Monthly Archives: December 2011

Basking on borrowed time

My wife is due to give birth to our second boy in March. People ask her how she is feeling, which is a perfectly sensible question. Some people ask me how I am feeling too, which makes no sense to me at all.

How am I feeling? Of course, I’m feeling great. I am basking in the limelight of an impending miracle. I am receiving congratulations, getting patted on the back, and being tolerated far above what I deserve by people who have no solid reason to tolerate me. And what is it costing me? Nothing. I have no aches or pains and I sleep like a rock. I am enjoying the loan of good will that I will not have to begin to pay back for months yet.

The pregnancy time is an expectant father’s grace period. Everything difficult about the new baby is still theoretical. The diapers, the lost sleep, the marital stress are all miles away yet. There’s nothing to do but sit back and soak up the congratulations. Life is good before the interest on the borrowed time is called in.

I imagine that this is kind of how it was for dashing young men at the outbreak of the Civil War. The horrors of war were still a ways into the future, and not necessary to be thought about yet. Meanwhile, all a young gallant had to do was announce his enlistment to afford himself the glow of the young ladies’ attentions. “Oh, you’re going off to war? How courageous of you. I will reward your bravery with a brief glimpse of my stocking below the ankle.” Cha-ching!

Those guys had no idea what they were getting themselves into. They thought it would be a few months of roughing it in the woods, just the way a first time father innocently believes that his new baby will be a nearly-self-sufficient toddler after about 90 days. Fools — all of them. It was only the men who re-enlisted after having seen the face of war that deserved to score some ankle for themselves.

Like me, those 19th century rakes were living high off the news. They hadn’t been brought down to earth by the reality yet. But I have an advantage. I’ve been through this war before and I know its horrors. I know what happens in diapers, and I know it doesn’t always happen in a diaper. I’ve seen a baby boy lie in wait for some unsuspecting parent to carelessly peel back his diaper and unleash a merciless ambush of pee. Here’s mud in your eye! Only, it’s not nearly as pleasant as mud would be. I am a veteran, hardened by the destruction wreaked by little babies. I know that I will not make it through the coming conflict unscathed, untainted, un-puked-upon. I know it and I accept it as my fate.

In the meantime, I intend to sit back, relax, make the most of my grace period, and maybe see if my wife will condescend to showing me a glimpse of her ankle.

Your Christmas presents have been diverted to Bolivia

Santa Claus was always good to me as a child. He brought me some awesome toys over the years, and I didn’t even really deserve most of them. I never set out cookies for him or left hay outside for his reindeer, or any of that stuff a grateful kid would have done. My older siblings had done those things, and I kind of just rode on the coattails of the good will they built up with jolly old Saint Nick.

The only time I ever had reason to feel let down by Santa was not Santa’s fault. It was a cruel joke played upon me by my older brothers. They had replaced all the goodies in my Christmas stocking with a single onion before I woke up on Christmas morning. I was very likely scarred for life by this incident, but they got a good laugh out of it, so it must have been the right thing to do.

Then I got too old for Santa Claus, and Christmases started to run together. Before I knew it, tens of Christmases had flown by. That’s what happens when Santa isn’t there to give each one its special magic.

Now, I have a three-year-old son, and Santa Claus is suddenly back in my life. The odd thing is that I think I like Santa now more than I ever did before. This is the first year when my son is putting together all the relationships between Christmas and Santa, and most importantly, presents. This is a wonderful development because it has turned Santa into a huge parenting ally of mine.

My son is in awe of Santa’s immense powers, which gives him a bit of a fear of the man himself. This is as it should be. The boy is afraid to sit on Santa’s lap, and even shy about writing a letter to the All Powerful One with a list of toys he’d like to have. He’s modest about asking Santa for presents; on the other hand, if Santa is determined to bring them, well, that’s Santa’s business. Indeed, anything that might encourage Santa to bring presents, short of outright asking for them, is all to the good. This is all the rope I need to use Santa as a means of manipulation in pursuit of my iron fist policy of fathering.

It is well known that there are things a boy can do to dispose Santa toward bringing him some top-flight toys. A boy can do what his father asks him to do, without putting up a stink; he can refrain from throwing tantrums in public; he can pick up his blocks when he’s done playing with them; he can go to bed at bedtime; and he can quit punching Dad in the crotch because he thought it was hilarious when he saw a bad kid do it on America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Santa appreciates all these examples of good behavior. Moreover, Santa has eyes on the ground all over the world. He sees every misbehavior and he keeps meticulous notes. For every tantrum, a toy gets shifted away into the column of some good kid in Bolivia. For every punch in the crotch, two toys go. That’s just the way it is; you can’t fight it, so you’d might better go to bed extra early to avoid the temptation to be bad.

Every child knows these things, none better than my son. Under my careful tutelage, my son is learning perfectly the math behind the ledger of Santa’s accounts. During the months of November and December, no opportunity will be lost to teach him the toy-value-consequence of every misdeed I see forming itself up in his shifty little eyes. I love Santa more than I ever did before. I may even bake him some cookies this year. Sorry reindeer, I don’t have a recipe for hay.

Some people may believe that this use of Santa to regulate a child’s behavior is an abuse of parental power or cruelty toward the innocent child. To these people I say two things. First: you haven’t been punched in the crotch lately, have you? Second: by January, Santa’s influence will have faded to the point of no longer being a useful tool. At that point, we will return to our normal regimen of spankings to keep the kid in line – like the good parents do.

Kids are creepy

We all love to boast about how cute and smart our children are. We’ll happily tell the whole world what angels they are, destined to bring joy to the universe with their bright eyes and adorable smiles. What we don’t talk about so much is the propensity our children have to creep us out.

Children can be very creepy individuals. There, I’ve said it.

For all of their usual noisiness, and the delightful pitter-patter of their little feet, children have a disturbing knack for being able to move silently from place to place within a house. They mostly use this skill at night, when they are supposed to be in bed, and their parents are relaxing in the security of knowing that no little creatures are gliding around, staring at them from places that are not the bed.

Most parents have a rough idea of how many people should be occupying their home after all the doors have been closed and the neighbors dispersed to their own abodes. Once the children are tucked into bed, there is generally a limited number of people who should be roaming around the home, and a list of places where one should not expect to find them.

It can be quite alarming to come across a person standing silently halfway down a darkened staircase late at night. Your child is innocently staring off into the darkness as if he sees dead people, and is in no way alarmed by the sight of them. Not only is it startling, but standing in such a place, at such a time, is not anything that an adult would think to do, thus adding an eerie dose of the unnatural into the mix. But children will do such things, not giving a second thought to how unnatural it seems, and never having considered how much unnatural equals freaky.

If you have never been awakened in the middle of the night by the patient breathing of your child as he watches you sleep from beside your bed, then you really don’t appreciate how creepy kids can be. Of course he needs a drink of water, or some such thing vital to his 3 a.m. happiness, but he’s staring at you with that blank look on his face that makes you want to check his scalp for sixes. He wanted you to wake up, for how else could you supply him his vital drink of water, but he didn’t want to be overt about waking you up. Instead, he just stood there and breathed with increasing volume until your unconscious soul could take it no longer and opened your eyes to whatever force was hovering over your defenseless self.

Your soul really expected it to be just a vaguely disturbing dream, but there really is a person standing there watching you sleep. And that person doesn’t even have the courtesy to say some calming words before your heart stops beating. He just continues watching with that same blank stare.

Finally, when you’ve recovered yourself enough to mumble, “What are you doing up?” he replies in the monotone of some alien child, “Daddy, I want a drink of water.” So you take him to the kitchen and give him a glass of water, a big glass of water. He barely wets his lips on it and hands it back to you. “I’m done,” he says. You stare at him, while your eye begins to twitch. “Really?” you think to yourself as you dump out 99.5% of the liquid. “This was about water?”

You lead him back to his bed and tuck him in. You shuffle back to your own bed, and even though you are very tired, you don’t sleep. You wonder how long he had been standing there watching you sleep. You were completely vulnerable. “Water,” you whisper to yourself. “Likely story.”

In the morning, the boy is all giggles and smiles again. This is some relief, but a nagging paranoia makes you test him. You ask him if he was able to go back to sleep after he had his water. Your worst fear is that he will answer you with a British accent to the effect of, “Water? Why dear father, I don’t know what you mean.”

He smiles and says, “I did go to sleep. Thanks for getting me water, Daddy.” You breathe a deep breath. He really is your boy, and he really did want just the tiniest sip of water. He isn’t an imposter, grown out of pod, plotting to murder you in your sleep.

He’s your boy, a little creepy sometimes, but you love him to pieces.

UPDATE: Read the sequel to this post here.

Only the one-zillionth blog about parenting; maybe someday the idea will catch on

Q: Why do we need yet another blog about parenting?

A: We don’t. But when has not needing something ever stopped us from having it?

There are a lot of blogs in the world. Many of them are parenting blogs. I haven’t done a scientific survey or anything, but it seems to me that the bulk of the parenting blogs are written by, and for, mothers. This blog is written by a father. It may not be read by fathers, because we all know that fathers would much rather take a sharp stick in the eye than bother reading a few words about parenting. Nevertheless, I’m using the fatherhood angle as my justification for adding more noise to the clogged up Internet.

This blog is not so much meant to inform, unless you are seeking advice on how not to parent. From time to time, it might entertain, but I wouldn’t even count on that. It’s main goal, to the extent that it has a goal, is to reassure parents of both sexes that no matter how many mistakes they have made raising their children, it could be worse.

For women, this blog just might reassure them that the father of their child is not the worst parent ever to walk the earth. All fathers let their kids go outside without their mittens. It’s what we do. We waited through millions of years of evolution for somebody to invent mittens, just so we could leave junior’s in the closet. And every time the kids come back inside without having suffered any long-term damage from frostbite, we are just that much more encouraged to send them out without mittens next time. The second-rate parent in your family is just one of millions of second-rate parents whose children will make it to adulthood in spite of him. Take heart.

For men, this blog might give them confidence that no matter what they’ve heard around the house, they are probably not the worst parent in the world. Fellow fathers, we are all brothers in our lax and lazy parenting. Buck up, my friend. Deep down, you know that even though the shirt you dressed your toddler in doesn’t match his socks, he will make it through the day. Our job is not fashion; our job is to meet the basic needs of the children until they turn 18. If they are looking stylish when they are old enough to be turned out of the house, good for them, but that’s not our concern.

Whether you are a mother, a father, or neither, please don’t attempt to learn anything from this blog. I don’t need that kind of pressure. Be entertained, if you can be; be reassured if you need to be; but please do not try any of the parenting stunts you see here at home. Nothing good can come of it.