Brotherly love: the bruise that keeps on giving

The other night, after feeling the baby in Mommy’s belly, my son came over to announce to me that his little brother had kicked him. “What?” I asked. “You two are fighting already?” I knew it would come to this, but I’d imagined that we would have peace until his brother was born. I should have known better, because if there is one thing I have a little experience with, it is brothers.

I have four brothers, three of them older. Any toughness I have in my constitution is largely thanks to them. They did an outstanding job of terrorizing my childhood toughening me up. Every charred spot on the back lawn, its black silhouette exactly matching the shape of one of my model airplanes, made me a stronger person. Every one of my toy soldiers fed to the dog prepared me a little more for the hard knocks of life. Their mangled, tooth-marked bodies were a constant reminder of the dangers of getting too close to the men.

I have confidence that my son will do a good job in teaching brotherly life lessons to his new sibling. He will, no doubt, learn a few things himself. There are a lot of useful things that brothers teach each other. If you never had a brother, you might be tempted to retreat when someone jumps out at you from a hiding place. Retreat invites attack. A brother teaches you that you should charge and punch that someone square in the middle as hard as you can. Further, you should keep punching until the threat is adequately diminished.

Gettysburg

And they called this the brothers' war? Milquetoasts! My family could have shown these Quakers a thing or two about how to throw down.

Brothers teach each other how to sleep in defensible positions. Just because it’s dark and the house seems quiet, don’t assume that a heavy body won’t land on top of you of a sudden, pinning you down on your bed. Don’t tie up your limbs in blankets, making yourself vulnerable to attack. Keep an arm free, so you can at least get a handful of ear or something. A would-be attacker with an ear that still hurts from last time is more likely to think twice before he pounces.

I don’t envision adding three more boys to my brood, so my sons will have to work overtime if they hope to teach each other all the lessons my brothers taught me. I wish I could lend them a hand, but there are some things you can only learn from a brother. If Dad nails one of the boys in the back of the head with a snowball, it’s not so much a learning opportunity as it is child abuse.

A boy needs to learn how to anticipate an ambush from his big brother. If he has multiple big brothers, he may be fortunate enough to have this teachable moment reinforced with a second snowball to his neck. The neck snowball does not pack the same instant enlightenment as the skull snowball, but the red welt is a good reminder for up to a week.

If their shirts are any indication, these brothers were out back educating each other with dirt clods. Nothing brings home an important lesson quite like a dirt clod up side the head.

My wife did not grow up with male siblings, so I’m not sure how much she knows about the educational services brothers offer each other. One thing I do know is that, in the coming years, she will find out.

 

Lady parts and miracles

My son wants to know how the new baby is going to get out of Mommy’s belly. I don’t know what to tell him. It’s not that it is a sensitive question, with an answer I’m not sure how to explain to a three-year-old. It’s that I really don’t know how it happens. The physics of process don’t add up. I know the route the baby is supposed to take, but how he shimmies through the narrows is a complete mystery to me.

The best answer I can give my son is that getting babies out of bellies is a scheme worked up between mommies and doctors, that nobody else could ever truly understand. If he really wants to know how it happens, he could ask Mommy, or a doctor, but it’s probably best to let it go. Like the rest of us non-medical men, he should just refer to the process as a miracle and not think about it too much from now on. Lady parts and miracles are great boons to mankind, but a man can seriously dislocate his brain trying to figure out how they work.

Four wisemen consult over what to do about that baby in her belly. They sure don't look like the Marx brothers.

True, I do know a thing or two about how the baby got in there. To accomplish that, Daddy didn’t need to understand miracles; a hearty “can do” attitude saw him through those duties. Forturnately, my son hasn’t asked about that end of the situation yet. I think he considers it to be water under the bridge at this point. What’s done is done; what matters now is figuring out how we’re going to get that baby out.

Duh! We didn't have to go the pregnancy route at all. We could have just waited for the candy stripers and picked a child from the baby cart.

Now that I think about it, having had a hand in beginning this process, it seems a shame that I can’t have a larger part in seeing it through. Yet, I have to understand that I am just one member of this team. We each have our role to play. My primary role was to help get things off to a good start, and after an appropriate amount of rehersal, I finally pitched in to get things rolling.

At the end of the process I am completely out of my depth. My role has diminished to that of a supporting castmember. When I really think it through, I guess I’m okay with that. Not being in a leadership role gives me more freedom to avert my eyes from any especially miraculous scenes, or to pass out altogether.

I wouldn’t exploit you if I didn’t love you so much

Here I am, happily blogging along about my son and his soon-to-be little brother, thinking my biggest problem is getting more than 11 people per week to visit the site, when along comes A.A. Milne and son to scare the Pooh out of me.

I was shocked to discover that Christopher Robin Milne, the inspiration for the stories that made his father rich and famous, grew up to resent his father for putting him on such public display. Apparently, he was teased by his classmates in school. As an adult, he was put off at having to talk so much Pooh at social gatherings.

Lexy

I’d wanted to show a photo of Christopher Robin and his toy bear here, but that could present copyright issues. Instead, here is a more recent boy with his “toy” cat.

This information struck a sudden fear into my heart. What if my boys grow to resent me for making them the engine of my success? Fortunately, the word success was on hand to console me. I thought about the billions of people the stories of A. A. Milne had touched, and then I thought about you – the faithful 11. I love you all, more so because the odds say that, out of a sample of this size, there are unlikely to be any children in my kids’ school classes who might mock them and turn them against me. You guys always do right by me.

It’s good not to have your children grow up resenting you, especially if you didn’t earn any riches off the cause of the resentment. At least the Milnes had something to show for their familial strife. I can see an adult Christopher Robin trying to complain to his father about how he was wronged. I envision the elderly A. A. throwing heavy bundles of £100 notes at his son. “There you go, you sniveling little brat,” the old man grumbles. “I ruined your life, did I? Well, just go buy yourself another one. The bear never complains.”

Smokey

Okay, if you really need to see a fake bear, here is a random, thus certainly not trademarked, bear.

I can’t afford for my kids to resent me in my dotage. I don’t have wads of cash to throw at them. I’ll be lucky if I can compile a complete roll of quarters with which to defend myself. I especially don’t want my kids’ resentments to boil to a head during the nursing home selection season. I can hear them now: “After so many years of exposing our private lives to nearly a dozen people, it’s time to embrace your golden years, Dad. Enjoy your time at Putrid Acres.” Then they go visit their mother in the licensed facility.

I guess I’ll have to set them down one day and discuss what’s going on here. We’ll see what they think about writing all my jokes for me and whether it is a hardship to their lives. But until they learn to read, what happens here is strictly between the 12 of us. Okay?

You have one job, and one job only

With the delivery date for the new baby sneaking up, I was trying to remember all the things necessary to prepare for the hospital stay. There are certain things that the father is expected to do during and after delivery, and I was trying to bring one or two of them to mind so that I could present myself to the hospital staff as a useful addition to the family.

When my wife discovered that I was struggling with these recollections, she reminded me why I couldn’t recall any of the tasks on the modern father’s list of delivery room activities. “Remember what I told you last time,” she said. “I don’t care what they think you should be doing; you have one job and one job only. Do you remember what that is?”

The wavy lines that momentarily affected my vision indicated that I was flashing back to summer, 2008. My pregnant wife had just finished watching her 100th Lifetime movie about children switched at birth. We had gone to birthing classes for a number of weeks, but that training paled in comparison to what can be learned from Lifetime’s You Have the Wrong Baby Weekend Movie Marathon.

This was the moment of the defenestration of all of my weeks of training on how to be a supportive birthing partner.  “You can do whatever the hell you want until the baby’s born,” my wife explained. “Once the baby is born, you have one job. I don’t care what they tell you to do, you do not take your eyes off my baby. I will not have some stranger knocking on my door in five years, telling me I got their baby by mistake. I am not spending my time raising somebody else’s kid for them.”

She let this sink in for a minute, while she looked like she was moving on to something else. Then she came back at me all of a sudden, pop-quiz style. “What’s your job?”

“Watch the baby,” I replied confidently, like I was proving that husbands can pay attention when they want to.

“Watch? Did you hear me use a word as weak as watch? No, you did not. I said you are to keep your eyes glued to that baby from the moment he comes out of me until we get home. You are chained to that baby, do you understand?”

“What if you need me?” That seemed like it was the type of concern a woman would appreciate coming from her man.

“I won’t need you.” It sounds harsher than I’m sure she meant it. “I’m a grown woman. Nobody’s gonna stick me in the wrong family until it’s too late to do anything about it. I don’t care if I’m half dead, you are going wherever that baby goes.”

And that is just what I did. From the moment our son was born, I followed him around like a Secret Service agent, except that Secret Service agents probably don’t let their charges suck on their little fingers for three hours straight. If they do, I respect them all the more because that can really wear on a little finger.

At least somebody got to close his eyes for a minute during our hospital stay.

That little boy did not go anywhere in that hospital without me. When a nurse offered to take him to the nursery so Mommy and Daddy could get some rest, my wife just about called 911 on her. We didn’t want rest; we wanted our biological child, not whichever baby happened to match the number on our claim ticket at checkout.

So don’t come knocking at our door telling us we went home from the hospital with your son.  The boy we brought home was under strict guard the whole time. And just in case I did doze off for minute while I was watching him, we’re raising him in a barn, so you wouldn’t want him back anyway.

 

Before you try to claim your “switched at birth” boy back, you should know that this is the lady we employed to teach him table manners. (Credit: Steve Hillebrand/USFWS)