Published in The Los Angeles Review, Vol. 7, Spring 2010.
I was doing laundry the other day, sleep-deprived, and repeatedly trudging the thirty-eight stairs to the basement washer and dryer, when a miniature baby sock – pale green and harmless – triggered something of a meltdown. Not only was I washing, drying, fluffing, and folding a two-week, grubby accumulation of my wife’s and my own garments, but I’d also taken on a full container of baby laundry, weighted like someone had sandbagged it. The washer cycle finished spinning and I lifted the dewy lid to discover the wedged baby sock trapped inside the plastic cylinder. For a long moment, I stood there stooped over the machine, wincing, my fingers dangling like serpents. But I could not coax the damn thing out. Tongs were required. Then again, the thought of mounting all those stairs back up to our place simply for tongs made my bones protest in exhaustion. Instead, I tore strips from the remains of a cardboard box abandoned down there by some other tenant, pinching the strips into primitive forceps and tweezing at the little sock. The better part of my day had now been eroded by the chore of laundry – a chunk of my life – the whole operation ground to a halt due to an absurd glitch. I jabbed at the sock some more, attempting to skewer and force it up the moist cylinder, but the cardboard quickly wilted, so that now I held two useless, soggy appendages like Edward Paperhands. I took deep breaths, contemplating the hapless sock with an unfamiliar muddle of something like pity and resentment, and pausing to consider the full extent of my inadequacy. Then I took action. Spreading my arms and legs like a grizzly, I proceeded to throttle the washing machine. This, of course, accomplished absolutely nothing. But there I stood, enraged, shaking the tinny, thundering hell out of the thing, and surrendering to the testosterone scuffle of man conquering appliance.
I have not yet run a marathon. Everest awaits my summiting. Nor have I freefallen from a shrieking F-14D Tomcat jet, hacked through Amazon jungles, mastered Danish, or completed a PhD in quantum mechanics. I haven’t composed an opera, become board-certified as a brain surgeon, learned how to swallow fire, or committed the Divine Comedy to memory. Each of these feats is now on hold as I grapple with a condition more pressing: I’ve just become a new father.
Baby Helena was born seven weeks ago; six pounds, thirteen ounces, eighteen inches long. Tender Helena, tiny being of countless epithets: Sweet Pie, Blueberry Eyes, Grunty, Gassy, Fussy, Poopmeister. I tell you all this not to lay any new-found wisdom on you. A year ago, I doubt I would’ve so much as glanced at an essay on fatherhood and, if so, would have munched on some absurdly salty snack to counteract the mawkish prose. But much has changed.
As we anticipated and planned for the new baby, I agreed to be right there at Jill’s maternity bedside. And I was able to commit myself unequivocally to every possible scenario which took place from about the neck up. But, even after the birthing class, I carried around my worries, privately mortified by the what-if of the unknown. Squeamish when faced with anything explicitly medical, it was my firm intention never to glance southwards during the ordeal – to gaze into my wife’s eyes, daub at her forehead and encourage her to breathe; breathe deep and release; good, that’s it, sweetie, breathe. And release. Everything else could be best left to the professional assortment of doctors, birthing specialists, nurses, intubators, wet nurses, support staff, and spiritual advisors. I’d meet up with everyone backstage after the show once all blood and guts had been appropriately bucketed and whisked from the scene.
But then the wondrous happened and, I’m telling you, something got hold of me, sweeping me along in the moment, and somehow I was watching the miracle of my daughter’s birth – every aching, fantastic, bloodied moment, the emerging dark crown of a mysterious and alien head, followed by the breathtaking dismount into the world. Someone handed me scissors and, rapt, I cut the umbilical cord, separating our writhing baby girl from her mother’s womb, weeping, weeping, Helena, as I welcomed you.
Note my daily fumblings, the paternal acrobatics. Jackson Pollack-esque diaper-changes, lingering burpings followed by spit-up triage, and my comical attempts at soothing via knock-knock jokes and improvisations on the song about knowing the muffin man. In fact, my first weeks of paternity might be summed up in the simple, three-word phrase, Shit! Now what? How did such an unwittingly slapstick condition come to be? A year and a half ago, Jill and I wrote out our needs on an enormous canvas paper chart. I recall negotiations of possible cat acquisitions, exotic travels, French mistresses, and maybe a pet iguana or carnivorous fish. Paternity seemed a distant and innocuous enough abstraction, something like cleaning under the bed – a thing you intended to get around to one of these days.
But all of a sudden, there’s a fragile bundle in our bedroom, starved and wailing without warning, gasifed, cramped, tired, snuffling, needy. From slumbering cherub to shrieking drama queen in about six seconds fat, you’ve become the loudest in the household, and I’m not all that sure how to soothe you. It occurs to me I’ve been thinking solely about myself pretty much for four decades or so. Now an unnamed terror prickles me – the possibility that I will do everything wrong, that I lack all preparation and that I know nothing. I’ve helped bring this remarkable person into the world and am humbled by a sudden realization of the stakes – how much I now have to lose and just how vulnerable I am.
I navigate the daunting adjustments, my moods lurching from jubilant to overwhelmed. What’s become of my time and my independence – has anyone seen my independence lying around anywhere? And what about my identity? Just when will I get down to working on the novel, joining a rowing team, and learning French? I embrace this new mysterious mission while grieving the loss of my former self – that old self sloughed of and left behind on the maternity ward floor. Suddenly I’m anchored, rooted and affixed, sitting up late with baby and bottle like a nesting fowl, no longer cruising the hunter-gatherer lane I’d been coasting on since college.
The sacrifices feel impossible, yet, at the same time, I’m overcome with a raw and helpless joy, a giddy tenderness newly exposed in me. Face to face with Baby, I feel myself going soft like aging fruit. How to love your baby to the utmost of soupy and syrupy, yet maintain that sturdy, masculine mien as specified by the male code? I prickle, seething in exasperation about how my life seems to be unwittingly suspended. Then I stumble upon the tiniest of baby socks, an intimate and Lilliputian parcel suggesting a tenderness which threatens to split me apart. I fear I may be too solipsistic to do the gig. Just when did the center of gravity – the center of the universe – shift? Who have I become and who am I becoming and how must I prepare and how should I presume?
Dear daughter Helena, dear girl, so fragile and dependent, barely able to upright your enormous, pear-shaped, cephalopod head. I must warn you the immunizations are daunting, the things lurking out there I must try to protect you from: hepatitis A through Z, measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, polio, chicken pox, rooster pox, small pox, pax aeterna. Identity theft, unfettered consumerism, Republicanism, telemarketers, car salesmen, shifty landlords, oversalted foods, transfat, hydrogenated fat, saturated fat, unfiltered hip hop.
New parents, our 4:00 a.m. attempts at trouble-shooting portray the depleted mumblings of two sleep-deprived, aphasic zombies.
“Must she shriek like that?”
“She must be cold.”
“No, it’s hot in here. She looks hot.”
“Shit, now what?”
“It isn’t the temperature, it’s just a little gas.”
“Un-uh. Because if she had gas she’d be doing her wiggle thing.”
“She’s gassy all right. Loaded with the stuff. Smell that? She’s practically an OPEC nation.”
“Do you think she could be hungry again?”
“I think she’s dreaming.”
“What do they dream about?”
“They have milk dreams, then dream of poop.”
¿En qué piensas, hija? Just what is it you’re thinking, little one? For Jill and me, the guesswork of non-verbal communication proves an ongoing exercise in enduring frustration through patience and grace.
I’ve been having these dreams about the baby, bugaboos of anxiety and incompetence: Helena and I pull into a parking lot and I abandon her for a moment in the locked car. I don’t remember the safest way to position her in the back seat, so I simply place her atop grocery bags peaked with milk cartons and thorny vegetables. I’m a few blocks away when it occurs to me it’s moronic to leave a baby in a locked car, which is when I realize my keys are in the locked car.
But in other dreams, Helena speaks and I begin to decode. I’d assumed the whole time that babies couldn’t effectively communicate due to undeveloped verbal skills. But it turns out it’s my own language skills which are deficient. Our little bean’s been all along communicating lofty, illuminating concepts, invoking great theorists and semioticians, but I simply have not been properly tuned in. In these dreams she looks up from my lap, spreads her pudgy palms, and orates:
“There are no other levels of consciousness and external reality. The many additional phenomena which have their place in the universe and which ought somehow to constitute the frame for the occurrences of the narrative are submitted to such reduction that nothing survives but an insubstantial background. I do not wish to prejudge the moral implications of such a mechanism, but I shall not exceed the limits of objective analysis if I point out that the ubiquity of the signifier in myth exactly reproduces the physique of the alibi.”
Baby and I are up late, privately enjoying an exchange of flamboyant belches and the farts of feckless frat boys. It seems, in this regard, there’s probably much I’m able to impart. She smiles my way and I almost take it personally before realizing it has almost nothing to do with my existence – that this smile merely signifies the pleasurable release of intestinal gas, the sheer joy of letting one rip into the night. Amen, little daughter. A philosophy-major-friend of mine once defined nirvana as the spontaneous and simultaneous excretion from every orifice. In this regard, babies may come closest to achieving enlightenment.
Jill hands over the midnight milk bottle, muttering things I do not comprehend concerning stork bite, little birdy mouth, nipple shields and proper latching on. I sincerely mean to support my wife. And yet, in the universe that is lactation, there seems to be so much to keep abreast of.
Meanwhile, I feed you, Helena, wanting to feast on your baby fumes, the hot, yeasty aroma rising from your downy skull. Post-bottle, I watch you collapse like a bus stop wino into a warm, bucolic stupor, and I must refrain from wanting to lovingly squeeze you to death.
My role as a caregiver feels both essential and yet unassailably secondary in comparison with the center of baby’s universe known as mommy. In the journey of baby’s growth and ascendancy, I may in fact be more elevator man than primary nurturer. But, on the other hand, my human plight is minimal compared to Jill’s ongoing saga of lactation, her puzzling transformation from steadily-inflating beach ball to sleep-deprived and wayward bovine. Whereas I squirm in the identity chasm between thrill-seeking wayfarer and haplessly pinioned daddy boy, her entire human condition has become, for the time being, consumed by a recovery from the aching cattle-esque. My goals encompass a someday return to refreshing sleep, a consistent exercise schedule, and the upper body strength to balance baby while urinating. But Jill’s overarching experience from pregnancy to motherhood becomes a medical primer chockfull of the barely fathomable: effacement, mucous plug, bloody show, vernix, episiotomy, amniotic fluid, perineum, cervical dilation, prodromal labor, cephalopelvic disproportion, epidural, meconium, colostrum, breast pump expression, engorgement, and the biblical deluge – the Red Sea floodwaters – the fat glop of afterbirth.
What past experiences of my own can I bring to paternity? Growing up, we seemed to always have cats around, not babies. I find little in past experiences to draw upon for my current, bizarre and unprepared-for condition, but instead gain expertise as I go.
Someone said all babies look like Winston Churchill. Angelic blob, babe of a thousand faces, you morph within the span of an afternoon from enraptured, blueberry-eyed cherub to Richard Nixon. Your glassy, disarrayed nap face at times resembles the sardonic stare of John Malkovich. And just when I think we’ve got you pegged, your chubby, Neptune cheeks inflate into tomato blowfish, as you transmogrify with grunts and shrieks into something right out of The Exorcist. I should have, as a youth, set aside my ass-kicking, kung fu grip GI Joe and taken the time to figure out how to dress and undress Barbie. Maybe then diaper-changing would not prolong the way it does into the wee and hideous hours. I probably could have learned something useful from my sister who’d collected hundreds of Barbies but who was poorly organized. She kept an arsenal of amputated Barbie parts – heads, limbs, amputated torsos – in an enormous receptacle that looked more like a Civil War reenactment than a young girl’s play station. But I stuck with GI Joe, learning perhaps less practical things like how grenades were carried or what well-defined pectorals ought to look like.
I’m searching these days for my own paternal métier, some identity to inhabit, which falls comfortably between Bachelor Boy and Mr. Dad. How can one be both liberated and committed; capricious and creative, yet at the same time reliable, rock-solid, responsible? Where in this ecstatic transformation is the equilibrium between joyful, domestic well-being and some uneasy feeling of terminal duty?
Jill and I are sharing diaper duty while Helena, supine on her wooden changing station, burbles and bicycles her chubby legs. She’s entered that quiet active state when, for the moment, all her needs have been met and her brain’s silently cycling at full thrust. The baby book says she can now see up to ten feet away and will, at a glance, differentiate between Mommy and Daddy. Things are moving fast, blossoming, fleeting. By the time you read this, a bunch of new things will have happened. Baby’s pensive gaze and slightly cross-eyed-Barbara Streisand smile, Jill’s exhausted, dry, hiccoughy laugh – it’s a moment that nearly makes sense. Our baby’s happy, grounded, and animated, emerging from a long nap. Perhaps I am as well.