Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood

  I alternated between massaging the girl’s belly and patting her back until she let forth a majestic belch that echoed through the nursery like a bell rung in a ballroom. It was a perfectly executed, adult-level burp. I had never been more proud. She was now asleep in my arms and I jammed the bottle back into her mouth so that she would unconsciously take the rest. I propped her head up with my left hand so that she would stay upright, and I could feel my arm begin to ache under the strain of the baby’s giant head. It was like her skull was made of cast iron. I stared daggers at the bottle, watching the fluid drain down further and further, the fontanel on top of her head pulsing along with each sip. Almost there. So, so close. I was so excited to go back to sleep, I could hardly stand it. When a baby finishes a bottle, you can hear the nipple squeak like a dog’s chew toy because all the formula is gone. It’s the sweetest sound in the world because it means that you can finally get up and get on with your life. I was angling for that sound. I burped the girl again at the one-ounce mark and now it was only a matter of time. The formula kept going down, and then, just as I was about to hear that gorgeous squeak . . .

  Thpppppppppppppp . . .

  A shit. A big ol’ shit. It was almost as if she had been holding it in until just now on purpose. I was at the end. I could have been in bed within three minutes. Instead, this.

  Before you have children, you look upon changing diapers as some kind of disgusting task, one you do with your hand to your nose. But actual parents don’t care about that. The poop is beside the point. You get alarmingly used to wet feces showing up in random places. Oh, it’s on the stove. That’s curious. It’s the disruption that changing a diaper causes that makes every parent hate it. I knew that changing the kid’s diaper would fully awaken her and leave me stuck rocking her back to sleep for the next seventy minutes. I was screwed. I had to change the thing.

  Or did I? After all, the baby was still sound asleep. Why disturb her? Wouldn’t that be cruel? And hey, poop is warm. Everyone likes being warm! Maybe it would be okay to leave that puddle of shit in her pants. Maybe she liked it that way. And if she liked it that way, who was I to argue? You should do everything in your power to keep your child happy, right?

  I put her back in the crib with a shit in her pants.

  I sneaked back into the bedroom and turned the monitor back on. I sat on the bed ever so gently, so as not to disturb my lovely wife. My aim was to shut my eyes tight so that I could fall back asleep as quickly as possible. If I managed to fall back asleep, I would win. And the second I hit the pillow, the exact second my head touched linen . . .

  Durrrrrr.

  Was that her? Maybe that wasn’t her. Maybe that was some other ambient sound, I thought to myself. This is always wishful thinking. If you suspect the baby is making noise, it’s making noise.

  Hack.

  Maybe she’s just settling back in, I thought to myself. She was quiet for a moment after that, and I lulled myself into believing my work was done. I was in the clear now.

  Hack hack hack.

  “Shit.”

  I got back up and trudged out of the bedroom. I made sure to sound extra huffy so that my wife would wake up and have sympathy and take over for me, but no. She was down like a gunshot victim. I was on my own. I grabbed the baby and tried to quickly change her diaper, only it took me ten minutes to align the snaps on her footies properly. Every time I thought I had it right, there was a stray unbuttoned snap right around her crotch. She began to fuss louder. There was a bottle of infant gas drops right by the changing table and I squirted an unknown amount into her mouth. I did this often. I don’t think the gas drops had any medicinal value at all. They were probably just powdered sugar mixed with water. But at least it was something. She spit out the drops and kept on crying. I grabbed a swaddling blanket and wrapped her up extra tight, as if I were putting her in a straitjacket. MWAHAHAHA. You’ll never escape from the clutches of this fluffy giraffe blanket now, I thought. She broke free in half a second.

  There was a trace amount of formula left in the bottle. Now, formula allegedly goes bad after being out for an hour. At this point, I had no idea how long I’d been awake. Could have been forty minutes. Could have been nine days. But making new formula involved mixing, like, a whole new bottle.

  I gave her the old formula.

  She sucked it dry and began to close her eyes. Yes, yes, attagirl. Then, just as I heard that wonderful squeak of the empty bottle . . .

  Thpppppppppppppp. Another poop.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  I put her back in the crib anyway to see if she would sleep, but the second I placed her on the mattress, she began to writhe and contort and make pained faces. I thought about propping her up on a Boppy—a curved breast-feeding pillow we had stashed in the closet. You aren’t supposed to do this. You’re supposed to leave a baby in a crib alone, with no other accoutrements around, because it can roll into things like pillows and suffocate. If I propped her up on a pillow, she might die. Then again, I was very, very tired.

  I propped her up on a pillow.

  She lay perfectly still there. So small. So beautiful. So silent. I loved her so very much, especially when she didn’t make any noise. When you have a baby, you’re always convinced that there’s some kind of magic bullet that will get the baby to eat and sleep and behave properly. OMG, all I had to do was put her on a pillow! Child: solved!

  I closed the door and the baby began screaming instantly. I went back in and tried putting a pacifier in her mouth, but she was crying and shaking her head back and forth and her mouth became a moving target. There was audible evidence of a mouth present, but goddamn if I could find it. I took a finger and scoured her face in the dim light for a set of lips, then managed to sneak the pacifier in. She spit it right back out. Babies aren’t stupid. They know what you’re trying to pull. They don’t want you taking shortcuts.

  I picked the girl up and changed her diaper again. She immediately threw up onto the changing pad, so now I had to engage in bodily fluid triage, trying to figure out if the shit should be wiped up first or the spit-up. I chose the shit, changing her diaper first and then giving her a new outfit. But she wouldn’t stop going nuts. Maybe she needed food. Maybe she needed to make up for the milk she’d just spit up. I know I always like eating right after vomiting.

  “Do you want more to eat? Is that what you want?”

  WAHHHHHHHHHH!

  I got her more to eat.

  I went to the bathroom and filled up a new bottle. At this point, I was failing in my efforts to remain half-asleep. I did my best to remain partially comatose so that, whenever this ordeal was over, I would fall right back asleep. But that hope was dashed now. I was legitimately awake. I took the baby down to the TV room and fed it while watching a Food Network show on mute, holding the bottle awkwardly, like when a child feeds a baby goat at the petting zoo. She wasn’t interested in the milk. I stood up and walked around with her to calm her down, but she kept right on crying. I grabbed another pacifier and wiggled it around in her mouth, as if to anchor it in the back of her throat. She spit it out, so I put it back in again and held her close to my chest so that spitting out the pacifier was physically impossible. My spine was quietly falling apart. I had already had two operations on my back, the second one coming two weeks before the baby was born. My then-pregnant wife saw me lying on the hospital gurney before my operation and was like, “It’s supposed to be ME on that thing, you bastard.” My back was not yet equipped to handle the yeoman’s work of carrying a baby around constantly, but the baby clearly didn’t give a shit about my troubles. “Please fall asleep,” I begged her. “Please, please, please. I’ll do anything. I promise I’ll never try to sing to you again.”

  But she just went on crying. I mouthed a quiet fuck it, took her back into the nursery, and put her in the crib, still crying. You aren’t supposed to let a baby cry out the night
until they’re much older, around three to six months. Leaving a crying two-month-old is thoughtless, selfish, and cruel. But again, I was very tired.

  I left.

  I went back to the bedroom and didn’t bother to turn the monitor back on. My thinking was: If a baby is crying and no one can hear it, is it really upset? I thought not. My wife, who was supposed to be sleeping, was quick to let me know she didn’t share my viewpoint. I don’t know how she managed to wake up after not hearing something, but there you have it.

  “You have to turn the monitor back on.”

  “No way. I’m not turning that thing back on.”

  “Fine. Then I’ll get the baby.”

  She got up and started walking out.

  “Wait!” I said. “Does this count as your shift? Because this totally shouldn’t count as your shift.”

  “Go to bed, Drew.”

  And I did. I slid into bed and it felt as if the bed were embracing me, as if I were nestled in the palm of some greater supernatural being. So soft and warm, I wanted to die inside of it. Nothing could pull me away. My wife was with the child now, but they were far away, in some other universe where things are loud and turbulent and nothing like the land of purple unicorns that I was entering. I became a nucleus: a tiny, impossibly dense thing tucked down into a void so expansive that the nearest particle seemed to be a million billion miles away.

  Three hours later, the monitor went off at previously unknown decibel levels.

  WAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

  I lay perfectly still. My wife lay perfectly still.

  Hack hack hack WAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

  “It’s your turn,” my wife said.

  “What? No way. It was my turn last time.”

  “But I relieved you, so now it’s your turn again.”

  “Are you joking? You were the closer. I did all the hard work. That doesn’t count as a full shift.”

  “I was the one who was up last.”

  “This is an outrage!”

  “Please.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “No.”

  WAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

  No one moved. The bed was far too comfortable.

  GYMBOREE

  My wife signed our daughter up for a gym class because she had to get out of the house with her. That’s the biggest challenge of owning a one-year-old: You’re constantly looking for ways to fill up the day. I was working in an office at the time, so this was of no concern to me. I got to go to work and talk to other people and dick around on the Internet and take a whiz whenever it suited me. I wasn’t the one stuck with a one-year-old all day. The child was close to being ambulatory now. It could be taken out. It had to be taken out.

  The brochure said that the classes helped toddlers with coordination, but that was mostly a ruse. They just provided a room full of padded, germ-ridden crap that toddlers could run around and fall down in. The main reason parents sign up for this kind of class is because it gives them a chance to relinquish primary control of the child to a peppy twenty-five-year-old gym teacher for forty minutes while they talk to other mothers about what a pain in the ass everything is. My wife loved the Gymboree class. If we had had the resources, she would have signed the girl up for it every day of the week. Not only did it give my wife time to rest, it also sucked all the energy out of the child so that she was perfectly set up to nap later in the day. Children have sixty times more energy than functional adults, and all that energy needs to go somewhere. Best that it goes into shaking a dirty parachute with a group of strangers.

  I got home from work the day of the first class and my wife was overjoyed.

  “Drew, it’s so great. I don’t have to do much. I even got to read a magazine for two minutes.”

  “That’s great.”

  “You should take her.”

  “I’m not gonna be the only dad there, am I?”

  “What? No. Of course not.”

  “Were there any other dads there when you went?”

  “No, but that was a weekday class. I’m sure the weekend classes are different.”

  “All right,” I said, piling up metaphorical brownie points in my head. “I’ll take her. You stay here and relax. Take some sorely needed time for yourself.”

  “Actually, I have to do the laundry.”

  “NO, NO, NO,” I said. I wanted this gesture to count. If she spent all that time doing housework, then I wouldn’t have any excuse to demand free time of my own later on. For every hour a mother gets to herself, a father will demand five times that amount for drinking with friends and acting like an immature dipshit. “Don’t do the laundry,” I said. “You work real hard. Watch TV. Take a spa day.”

  “I have to do her laundry or else she’ll have no clothes to wear and she’ll throw up on her own naked body.”

  “Then I’ll do the laundry.”

  “You suck at laundry,” she said.

  “Is it that I suck at laundry or that YOU suck at teaching me laundry?”

  “Just take her to the goddamn class.”

  And so I did.

  From the parking lot, I saw nothing but a mass of yoga pants and strollers heading for the gym. There’s something inherently terrifying about knowing you’re going to be the only dad at one of these things. I would be parenting in front of a live studio audience consisting of nothing but women. I mean, I was a real father. I handled feedings and played peekaboo and talked baby talk. I did all that, but the crude stereotype of the modern American father is that of a clueless dumbfuck who couldn’t mix a bottle of formula even if the instructions were tattooed on his penis. I imagined the mothers judging me in the class, watching me carefully for any glaring fuckups. Oh, look at the poor dad. Trying to act like a competent parent. How pathetic.

  Well, I wasn’t gonna take that shit lying down. I wasn’t gonna be a slave to the American Mother Hypocrisy Complex—this group of women who demand that men do their fair share but still want to be considered the superior caregivers. I was gonna ROCK THAT CLASS. I was gonna get down on that dirty mat and sing and hold hands and play all kinds of crazy baby games with the girl. And then all the women in that class would be simultaneously ashamed and turned on.

  I got the girl out of the car, took her in my arms because she wasn’t fully walking yet, and marched straight to the elevator. The door was still open, and a new mom and her mother were standing inside with a little boy. I confidently strode to the elevator with the girl in the crook of my arm. And right as I crossed the threshold, the door began to close and I bashed the girl’s skull right into the side of it. You could hear the smack from across town. Sounded like someone dropped a crate of oranges out of a window.

  “OH FUCK,” I yelled.

  The girl began to scream as the doors shut. Not a standard baby scream. The kind of scream that turns heads from a mile away.

  “Oh my goodness!” said the mother’s mother.

  There was a blue horn growing on the girl’s forehead.

  “Can I help you?” the mother asked me.

  “NO! No, everything’s fine! She’s just fine!”

  “She sounds like she’s hurt,” the grandma said.

  “Oh, you know . . . ,” I said. I didn’t even know what I was saying. I bounced the girl up and down and stared at the floor, hoping that staring at the floor would render me invisible. It did not. The two women could totally still see me. The elevator ride never seemed to end. I wanted the cables to snap so we would plummet down to the ground and this would all be over.

  We finally got to the top floor and I walked into the class. The girl was still erupting. A dozen mothers turned and stared at me. There I was, the shithead father. I had already failed. I had justified all the stereotypes. I could hear them thinking about how incompetent I was. Awww, that poor girl. Such a shame she has a negligent ass for
an old man. I felt the urge to flee, to run to a nearby bar and eat nachos for exactly forty minutes before taking the girl home and telling my wife that our day at Gymboree had gone just super.

  But I couldn’t. I wasn’t gonna give up and turn tail in front of the coven, confirming their worst fears. I was representing American fathers here. I was their ambassador. I would be goddamned if I was gonna fail. But mostly, I hoped the class would get my daughter to stop crying.

  The Gymboree class was housed in a nondescript room inside a shopping plaza, with the standard fluorescent lights and gypsum ceiling tiles. You could have moved everything out and converted the gym into an empty space for lease in less than thirty minutes. We found ourselves greeted by kiddie tunes blasting from a twenty-dollar boom box resting on the floor mat. A receptionist had me sign in and give my phone number. Parents have to do this in case they decide to go get a taco and the gym suddenly bursts into flames. I signed the form while the girl was crying. She was the only fussy child in the room, and I desperately wished that another child would throw a shitfit so I didn’t look like the only person who didn’t have control of his offspring.

  A young instructor named Cassie, wearing the official Gymboree T-shirt, escorted us out onto the floor and instructed us to sit in a circle with the rest of the class. I kissed my daughter’s new unicorn horn and made little hisses and buzzes in her ear—the kind that are supposed to help soothe fussy babies. But she was a toddler now. She wasn’t buying any of that shit anymore. She wailed on and I began to fear that she would keep bawling and bawling until her fucking head exploded. I offered her a pretzel rod from a ziplock bag of now-warm snacks that had been sitting in my jacket pocket for three days. She smacked the pretzel out of my hand and kept on crying. I whisked her over to a corner, where she wouldn’t be overwhelmed by all the other people around.