Category Archives: Baby Trauma

Congratulations, it’s an abstinence zealot!

Monday morning, 3 a. m.

Daddy is gently awakened by Mommy whispering into his ear. It sounds like she is saying, “I’m welding a metal Titanic.”

Daddy tries to shake off his sleep. “Huh?” he whispers.

“I’m feeling a little romantic,” Mommy repeats.

Daddy is tired. He has to go to work in the morning and he always has trouble getting to sleep on Sunday nights. Yet, with the birth of the baby, and Mommy’s long recovery afterward, it’s been a little lonely on his side of the bed. He does some sleepy calculations and determines that he should take his romance when he can get it. He pulls Mommy close and puts his lips softly on the nape of her neck.

Mommy yawns. Daddy was hoping for a sound more similar to a welcoming coo, but it’s 3 a. m., so he assumes that there was some sort of encouraging noise hidden beneath the yawn. Mommy is tired too. For the last four weeks, she’s had to convert herself into a buffet table every two or three hours. She has to get up at least as early as Daddy if she hopes to get anything accomplished  before the boys wake up.

Their spooning feels so nice. It is so comfortable that there is a good chance they will both simply fall back to sleep. Daddy means to kiss Mommy’s neck, but his lips feel settled and content on the spot where they first landed.

This is such an awkward time, Daddy thinks. If only it were . . . he runs all the other times of the day through his head until he realizes that this awkward hour is the only possible time. The three-year-old hasn’t taken a daytime nap in a year and a half. The infant’s loud demands eat away at both ends of nighttime. It’s now or never.

Since never seems like an even longer time than it’s already been, Daddy redoubles his focus. He nudges his sloth lips into activity. Mommy responds. She takes Daddy’s hand and carefully guides it to. . .

“Ehnt!” a sleepy little voice calls from the cradle.

Mommy and Daddy freeze. Maybe if they are very still and quiet, he’ll drift back to sleep.

A quiet moment passes. Hope builds. Mommy and Daddy resume their soft movements.

“Ehnt! Ehnt!”

Again, they freeze. Mommy silently rolls over and stares into the dark cradle. Daddy keeps what fleeting contact with Mommy he can.

Another quiet moment passes. Mommy rolls back to Daddy. They resume, but the belief has gone out of their caresses. Their attentions are in their perked ears. Silence. Maybe it was a false alarm after all. They begin to relax and think about each other again.

“Erwhaaaaa! Erwhaaaaa! Erwhaaaaa!”

Mommy sits up. “I’ll feed him a little bit,” she says. “Maybe he’ll go right back to sleep.”

“Okay,” Daddy replies, trying hard to sound like he buys into the fantasy.

Mommy gets the baby and goes to sit with him in the rocking chair. Daddy stays in the big, lonesome bed.

Daddy opens his eyes. The sun is up. The clock says it’s 7. Time to get up for work.

The baby is sleeping soundly in the cradle. Mommy is zonked out in the rocking chair.

Daddy gets up and stumbles over to Mommy. He kisses her on the forehead. “Morning, sunshine.”

Mommy opens her eyes and immediately moves them until they rest upon the baby. “Morning.”

“Good news!” Daddy tells her. “Our birth control worked again.”

“It’s very simple, my dear. How can we be expected to find time to procreate when you insist upon having all these children?”

There are many forms of birth control; some may be more effective than children are, but none are more zealous in their cause. Children can sense impending intimacy and their mission is to put the nix on it. There seems to be a subconscious Darwinism in their minds that tells them that intimacy equals more siblings. More siblings means more sharing. Sharing limits a young person’s ability to hoard all the ice cream, cupcakes, and other resources necessary to live a childhood safely above the level of hardscrabble existence. Hence, intimacy must be eliminated from the household.

“It seems like we’ve been waiting forever for the children to go to sleep.”*

Statistic show that one of every three clips on America’s Funniest Home Videos results in some hapless father being thumped in the nuts with a blunt object by one of his children. These are not accidents. These are calculated assaults on human reproduction by children who have nearby relatives to babysit them on alternating Saturday nights. This creates a dangerous gap in their control over their parents’ activities; therefore they have resorted to Plan B. Plan B is not subtle, but these are desperate times.

“Oh no! Don’t ask me for another child. I like fooling around too much for that.”

With only one child, it wasn’t so bad. He was outnumbered, and he couldn’t stay awake all the time.  Now, we’ve gone and made things more difficult by giving him a reinforcement. Between the two of them, they do a pretty thorough job of guarding both the day and the night. Together, those brothers are worthy adversaries.

I don’t know if we will have more children. I don’t know if we will decide to have more, and if we do, I’m not sure we will get past the sentries.

*Artist: George Hand Wright

Got them low-down, no-good, bottle-feeding blues

Both times we’ve had a new baby in our family, my wife has taken pains to prepare me for the first time I would be left to care for him. “Are you ready to handle him all by yourself?” she asked, as if she thought I was afraid of him. I think a lot of mothers believe that Daddy is secretly afraid of the baby. I would be insulted by this condescending attitude, except that they are right.

Toddlers, we’re okay with. By that time, the playing field has been leveled. In fact, fathers are sometimes better suited to meet toddlers on their own mental and emotional levels than mothers are. But when it comes to infants, Mommy has an inherent, secret weapon that Daddy will never have, leaving Daddy feeling a little vulnerable because he has nothing on which he can so confidently rely.

He'll help Daddy manage while Mommy's out - with his polite requests and gentle reminders.

Mommy’s secret weapon is actually a twin-pack of big guns. They are strapped right onto the front of her, and they never seem to fail.

My wife claims that a moment with the nipple will quiet a man of any age from his fussing; my own data supports this conclusion. Our new baby is no exception to the rule. He might be wailing like the sky is falling, but snap him onto a booby for 15 minutes and it’s all sweet dreams. Once he’s taken off, he’ll doze through a quick, satisfied burp, as if to whisper, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Then, just lay him down and he’s out for hours.

No bottle works like that. Bottle nipples are always too slow or too fast, leaving Daddy with a baby who is frustrated or messy, or both. Also, the milk is the wrong temperature; that’s what you get for mixing drinks with only one hand while an infant screams impatient demands into your ear. Even if the child could find some comfort in the bottle, he is so full of gas by the end of it that he practically has to do calisthenics to air himself out.

Some of the pieces of Daddy's baby-feeding kit. (Including the refrigerator in the background.) Mommy's kit is easier to keep track of, having come fully assembled and ready for use.

So, you’ve just fed the baby and he’s still crying like Armageddon. What else you got up your sleeve, Pops?

I tried swinging him in the car seat first. This was moderately successful for a while, but car seats grow heavy. Swinging them gets boring. Next we sat together in the rocking chair. That was less tiring, and also less effective, than the car seat. In desperation, I even tried putting him into the useless chair. The useless chair is a reclined device that slides back and forth on its base. The motion is supposed to be soothing, but it never calmed Baby #1, and so far it has done nothing for Baby #2. Its record is still unblemished by success.

Frustrated that he had spurned all of my attempts to sway him into contentedness, I gave the baby the finger — the pinky finger of my right hand is the one he usually finds most soothing to suckle. But he closed his mouth tight and shook his head. Even Daddy’s tastiest finger would not do.

Because Daddy has no ace in the hole to settle Baby down, he needs some luck to have a good day with Junior. Luck came to me in the form of my three-year-old son, who reminded me that all of us guys in our family are Bluesmen. How could I have forgotten the semi-secret semi-weapon I had developed during the first go-round? Before a moment could be wasted, we were listening to Luther Allison on the stereo, swaying to the soulful notes from his electric guitar and floating on his gravelly lyrics. In mere minutes, the baby was in dreamland and I was feeling pretty mellow myself. (Watch Luther Allison YouTube clip.)

"We're all Bluesmen here, Daddy. So let's quit with the cryin' and get with the wailin'"

The baby woke up when he was hungry again. By that time, Mommy was home and Daddy had to rush to salvage a half day at work. I couldn’t stick around to watch, but I doubt Mommy had any problems with her hungry baby. I’m sure she just hooked him up to the spigot for half an hour and then had the afternoon to herself.

Where are your boob holes when you need them?

If you are like me, you probably think that all hospital gowns are pretty much the same. That just goes to show how wrong it is to be like me. You should try very hard not to do it anymore.

In the maternity ward, they have a special gown, just for mom, with holes cut out over the breasts. I don’t remember seeing these on our first visit to the maternity ward, in 2008, but I suspect I just didn’t notice. After all, I was passed out much of the time, and overwhelmed by the prospect of a lifetime of parenthood when conscious.

The ostensible purpose of these special gowns is to allow mothers to breastfeed their babies without having to navigate all the way around to the open edge of the gown. While this is a noble cause, and a team of engineers probably dedicated the better part of their careers to calculating the optimal number of holes, I think it must be the most underutilized piece of medical technology in existence.

I almost missed knowing about these medical advancements on this last visit too, and with good reason. Though my wife breastfed from the get-go, she most often did so by throwing the bulk of her gown up over her shoulder with the same abandon with which a cavalier would manage his cape.

Only once, entangled in the gown, bed sheets, and other sundry cloaks of fresh motherhood, did my wife attempt to use these helpful slits in her apparel. She wriggled around, searching the folds of her peculiar garment. “Where are your boob holes when you need them?” she muttered in frustration.

This was my first indication that such a thing existed. “What are boob holes?” I asked, a little embarrassed that, in my position as a repeat father, I might have been ignorant of an entire undiscovered acre of female anatomy.

She pointed to a spare gown hanging on the bathroom door. Unlike the gown she wore, this one clearly showed a hole, by virtue of its being hung from it. Before I could note the difference between this hole and the short sleeves at either side, I said, “I thought that was an arm hole.”

This gown must be defective. Who has arms this close together?

“How many arms do you think I have?” she asked. Clearly, her frustration with her own gown was making her sarcastic.

Intrigued, I took down the extra gown and examined it. True enough, there were two spare arm holes cut right smack into the front of it. “Science!” I whistled to myself. I was just at the point of thinking that we might be able to use one of these at home, when a couple of quick impulses cooled my ardor.

First, my wife had given up and slung the bulk of her gown off to the side. She had finally located one of the holes, but it was awkwardly situated and she had no success using it to lasso anything useful to a baby. I’m no expert on hospital gowns, but it seems to me that they are difficult to keep on straight.

Some sicko with a camera playing dress-up in hospital dainties. They really ought to be more careful about who they let into the maternity ward.

By the time a woman gets into bed and maneuvers breast and baby onto a collision course, the boob holes (pardon my continued use of technical terms) might as well be arm holes. A baby stands a better chance of finding milk by shoving his head up a sleeve.

Second, the material of the hospital gown seems flimsy and unattractive to me. I think I’ll wait until they start making these chic little outfits in leather.

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Dispatches from the Delivery Room, Part 2: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Labor Pain

Watching your wife go through labor is kind of like seeing the one you love turn into a werewolf. There is nothing you can do to stop the transformation; your wife possesses decreasing cognition of why she shouldn’t tear you apart; and the townspeople agree that you are not to be trusted to make the difficult decisions that might need to be made.

When my wife’s contractions were getting to be about five minutes apart, she could still speak to me as a friend. She very calmly made the arrangements for our three-year-old to be looked after. She put the house in order, and even accepted my comforting touch whenever her five minutes of peace expired. We got into the car and drove to hospital like married people.

Even though the contractions were only five minutes apart, the hospital wasn’t satisfied that she had made enough progress to be admitted. They made us walk the halls for an hour, after which they became convinced that we had no business there. They sent us home; we were welcome to come back when we were serious about having a baby.

A lot can go wrong when one finds himself alone in a car with a woman in labor. Even though we were heading home, I drove as though it were an emergency. I was sure that I would be pulled over for speeding at any moment. I imagined how I would explain myself to the cop. “My wife is in labor, Officer. So, naturally, we are driving away from the hospital as fast as we can.”

Back home, my wife’s contractions gained in intensity. There was no more quiet conversation in between. To make matters more frightfully confusing, those damned pains would not pace themselves at regular intervals like they do in all the training literature.

We tried every position, short of standing her on her head, to alleviate her agony. A warm bath helped for a few minutes, but soon became just another terror associated with the pain. All the while we debated the wisdom of returning to the hospital. What if all of our screaming and writhing were still not worthy of their hospitality? What if they sent us home a second time? That wouldn’t make us feel like social outcasts.

After three or four hours of this, my wife crossed an invisible line. I could no longer reach her. She had gone into werelabor. The transformation was manifest in her incongruous plea, “Help me! Help me! DON’T TOUCH ME!”

Her sister helped me load her into the car, for she was beyond the management of a single human. At the second stoplight, the cruel spirits of labor overcame her. “I can’t stand this!” she moaned. “I gotta get out of here!” Only my quick finger on the auto door lock kept her from laboring against traffic in a busy intersection and causing chaos in the streets.

Our son was nearly born in the middle of this intersection. Despite his mother’s fervent attempt to have it all out here, I stuck to my guns and insisted upon a hospital birth.

In the hospital again, the doctor did another cervix exam. She announced to us that it was four centimeters dilated, which was enough progress for us to earn a bed at their inn. I’m not sure if it were four centimeters or not. I truly believe that, having seen the wild light in my wife’s eyes, the doctor knew what answer she had better give before she pulled on her gloves.

Finally invited to give birth among polite society, my wife howled for pain medication.  The hospital staff insisted on observing certain formalities first. This only left my wife more desperate. I soon found myself caught between calculating civilization and the primal needs of raw nature, trying to forge a peace between two powers with which I held waning influence.

This was when I understood that they were both right. Raw nature had no good reason not to tear me apart. I was merely an annoying noise that brought relief no closer. At the same time, civilization could not trust me to make calculated decisions. The werewolf was too much a part of my heart.

In all fairness, my wife only turned werewolf under the most stressful conditions imaginable. I often turn into a Frankenstein while sitting around the house, without provocation. (Photo credit: my three-year-old son with his Fisher-Price camera.)

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