonding moment with my son. (And certainly the first time I ever winked at anybody.)

  “Don’t worry, Daddy’s here. Daddy knows what you need . . .”

  As I proceeded to diaper him, I took the opportunity to wax philosophical about all things masculine and intimate.

  “You know, Son . . . as you grow older and bigger and stronger, this area will be very important to you. Oh, I know it means nothing to you now. Now it’s just the area that gets wetter than every place else. But you mark my words: This area will be your friend.”

  Powder, powder, sprinkle, sprinkle.

  “But it’s also important that it not be your only friend. I don’t want this area to rule your life as it does with so many fine young men. So much energy in life is spent comparing and competing and discussing this area, but you must remember that this is not the true measure of a man. You know, years ago . . .”

  And then I noticed he was staring at me. This whole time, he’d been looking at me looking at him. I could hear the therapy bills ringing up.

  “And that’s why, Doctor, to this day I cannot put on a bathing suit if there is a man talking.”

  Quickly, I turned my gaze elsewhere and finished diapering him without looking. It was at this point that my
bride walked back in the room.

  “Sweetie . . .”

  “What?”

  “You’re diapering his thigh.”

  “Huh? Oh, I know . . . hey, why don’t you take over? You know what you’re doing.”

  Is That a Needle

  in Your Hand, or Are You

  Just Glad to See Me?

  Taking your child for his first checkup is a big milestone. But it’s a mixed bag. On one hand, it’s exciting, because your baby, who was born seemingly minutes ago, is already mature enough to be doing things as mundane as having a doctor’s appointment. He’s like a person. With things to do.

  “I’ve got to stop at the dry cleaner’s, then I’ve got a doctor’s appointment, and then I’ve got a three o’clock reading of Here Comes a Fire Truck. So let me pencil you in for tomorrow.”

  Clearly time is flying, progress is being made.

  On the other hand, your baby is in a doctor’s office. He’s certainly not going to enjoy it. It’s bright, loud, and smells like a hospital, a place he didn’t particularly enjoy the first time. So it’s hard to imagine anything good coming out of this. All you hope for is that you get a perfect bill of health, which means, best-case scenario, you leave with the exact same baby you walked in with. While you wait in an examining room for the doctor to finish proding and poking someone else’s baby, you sit and memorize the posters of disgusting ear infections and faulty lung scenarios that you hadn’t managed to worry about yet, but are certainly happy to add to the list now. So, even if everything goes great, you personally still leave a little worse off for the wear.

  When the doctor finally comes in, they immediately—if they’re smart—say how beautiful your baby is, how much he’s grown, etc. This is, frankly, all you want to hear.

  Then you hand the baby over to be examined—a moment that feels somehow a little biblical. Gingerly and fearfully, you make of your firstborn a sacrificial offering to a Being with abilities far beyond your own. You have nothing but your faith. And the hope that those diplomas hanging on the wall are not forged.

  It’s kind of like bringing your car into the shop.

  “Uh, yeah, it’s not making the noise now, but I definitely heard it yesterday, so, you know, why don’t you just poke around and tell me what you think, because I myself know virtually nothing.”

  And I felt sad because I realized my son was about to take his first Test. He might not have known it, and he might not have studied for it or worried about it, but the fact that he was—consciously or unconsciously—about to respond, or fail to respond, correctly or incorrectly, and have points added or subtracted from his record—it all just broke my heart.

  Ultimately, you realize you can’t help him, so you merely wish him good luck and tell him to “do the best you can.”

  But nothing prepared me for the real heartbreak—the moment of The Shot. The actual injection. You know your baby has to get these shots, but that moment of pain and the look of betrayal in his eyes still haunt me. Babies have no idea there’s a shot coming. They don’t see the nurse shooting an arc of fluid out of the needle. And if they did, they’d probably think it’s just a very small, very pointy breast. They don’t know why the nurse is squeezing their little thigh and coming even closer, but they don’t mind.

  They’ve finally gotten comfortable, they’ve overcome the initial misgivings about the smell and general vibe of the joint, and figure if you trust these people, if you’re comfortable enough to hand over your own flesh and blood to them, they must be A-OK.

  Then the nurse stabs this spear into your infant’s little virgin, heretofore undamaged skin. But the cries don’t come right away. There’s a small interval between Injection and Pain. Maybe it’s that their little nerve endings take that much longer to transmit the news, but there’s a good few, solid seconds where the baby doesn’t register that they’ve just been savaged.

  But you do. You know that with a jolt like that, a response will be forthcoming. I was painfully aware that there was a very short clock ticking, and only precious seconds of innocence remaining in my child’s heart. Those beautiful, trusting, innocent eyes are about to transform horribly, and I have but a fleeting, minuscule window of opportunity to either distance myself from the event or soothe him; say something that will ready him, because any second now . . . and—BAMMO!—it hits. Wherever that shot was supposed to go, it just got there. And he is instantly, irrevocably pissed. Not regular pissed—rageful. There are no graduations. No transitional drama-award face. It doesn’t hurt a Little, then a Little More, and then kind of Really, Really Hurt. It goes from Nothing Whatsoever to “OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW” in a flash.

  And then he whips his head in my direction.

  “Did you SEE that?!”

  You have nothing to offer except a colorful plastic key you pathetically shake around a little. This does nothing.

  “Did you see what that lady did?! She just stabbed me!”

  The betrayal is unspeakable.

  “How could you let that happen? You were standing right there, you must have seen that, for crying out loud. You two are the worst parents I ever heard of. You’re both cruel, untrustworthy, and no damn good . . . Now could somebody get me a Band-Aid? Do you think you could manage that?”

  It killed me to know that I couldn’t make his pain go away. I looked at him tenderly, thinking, “Son—”

  “And don’t think this hurts you more than it hurts me.”

  I thought, “Okay.”

  Look, a Fuzzy Tiger

  To fully appreciate what having a baby does to your life, you need to really grasp the concept of Baby Time. Babies slow down time in two particularly exasperating ways.

  First of all, things that used to take five minutes now take an hour. When you add a baby to any activity, even something as simple as Walking Out the Door, you must allow yourself one solid hour more than you used to. There’s the packing, the changing, the planning for any one of seven hundred scenarios that could develop, and the going back for things you’d need for any of the two dozen other scenarios your spouse decided could happen because she heard of them happening to someone her friend knows.

  This is why the moment your child is born, feel free to lose entirely from your vocabulary the phrase, “We’ll be there in twenty minutes.” It has no value, it has no more application. You will never again be anywhere in twenty minutes. Ever.

  Furthermore, and this is the nasty second reality of Baby Time: Things that feel like they’re taking an hour actually are not. I was once so proud of having successfully entertained my son for an entire afternoon. I designed and constructed an immense building-block fortress, played a vigorous round of “Where’s-Daddy’s-Nose?/Where-Are-Daddy’s-Ears?” and rendered a poignant reading of Harry the Hippo, only to glance at my watch and discover that in fact seven minutes had elapsed.

  BABIES SLOW DOWN TIME. Understand this. Accept it. Make friends with it. They tamper with the actual physics and mechanics of the Space/Time Continuum. In fact, if you play with a baby long enough, time will literally stop, and then go backward. These tiny people can actually reverse time. A friend of mine once played with his ten-month-old daughter for an entire afternoon, and by the time his wife came home, the man was seven years old. No kidding around, he was, astonishingly enough, a scant six or seven years older than his own child.

  This is why parents love videos. Even the ones like me who swore, “I’m not going to be like all those parents who just drop their kid in front of the TV.” Because you discover that videos have the power to overcome Baby Time. They are immune to the baby’s unearthly powers. If the tape says “fifty-three minutes,” you’re going to get fifty-three minutes. Put the kid in front of that video, you are free to do fifty-three minutes’ worth of stuff.

  One time, the only tape I could find was the instructional video that came with our car. It was about thirty-five minutes long—which is exactly what I needed. As it turns out, my kid love
d it. You know why? He’d never seen it. He’s never seen anything.

  And this is where the Powers That Be compensate nicely for the inconvenience of Baby Time. They throw in the wonderful Counter Force—Baby Point of View. One works against you, one helps you out.

  Baby Point of View hinges on the simple premise that almost anything you show them, they’ve never seen before. And if they have, there’s a very good chance they don’t remember. So it is through this miracle that a piece of Scotch tape becomes the best toy ever made. A restaurant’s fish tank becomes the San Diego Zoo. The produce department at the supermarket is suddenly the Wonderful Interactive Museum of Food—because it’s all new.

  It seems that the key parenting skill you need to develop when entertaining your new child is the ability to Distract. If they get bored, or scared, or cry for any reason, you just pull a sleight-of-hand and misdirect their simple little minds elsewhere. For starters, show them something. Anything.

  “Look, a fuzzy tiger.”

  They will most likely stop crying and evaluate this new information.

  “Hmm, a tiger . . . I hadn’t realized that . . .”

  “Yes, a tiger . . . look . . . see the tiger? . . .”

  “Well, (sniffle) my stomach was hurting . . .”

  “I know, I know . . .”

  “But . . . a tiger, you say . . .”

  “Yes, a tiger. Right here. Here is a tiger . . .”

  It doesn’t even have to be as interesting as a tiger. Any physical item that is currently on the planet and within reach will do.

  “Look, the cap to Daddy’s water bottle . . . see . . . plastic . . . and white . . . isn’t that something? And here are some keys.”

  It’s truly a miracle that this works. I always expect them to demand more. At least an elaboration.

  “Okay, I see . . . you’re showing me keys . . . but what about them? Are they important? Do they open anything I should know about?”