Adventures in Fatherhood
The First Year
At the one
year mark, the author still has a lot to learn.
By Terence Loose
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hen my daughter was born I was 35 and felt 23. Now she’s one, and
I’m 36 going on 72. Yes, it’s been a long year.
But it’s been a blazingly short year, too. Like the 30-minute
point in one of those techie movies where things happen in slow-mo and revolve
around the dazed protagonist, right up until everything screams into overdrive
for a second or two and he ends up confused and under attack on some alien
planet, sometime far into the future.
Well, I’m that guy, only my mission is not to save the world from
alien invasion – I only wish my life was that easy. No, my goal is to save my
sanity from sleep deprivation, financial ruin and the crushing fear my fellow
parent friends induce when they tell me, “Are you kidding, the first year’s the
easiest; just wait until high school!” In short, my Lex
Luther is fatherhood.
It all started wonderfully enough. When our daughter Leila was
born, I took three weeks off to help my wife recover as I spent time “bonding”
with my little girl. Basically, I burned a lot of toast, ordered a lot of
pizzas, watched a lot of sports, never showered or shaved and shuffled around
in my bathrobe all day. A lot like college, only with more diaper changes.
I should say, however, that my wife was a saint. Basically, she
had two babies to deal with: Leila, who was content to cry and whine and feed and
poop 24/7, and me, who basically did the same thing. It was because I was
totally unprepared for fatherhood; I had the desire, but the skills had left
the building. Actually, I doubt they ever had gotten close to the city.
I grew up totally infant-free. My sister is only two years younger
than I and we had no relatives with babies. As an adult, my friends had kids,
but I have a tendency to stay in my room a lot, with sporadic and unpredictable
multi-month or multi-year jaunts out of the country. So I had a total of maybe
10 hours of time around babies, all of which consisted of the same
conversation: “It’s okay, Terence, you can hold her.”
“No thanks. Maybe later, when the drooling stops.” In
fact, the first diaper I ever changed was my daughter’s; it was a painful
learning curve for both of us.
But still, those first three weeks were bliss, and Leila, by all
accounts, was a wonderful baby. She didn’t cry all the time and I could hold
her like a football while watching sports.
Then, in the fourth week, reality hit like an 11,000-pound poopy diaper. The problems started when, again as in
college, the outside world actually expected intelligent output from me. I had
to get organized. I had to get caught up. I had to get some sleep!
I toyed with the idea of setting up a bed in my office and
visiting home for quick showers and those “bonding” sessions, but something
told me that would not be seen as very progressive fathering. So I began
prioritizing my time. I moved surfing, tennis, TV sports, and reading down a
few spots. My wife moved them down a few more. They came to a rest just below
taking out the trash and eating, which I was lucky to get to in the first
place.
I soon discovered, and kept discovering over the course of a year,
that there are rules to this fathering gig. And the rules are never, ever made
by the father. In fact, we aren’t even let in on the discussion. For us, it’s learn as you go – and there’s a lot to learn…
Knowledge is good; ignorance is better
Long ago in my marriage I learned how to get out of
responsibilities diplomatically. To get out of laundry duty I offered unlimited
help. Then I mixed every conceivable pattern and color together, poured in an
entire bottle of bleach, and, voila, I was banished from the laundry room.
Sure, it put a temporary dent in the clothing budget, but the rewards last
forever. Same thing with cooking and cleaning: Charbroiled a few dinners,
stained a few rugs and bingo, it was beer and Lakers time, baby. It’s what I
call the Ozzy Osborne approach.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work when it comes to being a dad.
Primarily because when you mess up, someone gets hurt and everyone cries. So I
decided I had better get informed; I hit the local library. The choices were
endless. Tens of thousands of pages dedicated to taming those
tantrums and parent empowerment and how not to go completely bonkers. I
pulled out Dr. Spock’s tome; his was at least a name I had heard, I thought.
The book was 939 pages long and started with the words, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” I put it
back on the shelf; definitely not for me.
Next I flipped through a book specifically on fatherhood called
Dear Son, About Your Baby. I landed on page 65 and read, “Playtime doesn’t mean
you can go out and play baseball with the fellas.”
Ooh, that sounded depressing; I put it back. In Tears and Tantrums I found the
advice: “Children who are allowed to cry and rage as much as needed become more
pleasant to live with.” This author was obviously deaf. I thumbed through a few
others – Parent Power!, The Best Advice I Ever Got –
but none of them spoke to me. Then, I saw it, the guide that was seemingly
written specifically for me: Parenting for Dummies. I opened it and read a
selection on the Five Basic Parenting Skills: Speak and listen with care; be
consistent; follow through; remain patient; learn to manage behavior. Well, I
possessed none of those skills, but the type was nice and big and there was a
lot of white space between the lines, so home the book went with me.
I soon found, however, that Dummies didn’t address the dramatic –
traumatic? – issues that hit in the first year. It
focuses more on the less important stuff like child safety and medical issues.
Your social life is now anti-social
There are two groups this rule affects. First,
your friends who don’t have kids. Basically, you should send them a
“Have a nice life” email; you will never see them again – unless they end up in
group two soon. This is because they are still having dinner parties that don’t
revolve around the number of poops, burps, tantrums, and vomiting attacks the
little princess had that day. For some reason, this kills the romantic buzz
still humming through their veins. Also, they will want to go out after dinner
and party until insane hours, like nine. And if you’re thinking dad can venture
out with the boys while mom stays home and breast feeds, I have one piece of
advice: Never, ever, under any circumstances, use the argument, “But obviously
that’s what God wanted when he gave you the equipment instead of me.” Trust me
on this one.
Group two consists of friends who also have infants and toddlers.
You will still see them, sort of. Dinners at their house will go something like
this: Both moms run back and forth between kitchen and babies while the dads
stand around confused running down quick requests like “Stir that!” and “Change
that!” in between sips of warm beer. Attempts at intelligent conversation are
made over the crying of one or both babies (usually they trade off to insure
constant noise) but only a series of convoluted half sentences are
accomplished, so that soon Michael Jackson is blamed for some sniper shootings
that were of course the result of a Saddam Hussein/al-Qaida
link to our own CIA who is secretly tapping the back bedroom to find out how
many poopy diapers Leila had this week. (Like I said,
everything comes back to this poop theme.)
About this time something is discovered to be lacking for a proper
meal and Dad Number One gets to escape to the store for a frantic, but somehow
more relaxing, 20 minutes. Upon his return he’ll find that due to a crying fit
and “blow-out” (yes, diaper-related again, and no, don’t ask) the original
dinner idea has been scrapped. Dad Number Two is at this moment on the phone
with The Pizza Bakery ordering $50 worth of pizza and salads. By the end of the
evening, everyone is huddled over a cold piece of pizza watching “The
Bachelor.”
You will need a bigger house
An amazing paradox exists with babies: That cute little cuddly
person who has no job, hobbies or friends is going to require more space that
the 49ers football team. It’s an unexplained phenomenon more perplexing than
black holes or Keanu Reeves’ acting career.
If you’re lucky, you have an extra four rooms: A nursery, a room
for the shipload of toys you bought because they’re just so cute and “Leila
will be nine years old sooner than we think”; a room for the truckload of
clothes bought for the same reason; a room for the piles of laundry – yes, the
clothes are tiny, but they are attacked hourly by food, drool and you know
what; and finally, what I like to call an operating room, a negative-pressure,
hermetically sealed space where all diaper changes go on.
Of course, this is not going to save the utter demolition of the
living room, which at my home is referred to as the minefield because of the
impossibility of stepping even two feet without coming down on some demented
toy manufacturer’s evil attempt to break every adult’s ankle. Equally as
treacherous are the kitchen – Leila has her own drawer of “harmless” cooking
utensils to fling around at will – the dining room and the hallway. The Dummies
book suggested baby-proofing, of course, and setting a small basket of toys in
each room, so that: First, we wouldn’t have to constantly follow Leila around,
pulling her away from electric sockets and off tables, and second, she would be
occupied with the toys. Two problems here. One, that
nice $1,000 hard wood hutch looks like a K-Mart $99 special with baby-proofing
rubber all over it. And two, the toys are fun for exactly the amount of time it
takes Leila to hurl them out of the basket, then she’s back to trying to pull
Mommy’s pants off while she cooks.
So around the 50th time I tripped over the Jam With
Elmo Electric Guitar I had an epiphany: “Baby Track!” I yelled. My wife stopped
cooking, Leila stopped pulling. “What?” my wife asked. “You get some track
lighting tracks,” I explained. “Then you get a harness, like the ones poodles
wear as leashes. One that fits Leila.” My wife lifted
Leila up and took a step back. I pressed on. “Next you attach a bar from the
tracks to Leila’s harness, and presto, she can only move in certain areas of
the house. Like a monorail system for kids! We could make a fortune, here!”
Leila started to cry; my wife said, “Daddy’s mean and crazy.” I called The
Pizza Bakery.
Take what you can get
There are some silver linings that come with fatherhood. The
problem is that the clouds they surround are big and dark. Take the first time my
little girl looked deep into my eyes and said Dada. It was more awe-inspiring
than my first tropical sunset. It made all the months of sleepless, thankless
work worthwhile. And I felt that way a full three minutes, right up until the
moment Leila turned her head, looked deep into the sofa’s pillows, and said
Dada, this time with the addition of a loving smile. I like to think that she’s
actually a little tease; in other words, she’s so smart she has skipped the
boring-point-at-object-and-label-it game and gone straight to the conceptual
and intellectual game of irony.
I know, it’s thin, but hey, it gets me through the night.
Signs of trouble
Somewhere around the eighth month my wife brought home the book
Baby Signs. “This way we can actually communicate,” she said. “Isn’t that what
all the crying and screaming is about?” I said. “I’m talking about Leila, not
you.” Oh. I snuck into my closet and checked the Parenting for Dummies. There
was nothing about this baby signing thing; I was in over my head again.
I put down The Old Man and the Sea and picked up Baby Signs (I was
averaging about 10 words a day anyway). I had to admit, the reasons for
teaching Leila Baby Signs were compelling. The book pointed out: “Talking is so
easy for adults, we forget how difficult it was to
learn…. There’s the tongue to place, the lips to form, the vocal chords to
control, the breathing to regulate…. Considering how slowly babies learn even
easy words like ball and doggy, let alone difficult words like scared and
elephant, many months are lost that could be spent having rich and rewarding
interactions, both for child and parent.”
The book suggested starting with some easier signs and building up
to conceptual things like hungry, hot or tired. So, for the next few months, my
wife and I signed our brains out. If you take walks in
Leila took a stoic attitude to all this; she sat and watched,
mouth straight, and seemed to be planning an escape from what had to be a
terrible mix-up at the hospital nursery – this set of village idiots could not
be her real parents.
But then, she did it. I asked her how big she was and she thrust
her arms up over her head. “This big!” she was saying. I signed back big, she
signed back big again. Yes, joy, success!
Twenty minutes later I winced in pain as I threw my arms up for
the 457th time. But Leila was smiling, and that’s all that mattered.
Unfortunately, she has yet to learn the signs that will tell us
when she needs to be changed, is hungry or thirsty. For those, she’s decided
screaming and crying get a much quicker response. So now we are an entire
family of spasmodic idiots who walk at Crystal Cove. Shows daily.
Sleep? We don’t need no stinking sleep!
It’s amazing to me now just how much time I used to waste
sleeping. I’ve found that I can function at at least
a 12 percent efficiency level on almost zero sleep; give me a few hours of Zs
and I’m almost at zombie level. It’s all just a numbers game, really: It takes
twice as long to do the simplest of tasks, but you have doubled your waking
hours.
Of course, the reason for my lack of sleep has changed slightly.
In the first few months it was simply because Leila was little more than a
filter. She would feed for 40 minutes every two hours, preceded or followed by
making room for the new food. So I moonlighted by changing her when she cried,
handing her to my wife, napping, changing her again, napping, and changing her
when she cried….
After a few months, Leila transitioned to being able to sleep for
hours on end without food. I anticipated escapes to dreamscapes that rivaled
the best vacations. Then, Leila decided that neither bassinet nor crib was
adequate for her bigness. She had her eyes on our full-sized bed.
After three nights of playing my elbow’s bigger than your knee, I
found myself in the Sit and Sleep parking lot. Two hours later, I woke up to
the sound of a man’s jovial voice: “That is our finest model,
you have excellent taste, sir!” I blinked and rubbed my eyes. A huge smile and
head of waxed hair stared down at me and I felt like I was floating on a cloud.
Actually, I was on a $3,500 king-sized deluxe mattress.
The bed was delivered the next day and my wife and I feasted our
eyes on its acreage. Hours later, all three of us lay down and drifted off.
Two hours later I woke up clinging like a mountaineer to the edge
of
So what have I learned after a year on the front? Mainly that the
real trick is staying sane and having even a shot at becoming the super dad you
really want to be takes stamina and endurance, but mostly a very Zen-like
attitude. You must learn to embrace the good in every moment and let the bad,
the smelly and the ear-shattering flow on by. Yes, I think it was Spicolli who said, “Just go with the flow, dude.” Because,
dude, there’s going to be a lot flowing. þ