Babyhood (9780062098788) (15 page)

Fortunately, this lady seemed to pose no threat. She smiled from a safe distance, made a few friendly baby sounds to engage my son, and then mentioned to me that though she had traveled the world extensively for many years, she had never seen or heard mention of a child being quite this splendid looking, and then went on her way. I was very proud. And felt my confidence increase. I thought for sure this lady was stopping us to point out that I was doing something wrong: The kid's leg was hanging out of the stroller, his little seat belt was undone, or he was buckled in upside down—
something
wrong.

But to my surprise, she said nothing of the sort. And as I walked along, past other people, nobody said anything like that. Nobody criticized me, nobody made suggestions. There were no critical stares, no looks that said, “Hey, look at that guy over there, with the stroller . . . Something's not right . . . He doesn't know how to work the stroller . . . Why, he's not a father at all . . . That man is an impostor . . . Police! Somebody! Stop that man!”

But nothing. As far as they knew, I was just “some guy out with his kid.” A certified Dad. They're oblivious to the cold sweat, the white-knuckle grip I have on the stroller handle. No one notices that each time I get to a new sidewalk, I actually bend and lift the entire carriage up and over the curb, because secretly I'm afraid I might tilt it too far and slide my offspring into the gutter. God bless them, they notice none of this. Even my baby doesn't notice. (Although at one intersection, after I carried the stroller—
with the kid in it
—in my arms for a block and a half because it looked to me like some guy was possibly going to spit, I did notice my son look up at me from his forty-five-degree perch as if to say, “Are you sure we don't want to get Mom in on this? She's very good at just this type of thing.”)

I was thrilled to know that all this was merely my own private nightmare, and whatever shortcomings I may or may not have are nobody's business.

But as I thought about it, a new concern came to mind.

“If they can't tell I don't know what I'm doing, how do I know
they
know what
they're
doing? Maybe we're all impostors.” Suddenly I was looking at the world with new eyes. Very frightened eyes.

“What if
nobody
knows what they're doing? When I sit down in a restaurant and a waitress asks me what I want, how do I know she actually works there? Maybe she's just a lunatic who showed up with an apron and a pad of paper, and no one has the guts to ask her to leave. When you get on a plane, how do you know the pilot has ever actually flown before? Who's to say he's not a luggage handler who swiped a better uniform? Is it not entirely possible that when our obstetrician was in medical school, his nickname was “Goofball”?

I soon realized this was a very unhealthy train of thought to be on, and I jumped right off the train. I focused my concentration instead on the job at hand—taking my son to the mailbox. But it did change the way I look at people. And it certainly made me marvel at my wife, who, apparently, goes out with the kid every day as if it were nothing.

F
inally we arrive at the mailbox—an exhausting block and a half from home. Dizzy with the victory of arriving at our destination in more or less one piece, I reach into my pocket, retrieve the now sweaty envelopes, and am about to toss them into the mailbox when I hear a voice. It's my wife's voice, echoing God-like in my head.

“Talk to him.”

“Hmm?” I say automatically, totally accepting that my wife might in fact be physically standing next to me, just for a follow-up evaluation on my performance.

“Talk to him. Explain to him what you're doing,” the voice in my head suggests.

Sometimes I forget that part—talking to my child. Actually
being
with him. When I'm in charge of the kid, I tend to either stare at him like he's television or drift totally into a world of my own, running through my list of things-I-have-to-do-later-when-I'm-not-taking-care-of-the-kid. Or I take the job
so
seriously I become blinded by the severity of the responsibility, and panic. What I seem to miss is the middle ground—the part where you share, teach, learn, play—the part you can actually enjoy.

“Right. Talk to him. I'll do that. Thanks,” I say to myself, and the voice of the Nice Lady in My Head leaves me alone again.

“So,” I say to my buckled-up Beautiful Boy. “This is a mailbox.”

And in response, he takes a hearty bite out of his little red corduroy clown's terry-cloth head.

“See? Daddy's going to put these letters into the mailbox. See? . . . What else can I tell you . . . The mailbox is blue.”

When in doubt, mention the color. They can't get enough of colors, these kids.

“It's a blue mailbox.”

Another ferocious bite-and-tug almost removes the corduroy clown's left ear. Clearly the boy is not that interested—I'll just mail the damn letters.

“Explain to him how it works.”

“I tried.”

“Try again.”

“All right, all right. Quit yelling.”

Fortunately, no one sees or hears this violent exchange in my head. (See what I mean? They think I'm a guy-with-his-kid, and in fact I'm not only hearing voices but barking back at them.)

“We put the letters in the mailbox, and then the mailman comes and gets them.”

Talking to your baby is a lot like being on a first date; you feel like you're either saying too little or too much.

“The postal system was invented by Benjamin Franklin. In Philadelphia. He also invented bifocals. And I hear he had over one hundred illegitimate children.”

Probably too much.

“The mailman takes the letters and puts them in a big bag and then he takes them to where they're going. See, this one goes to Aunt Ellen, who sent you that itchy sweater you hate, and this one goes to the Electricity Company so they don't shut off our electricity and force us out of our home.”

A little too heavy.

“Forget that. That will never happen.”

Then, remembering that Demonstrating is always better than Explaining, I unbuckle him, scoop him up, and illustrate my letter-mailing technique.

“What you want to do is: Pull down the handle, open the mailbox's mouth, and then you
flick
the letters in. You want to get that nice flicking motion in your wrist . . . And then you pull the mouth open-and-closed a few times, to make sure the letters went down. A lot of people will tell you that doesn't do anything. They're wrong. You
must
check. Otherwise the mailbox will chew up your letter and stick it in a corner where no one can find it for years and years and years.”

My son smiles. I pull the handle up and down again. He seems to enjoy the squeaky noise. Who said mailboxes aren't a dynamite activity for youngsters?

As we prepare for our return voyage, I wonder if I've left anything out.

“Now, you may notice, it says here they pick up at eleven A.M., but between you and me it says the same thing on every mailbox, and there's no way that the guy can be at every mailbox in town at the same time, so I say just throw it in whenever you feel like it—it makes no difference. But you know what? You probably won't be mailing things by yourself for a while, so forget that. The main thing for you to remember, I would say, is: The box is blue. It's a big shiny blue box with a squeaky blue mouth.”

As I buckle him back in, my son gives me one of those magnificent, otherworldly smiles, and looks at me as if to say, “Dad, I don't know what you're talking about, but you seem like a very nice man.”

Meanwhile, Back
at the Office

T
he moment you have a baby, every available wall space and square inch of surface area is covered with baby pictures. Big pictures, little pictures, pictures in frames, pictures thumbtacked to the wall . . . you name it. For a while, we were actually buying new furniture just so we had more surfaces on which to put more pictures.

Even though I used to make fun of people who thrust their children's photos in your face against your will, and swore up and down that I would never become one of those people, I have in fact become not just “one” of those people—I became the
president
of all those people.

When I returned to the office as a dad, no one was safe. Anyone who wasn't smart enough or quick enough to get out of the way was cornered and detained for as long as it took to study my baby's picture and reiterate what I already knew to be the case: This child is preposterously cute.

    

B
eing out of the house and back in the office made me feel even better about being a dad. Because at the office you get all the accolades for being a dad without any of the actual responsibility. At home, everyone is so busy in the nitty-gritty business of
being
a parent, there's no time for back-slapping adulation.

But if you walk around the office showing pictures of your baby and talking about how fun/exciting/hard/challenging/different it all is, what can anyone say but “Boy, it sounds like you're a great dad.”

And you get to gush in modesty.

“Well, I just do the best I can.”

Unlike your home life, which has, upon the arrival of your child, changed forever in every way conceivable, your office has remained the same. There's no new, red-and-yellow plastic furniture for you to trip over; people aren't walking around like sleep-deprived zombies; they're not speaking in strained, hushed tones. Your office—a place which ordinarily you're dying to flee the first moment you can—is suddenly all the more appealing, specifically
because
it has simply remained unchanged. The familiarity is soothing.

One day shortly after my son's birth, I found myself remaining in my office after hours, sitting in my familiar desk chair, gazing at one of the eleven hundred pictures of my boy I had surrounded myself with, and just marveling. I marveled at how soft and round his face is, how wet and little his little wet lips are. I was almost to the point of taking out a pencil and physically counting all my blessings when a friend came in.

“What are you still doing here?”

“Huh? Oh, nothing. C'mere . . . Look at this picture . . . have you ever seen anything sweeter?”

“No, I haven't.”

“You're darn right you haven't . . . Boy, I'll tell you, there's nothing like a kid to remind you what's important in this world, huh?”

“So true.”

“Seriously . . .
work
is not important,
money's
not important—just family, and children, and . . .”

“So why don't you go home?”

“How's that?”

“I say, why don't you get out of here and go home and
be
with that family of yours?”

“Oh . . .”

Good question.

What I
didn't
say was, “Because this is actually easier. It's much easier to be a perfect dad from a distance . . .”

I
f you asked them, almost everyone would say that, indeed, Family is more important than Work. They may not
act
accordingly, but they at least claim to embrace the thought as a guiding principle of their lives.

And while I believe it to be true myself, I'm not sure it needs to be the truth for
everybody.
I think it kind of depends on what you do.

What if you're a genius? Or a world leader? Isn't it more important that you lead the world than get home on time? If you're Albert Einstein, couldn't you effectively argue that discovering the theory of relativity and unraveling the mysteries of the universe may have more value than promptly sitting down to supper at six?

I don't know if, for example, Mozart actually had kids, but certainly there is no record of him ever leaving the office early to coach Peewee Soccer League.

And even if he
was
a terrible father—do we really care? Let's say, worst-case scenario, Mozart
ignored
his kids. Just totally ignored them. Never went home, worked feverishly into the night, slept at his desk, woke up, picked up that big feather pen, and started working again. In retrospect, wouldn't you rather have the extra string quartet? Wouldn't you say that the emotional well-being of one twelve-year-old Austrian kid is a small price to pay for
The Marriage of Figaro
? Now, certainly I feel bad for the kid, and if I was his friend I'm sure I'd have said, “You're right, man . . . your dad stinks.” But as a society, isn't Mozart staying late at the office, checking for mistakes in a bassoon concerto, more of a contribution than reading
Runaway Bunny
to a European toddler?

I would argue maybe it is, but unlike Mozart, I have to go home and give my baby a bath.

The Baby
and the Bathwater

O
ne of my favorite baby activities, which can also virtually qualify as a
sport
, is Bathing. Giving a baby a bath combines some of the most challenging elements of swimming, gymnastics, sculling, and fishing, as well as being a thorough cardiovascular workout for the sweating parent.

You wouldn't think that a person weighing roughly the same as a moderate-sized sea bass could be this difficult to control in water, but water has a phenomenal effect on babies. Their muscles expand to fifty times their normal strength and can exhaust even the most well-conditioned athlete, let alone wiped-out parents who are too depleted even to look for their gym shorts.

Baby Baths are very different from Grown-up Baths. When a baby sits in a bath, there's nothing either meditative or hygienic about it. Little attention is paid to scrubbing or relaxing. The key agendas are as follows: For the baby, floating, moving, and tossing as many rubber and foam toys as you can within the time allowed, while getting as much water as possible
outside
the designated tub area. And for you, to avoid all of the several hundred ways in which your child can make you race them to an emergency room.