Tag Archives: children

Give up your lost cause, Daddy

Pickett’s Charge was the crescendo of Gettysburg, the high water mark of the Confederacy. Thousands of men charged toward a strongly defended line. They reached that line and punctured it. At that moment, they must have felt the euphoria of hard-fought victory.

Then, their charge ran out of steam. They were thrown back, battered and bruised. It was the beginning of the end for them.

Why do I mention Pickett’s Charge in a parenting blog?

Because at 1 a.m. this morning, as I was struggling to get the baby to sleep, I thought about all the men in history who fought hard and thought they had won, only to be cast backward into defeat. It isn’t that I wish Pickett’s Charge had succeeded; I’m very satisfied that it failed. Yet, as this fidgety baby turned my hard-won victory to defeat, I felt the weary pain of having the tables turn against me at the crucial moment.

The High Water Mark at Gettysburg. The monument to Daddy’s High Water Mark is the bruise he got while walking, half asleep, into the bathroom door frame on his way to the shower in the morning. (Photo: National Park Service)

At 11:30 p.m. the baby started crying. I took him downstairs and poured him three fingers of milk. He finished about two fingers worth before he waved off the bottle with his spastic little hands.

For an hour, I rocked him, swayed with him, and bounced him on my knee. He didn’t cry, but he didn’t close his eyes either. He just sat there looking cute, and awake. Occasionally, he would punk me by fitting a tall yawn in between his moments of contemplative staring at the ceiling.

Finally, his eyes got droopy. I took him upstairs and put him into his cradle. This perked him right up again. To keep things moving in the right direction, I gave him my pinky finger to suckle. He settled down.

For long, uncomfortable minutes, I hunched over him, rocking his cradle and feeding him my finger. It was working. As he drifted further into sleep, I eased my finger loose from his gums. In another instant, I would be free. Victory and a soft pillow would be mine!

Then the tables turned. We were doomed by the Moro Reflex.

The Moro Reflex is that instinct that makes babies fling their arms up over their heads at moments critical to their parents’ escapes. I have noticed two variations of the Moro Reflex. The Little Moro Reflex is the one where the baby throws his arms up in one fluid motion. I call this the Praise the Lord Reflex. The baby comes out of R.E.M. long enough to ask his dreams, “Can I get a witness?” then slips right back into deep slumber.

The Big Moro Reflex is the one where the baby violently jerks himself awake throwing his arms up and casting them all about for some vine or lemur tail to catch hold of. His eyes jolt open, and in them you can hear him think, “Holy shit, I’m falling out of the monkey tree!” The baby is now irrevocably awake.

At 1 a.m. this morning, my baby boy was stricken with the Big Moro Reflex. It was my high water mark.

An action shot of the Moro Reflex. This is only a dramatization; no parents were exhausted during the taking of this picture.

I jammed my pinky back into his mouth, but it was too late. My victory was slipping away from me, and I knew it. Everything was trending in the wrong direction, right up to the point when the boy signaled my defeat with his battle cry.

This cry woke my wife. She saw that I was a shell of the proud soldier I had once been. I was summarily relieved of duty. Maybe I had earned a rest, but I had earned no victory. Just like the survivors of Pickett’s Charge.

 

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

You work for me now

My wife is utterly devoted to our children. She does whatever it takes to see to it that their young lives are full and happy. This is a wonderful thing to see, and it warms my heart. It also makes it such a shame that this is the woman with whom I have to compete in the ruthless tug-of-war for “me” time.

I could go on and on about how deserving my wife is of every moment of “me” time she can grab, but this is, after all, a competition.

I first truly realized how much a competition it is when she explained to me that I got my “me” time when I went to work. I get eight hours a day all to myself, with no needy, helpless, little people to distract or make unreasonable demands upon me. That’s the way she sees it, anyhow.

Way back in the years before children (B.C.), I used to spend some of my numerous idle hours brewing beer. It now seems like that was decades and decades ago.

It is too bad that I can’t mow the lawn from work, because that is the sort of thing I do with the rare snippets of “me” time I find these days. In fact, my “me” time belongs almost completely to our homeowners association. It is devoted to some sort of mowing or trimming, necessary to keep our property’s appearance at or near the minimum acceptable standard. I begin to feel like an indentured servant.

I would like all of our concerned neighbors to know that our grass is not long because I am inside playing video games. I am trying to get out to tend to the lawn, but I am being hindered by certain burdens. There is a 110 lb. woman draped over my shoulders, a three-year-old with his arms locked around my ankles, and a newborn hanging by his gums from my earlobe.

The woman is on my back because her schedules show that my “me” time ended when I took off my necktie. The boy is wrapped around my legs because there is no way I am going out to play with a loud, dangerous piece of machinery without him underfoot the entire time. The baby merely figures that, if he clamps down hard enough, long enough, he is bound to coax some milk out of this weird nipple at the side of my head.

On Wednesday evenings, my wife takes the boys to her moms’ group. The anticipation with which I look forward to this is shameful. It is my opportunity to enjoy mowing the lawn without distraction. Mowing the lawn doesn’t require inordinate concentration; you walk around a rectangle with an ever-shortening perimeter. Yet, it is very easy to mow Lucky Charms shapes into your lawn when you are constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure your little helper doesn’t follow the neighborhood cat into the street and wherever else a cat-about-town needs to be on a spring evening.

There were days, long ago, when I would have spent time playing computer games, or frittered it away on those wasteful activities known as hobbies. Not anymore. Now, if I find a moment that is not owed to my sons, my wife, or my fellow homeowners, I try to work in a little reading or writing. You are enduring one of the fruits of my “me” time even now. It’s more a dried prune than a plump, juicy watermelon, but you harvest what you can in these precious moments.

This is one of my more recent hobbies. It's really difficult to do this and write a blog post at the same time, but it can be done - just not very well.

It turns out that I don’t miss computer games, home brewing, or any of my former, solitary activities all that much. My sons are much more rewarding. They are more fun than any of my erstwhile hobbies, which is fortunate because they own me. It would be nice if I could just find a little more opportunity to read and write, but I guess I’ll have to arm wrestle my wife for that.