Punk Rock Dad
Page 4
Two symptoms Jennifer did experience were random food cravings and a heightened sense of taste and smell. She could smell someone opening a can of tuna in another area code and would promptly begin to dry heave. There were times when we would be watching a TV commercial and all of a sudden she’d become ravenous for Chinese chicken salad or a pint of cookie dough ice cream. I tried not to argue or complain when late at night she needed me to get out of bed, put on my clothes, and drive to Taco Bell for a bean and cheese burrito with sour cream, giving me specific instructions for there to be no onions whatsoever, because “if I see or smell onions, or even if I think about the smell of onions too long, I’m going to barf.” I tried to see these opportunities as a way to earn some husband-of-the-year brownie points, which I could cash in at a later date, and if I added to my gut a little, people might think I was having a sympathy pregnancy and say what a sweet guy I was for doing that.
Apparently some of the other physical signs that pregnancy can include but not be limited to are leg cramps, back pain, constipation, hemorrhoids, sore and engorged breasts, swollen ankles, skin rashes, itching, head and body aches, a constant need to pee, vaginal discharge, frequent vivid dreams, water retention and bloating, gas, bleeding gums, hot flashes, spider veins, general overall shortness of breath, and fatigue. Pregnant women also get to worry about the wonderful things that can happen after delivery, such as stretch marks, saggy deflated boobs, and whether or not their cooch will ever return to its former elasticity after it’s been stretched out like one of those African tribeswomen who cram dinner plates into their lips. Because Jennifer had to suffer through all the glamorous symptoms and debilitating anxieties of pregnancy that I got to sail through like a vacation in the Caribbean, it wasn’t surprising that at times she could seem a little moody.
I’d heard all the horror stories that, for some guys, pregnancy can seem like one long nine-month PMS party. The term “emotional roller coaster” had to have been coined by an expectant father gamely trying to negotiate the twists, turns, and backward loops of pregnancy, and probably by a guy who’d just had an ashtray thrown at his head by a woman surrounded by boxes of Kleenex and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. Lucky for me, my wife was just so happy that she was about to become the mom she’d always wanted to be that she didn’t have a lot of glass-shattering freak-outs or emotional meltdowns. She spent most of her time reading child care and parenting books and getting ready for the big day. There were a few times, however, when I’d be sitting on the couch minding my own business and all of a sudden she’d be incredibly pissed off, saying that I’d forgotten to take out the trash again and now the whole house wreaked and that I was a lazy bastard. I tried not to tell her it was just her hormones talking, because not only is this the last thing she wanted to hear, but the truth was, I had been a lazy bastard and I did forget to take out the trash. Overall, she just wanted a little extra encouragement and help getting up out of chairs and the occasional reassurance that she still looked great and that I wasn’t going to leave her now that she looked like a giant bowling ball in stretch pants.
SEX
The other way hormones affected Jennifer was by messing with her libido, and indirectly mine as well. At varying points in the pregnancy, she would want nothing to do with me, and then all of a sudden she’d turn into a rabid porn star. I wouldn’t have gotten any for weeks because she wasn’t in the mood for it when she was feeling nauseous and fatigued all the time, and then I’d wake up one morning to what felt like my wife holding on to a Butterball turkey bouncing up and down on me. For most guys, late-term coitus can be kind of disconcerting. In the last few months of pregnancy, she would be raring to go, but all I could think about was that my future child was in there a few inches away from the action, and something felt vaguely…well, wrong about that. I tried to remember that in a few weeks I’d be getting less than no hanky-panky for a long time and I should probably stock up now, even if it did feel like I was being romantic with a large, warm watermelon.
GOING TO THE OBSTETRICIAN
My first official duty as a punk rock dad was going along with my wife to the initial OB/GYN appointments. These short visits to the female anatomy doctor felt like they lasted a lifetime because everything is painted a pale pink color and there are pictures of flowers everywhere and I always felt a little queasy just being there. I was usually the lone persecuted male in the waiting room surrounded by violently pregnant and vaginally troubled women, who I imagined looked at men like me as the source of all their suffering. It’s a little disconcerting for a guy to be in a place where he’s surrounded by six-foot-tall diagrams of gaping vaginas and three-dimensional, full-scale plastic models of a uterus sitting next to you on the coffee table among the scattered Woman’s World magazines. You’re always thinking you could turn a corner and walk by a room with an open door and see the old lady from your block spread-eagle on an examination table and pass out and wake up with retrograde amnesia.
Although most of the doctors I’ve dealt with in my life have been very nice and personable, it’s hard for me not to think they all see us as walking sets of symptoms and diagnoses. I’m not Jim, the nice musician guy with three daughters, I’m strabismus and psoriasis with hay fever, terrible family heart history, and acid reflux. They’re just taking notes to see how similar my symptoms are to the last thirty people they treated and if my case is just peculiar enough to get a “poor bastard” chuckle during the next round of golf with the other doctors.
The wife and I have a rough time going to the doctor’s office in general because we’ve watched one too many investigative reports on television where a patient goes into the hospital with a nagging cough and somehow contracts a level-10 staph infection and gets the wrong leg amputated, so now we’re both paranoid germ freaks. Whenever we step into the doctor’s waiting room, we treat it like we’ve been dropped off at lepers’ island and wear enough clothing for an arctic expedition just so no airborne particles of flesh-eating virus or mad cow disease inadvertently land on any exposed skin. I open the door with my sleeve over my hand and pick up the pen for the sign-in sheet the same way, eliciting disdainful looks from the nursing staff. We both try not to breathe at all in the waiting room and don’t even look at other patients for fear of getting some kind of black plague spread through casual eye contact.
Even though I’m an incredible germ freak, once I get into the examination room I can’t help digging around in there and trying out all the equipment, opening drawers, and seeing what types of forceps and lobotomy tools might be laying around. I also can’t stop myself from opening the hazardous waste bin with the bright red “Danger” trash bag liner, just to see if there are any aborted fetuses or Siamese twin halves in there trying to get out. With this type of neurosis going on during our trips to the doctor, it’s no wonder we’re concerned with what horrors awaited us at the OB/GYN’s office.
Lucky for us, we couldn’t have asked for a better first obstetrician for a couple as freaked out about childbirth as we were. She was a small Indian woman who must have been a reincarnation of some kind of midwife for the baby Buddha, because she knew every possible detail about childbirth and delivered the answers to our long volleys of paranoid questions with incredible patience and care. My wife could be asking what would happen if the baby comes out and its face is inside out, and the doctor would calmly answer that this rarely happens and it was nothing to worry about and that everything would be fine. She just sat there patiently and waited for our next stupid question, knowing that the only thing that would calm our frayed nerves would be if she answered all our increasingly inane inquiries as if they were all completely valid.
Our second obstetrician was kind of kooky and jaded with the tired look of someone who’d stared down at one too many poorly coiffed vaginas. She was one of the few people who didn’t begrudge me when I came in unshowered and disheveled wearing my Black Flag T-shirt with the Pettibone drawing of a raised middle finger. She was the most laissez-faire
doc I’ve ever met, almost as if she’d delivered so many babies and experienced so many different types of childbirths she wouldn’t be surprised at all if your baby came out with a full beard in a white suit singing Bee Gees’ songs. She’d seen everything twice, and nothing fazed her. We again had a thousand silly questions to which she would just kind of shrug, as if to say, “Well, if that happens, I’ll get a turkey sandwich for lunch instead of soup, for all the difference it will make to me.” Her relaxed bedside manner again eased our paranoia, which was probably her plan all along.
The most important visit for me to be present for was the ultrasound, where they used a magic wand to electronically produce pictures on a monitor of what was happening inside my wife’s womb. This gave us the chance to see the coarse, wavering, gray image that was supposed to be our baby, but to me looked like a black-and-white, badly photocopied map of the world, with our baby looking something like Russia or China. I just pretended I saw what they saw. “Oh, that small, white, circular shape is her leg? Well, she definitely isn’t going to be a basketball player! Oh, look, honey, she has your eyes. I’ve always said your eyes look like two grainy bulbous slits.”
Another purpose for the ultrasound, besides confusing me into thinking we were giving birth to some kind of Rorschach test, was that this was when they checked to find out if we were having a boy or a girl, our own little Deborah Harry or Dee Dee Ramone. We wanted to find out in advance just so we’d know what color to paint the baby’s room and what kind of clothes to buy and also to save ourselves from any type of unexpected spontaneous response in the delivery room if we didn’t get what we were secretly hoping for. I didn’t want the kid to come out and have the first words it hears be, “Oh, crap!”
Mainly I was just relieved to find out that the developing fetus had all its limbs in the right places and didn’t have devil horns coming out of its head. So when they told us it looked like it was a girl, it hardly seemed to make a difference, as long as everything was normal. Some guys with masculine insecurity issues think that unless they have a boy, the other guys are going to think they are less of a man and make fun of them, and they’re too dumb to realize that having these insecurities actually proves the point. Men have millions of X and Y sperm running around in their nut sacks, and it’s all one big cosmic spin of the gender roulette wheel what you’re going to get. If only macho guys had boys, then the planet would look like one giant gay bar in West Hollywood. I think being happy with the fact that you have a healthy kid proves you’re a man, and being depressed and sulking if you don’t get a boy makes you a crybaby. This, of course, is coming from a guy with three daughters.
When I accompanied Jennifer to her prenatal visits it showed the world that even though I was a punk rock sociopath, I intended to do the right thing and be involved in the pregnancy, but sometimes seeing my wife spread-eagle on the examination table with the doc sitting between her legs like a mechanic checking under the hood of an old Ford did freak me out. It’s kind of like if you were having a rectal exam and the doc was two fingers deep in the place where no person you’re not otherwise romantically involved with should ever have their two fingers, and you looked over and saw your wife sitting there smirking at you. You’d feel a little self-conscious too, unless of course you’re into that kind of thing. I wanted to stay involved, but not so curious that the doctor had to move me aside just to check my wife’s cervix. I was happy to sit several feet away in a chair by the door, next to the giant labia sculpture in the corner.
TOO MUCH PARANOIA
So we’d shared the news with our friends and family and survived the first few trips to the obstetrician, and Jennifer and I would be sitting in our tiny apartment on the couch just trying to get used to the idea that soon we would have a little kid there in between us, our own tiny little helpless creature who looks just like us, eats strained peas, poops, says cute things, and loves us unconditionally, and who would be relying on us to provide everything it needed in life. This was right about when the gargantuan shadow of anxiety came in and began to hover over us day and night. Before, I was always pretty lighthearted and tried not to take things too seriously in life, but I found myself becoming more and more concerned with how this parenthood thing was going to affect my previously irresponsible, independent, punk rock lifestyle.
Many guys from the punk generation have some pretty large issues with their dads, some repressed and unspoken, while others might be right there on the surface, holding a Bud tall and telling you what a loser you turned out to be. If you were one of the lucky ones, he was a great guy, and you and he tossed the ball around in the backyard every day when he came home from work and had great father-son chats in a canoe out on a placid lake somewhere. Chances might be a little better that he was either a patently abusive alcoholic or absent altogether, both physically and emotionally. You can never tell if you’re going to get a dad like Ward Cleaver or one who pinches your girlfriend’s ass and steals your pot.
So right away, I was a little concerned with what type of father I’d turn out to be. During my childhood I’d caused the untimely death of more than my fair share of hamsters and goldfish due to neglect, and I wondered if I might be constantly having to ask myself if I’d remembered to feed the kids that day. What kind of a role model would I be for my kids when I usually woke up every Monday morning feeling guilty and ashamed about what an ass I’d made of myself over the weekend? I still acted like an overgrown kid myself, eating Fruit Loops for breakfast and watching cartoons, and I still thought arm farts were funny. Would I be able to teach my kids right from wrong, especially since I barely knew the difference myself, and regularly chose the wrong side when I did? What about when they asked me about the birds and the bees? Are you allowed to just rent them a porno and let them figure it out for themselves? Wasn’t there a rule book for this type of thing?
I was also concerned about what type of world I was bringing my kid into. We live in Southern California, a half an hour southwest of Hollywood, home to the most superficial, looks-obsessed, artificial, shallow population on the planet, where if you have one microscopic flaw or blemish on your face, you immediately rush to your plastic surgeon and have it lasered, Botoxed, and eviscerated, until everyone on the street looks like a living version of a stretched-out Barbie or Ken doll. There’s no way anyone with my DNA would be able to compete in this environment. Would my kid be able to hone and perfect a carefully cultivated “Screw the World” attitude defense mechanism like I had, just to deal with the constant scrutiny of the Tinseltown fashion police?
MONEY WORRIES
The next big cause for concern was, of course, money. Kids aren’t cheap. There are clothes to buy, which they’ll grow out of in a month, food to purchase that they’ll eat two bites of and refuse, medical bills for the six thousand different colds and viruses they’ll collect at the germ pool of a school you’re paying for them to attend, not to mention the thousands of Christmas and birthday presents that seem to multiply exponentially in cost every year. There’s also the skyrocketing cost of sending them to college, where they will take headstand beer bongs and wildly fornicate with other kids from around the country and contract STDs, and then if you’re lucky like me, you’ll have three fancy weddings to pay for. When I started to add up what it was going to cost to raise a kid, I couldn’t pretend I could retire at forty anymore by selling some of my vinyl on eBay.
Now that I was a wholly unprofessional professional musician, the money stress came when I realized being the singer of a punk rock band didn’t provide me with the most stable future financially. Record labels don’t give you 401(k)s or health insurance plans or stock options, so I always had to worry about how far into the future our record sales would dry up and people would stop coming to our shows, and our record label and agents, so happy to make money off of us during the high points of our career, would unceremoniously kick us to the curb. Would we be able to rock on into our sixties and tour the country as a nostalgia act, so all the
aging punkers could get together and bash around the slam pit in their walkers and wheelchairs, or would the next electronic techno music fad take over and push the punk scene unwillingly into obscurity? Like any other working-stiff dad, wondering if he might find a pink slip on his desk on Monday morning, my job security was another thing I worried about late at night, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling and gripping the sheets like death until dawn.
Also in the back of my mind was how I was going to clean up my shamefully unhealthy lifestyle. Throughout the 1980s and most of the ’90s, my diet had consisted mainly of fast food, donuts, fluorescent orange chips, instant macaroni and cheese, and microwaveable burritos. I’d head out to a show at night and drink as many rum and Cokes as I could hold down, and then finish it all up by hitting Oki Dog for an enormous chili cheese dog burrito for a midnight snack. When we started going on tour we would have nothing but pizza and beer for dinner every night for a month. I’d never jog or work out, thinking a few laps around the mosh pit or a brisk walk to the cigarette machine would give me all the exercise I needed, and that going to the gym was for yuppies.
I started smoking when I was about eighteen, confusing it for something only incredibly cool people did. Now that I was about to have kids, I didn’t want them coming out with a third eye asking for a pack of Camel Lights. I also didn’t want to help them along to a life of bronchitis by chain-smoking next to the crib or to have to be trailing around a ventilator to their little league games. Although the punk rock lifestyle has always championed a steady diet of beer and cigarettes, and I’ll always crave one more nice long satisfying drag from a menthol 100, apparently emphysema is like being suffocated very slowly over a ten-year period. Cirrhosis of the liver isn’t that fun last time I checked, either. “Live Fast, Die Young” is a great song but not as fun in practice. As rewarding as it was to eat, drink, and smoke whatever I wanted, I didn’t want my kids spending their teen years visiting me in the cardiopulmonary ward of the local hospice, and I worried that if I didn’t clean up my act soon, in nine months we’d be giving birth to the Toxic Avenger.