by Jim Lindberg
After we had our first kid my whole life took on a whole new brilliance and sense of urgency. I had this nagging suspicion that I didn’t have time to screw around anymore. The father protector/provider instinct started welling up inside me, and suddenly life was about something more besides drinking beer, bashing into people in the slam pit, and screaming at the top of my lungs at punk gigs. I knew I had to begin to sacrifice my own immediate needs to those of my kids and that there was a lot of work to be done. To everyone else, I probably appeared my normal, carefree self, but inside I was becoming a completely different person. When I was happy, I was ecstatically f@#king happy. When I was pissed off, I could tear the bark off trees with my bare hands and eat it. When I was sad, I could cry ancient floods of salty, wet tears. This is what having kids did to me. When I wrote songs about wanting to change the world, I meant it more than ever, because now there was a lot more than my own miserable future at stake, and that something needed its diaper changed regularly and food put on the table every day. I was now a certified, not to be trifled with, punk rock dad.
3
HEY, HO! LET’S GO!
Once we’d delivered our first bundle of joy and our friends and parents had dropped off their flowers and obnoxious metallic balloons and the doctor made sure the baby had “voided,” they strapped the little one into our car seat and set us off on the ride of our life. One day I didn’t have a care in the world, my only concern being the next time the Circle Jerks or T.S.O.L. were playing and rearranging my album collection into pre-and post-Minor Threat years, the next I woke up to a screaming infant who had to have its needs catered to at every moment. There were diapers to change, feeding issues to decide, and I soon found out that I wouldn’t be sleeping very much at all for several weeks. This was not a test. This was the real thing, and our crash course in parenting 101 had officially begun.
Right after we walked through the door with our new baby, it felt like a completely different place. From then on, our senses were always at a heightened state of alert. “What is the baby doing? Is it crying? Is it hungry? Is it sleeping? Does it have a poopy diaper? Is it surfing the Internet for porn? What the hell is going on?” Guys usually need a little more time to adjust to a new environment but I didn’t have that luxury. The first few days out of the hospital were all about me and the baby because the wife felt like an eighteen-wheeler just rolled over her crotch and she needed to take a load off for a while. She seemed great and cheerful at the hospital, but once she got home and realized what she’d been through, she crawled into bed and didn’t feel like getting out for a couple of days. It was on-the-job training at its best, and my initial task was playing baby interpreter to try and figure out what the baby needed and when she needed it.
THIRSTY AND MISERABLE
The first few days with a newborn are kind of like what I imagine it must’ve been like to be the tour manager for the Sex Pistols: You just waited around to see what the next crisis would be. When we came home from the hospital, Jennifer’s milk hadn’t come in yet, and the baby would suck away and not get much of anything. She tried to assure me that this was okay and that the small bit of colostrum the baby would get whenever she would nurse was enough to tide her over until her milk came in, but I wasn’t buying it. It seemed to me that the little bean couldn’t possibly be getting enough food to survive and would soon shrivel up and starve like one of those Hollywood starlets that live off Diet Coke and gum. I was also concerned because she hadn’t taken a bowel movement yet and I knew that if she didn’t soon, we’d have to take her back to the hospital because she’d begin to develop jaundice, which is when they get so backed up they actually start turning colors like a little Oompa Loompa. I was worried that with nothing going in and nothing coming out, we’d somehow brought home a defective baby that couldn’t eat or evacuate its bowels on its own. Every time she made a noise, I’d grab her out of her bassinet, rush her to Jennifer, and tell her we had a noneating, nonpooping baby and that she had to do something.
Thankfully, after a while, my wife’s boobs suddenly filled up with milk and got rock hard, and the baby started sucking away. Once this first crisis was averted and she had eaten her fill, we went back to worrying that she hadn’t evacuated her bowels yet and that soon we’d be back in the hospital with our little yellow baby roasting under heat lamps for two days. We were hovering over her, concerned while she was laying on her back on the changing table, when she made a strange face and then exploded a giant shat that sprayed all over our faces and the walls around us. With baby poo dripping off her nose, Jennifer said, “Oh, thank God.”
After all the stress and pressure of bringing home a newborn, we were both ready for a nice, long, well-needed rest. We figured she would just pass out on her own eventually and sleep for hours, but we had a rude awakening when that first night, as we both laid down in bed, daughter number one stayed awake from midnight until six in the morning. The next night she did the same thing, and then again the next night after that, and the night after that. We were slowly devastated to find over the next few weeks that she didn’t want to sleep at night for more than a couple of hours at a time, ever. Just when we were dying for a few continuous hours of shut-eye ourselves, she wanted to stay up all night and party.
Like clockwork, we’d hear her starting to make noises in her bassinet. Then she’d start getting cranky because no one was coming to get her, and then she’d just bust out and start bawling hysterically. The wife and I would both lay perfectly still and pretend to be asleep, hoping to God the other would get up and entertain her, until finally one of us would give up, rip off the sheets, and pick her up, the whole time muttering a long stream of profanities. After a few weeks of this, we started to wonder if we’d given birth to some kind of crazed baby insomniac who would never sleep and instead just roam the hallways at night like a baby vampire.
We slowly came to find out that, as parents of an infant, most of the time would be spent monitoring the eating, sleeping, and pooping habits of our newborn. It seemed like they were always in the process of doing one or the other and when they weren’t we were always concerned why. During this time you find out a lot about yourself, and I found that I’m extremely impatient. Instead of being a help to Jennifer, I just stressed her out by being the bodily functions-obsessed baby monitor.
“Honey, it’s three o’clock and she hasn’t taken a crap yet.”
“I’m sure she’s fine.”
“When did you feed her last?”
“A couple of hours ago.”
“Did she eat enough?”
“As much as she wanted.”
“Shouldn’t you feed her again to help move things along?’”
“Not if she’s not hungry.”
“Does she need a nap then?”
“Not if she’s not sleepy.”
“Well, she’s just lying there making gurgling sounds and staring at me and not doing anything.”
“That’s what most babies do.”
“Couldn’t we just give her a cup of coffee or something? That always works for me.”
“Don’t you need to write a song or go on tour or something?”
BREASTFEEDING
Let’s face it, if there are two things most guys know for sure about ourselves, it’s that we’re lazy and we like boobs. If you can somehow talk your partner into breastfeeding, you’ll have a lot less to do the first year and her boobs will be several sizes bigger. I knew that with bottle feeding there would be a lot of washing and cleaning and sterilizing of bottles, nipples, and rings and boiling of water and any time I helped out, my wife would be circling around me the whole time telling me what I was doing wrong. I’d read somewhere that there’s more and more evidence that breast milk may help fight infections by boosting the immune system, and that it can lower the risk of certain ailments for both mom and the baby, and so I tried to stress all these important factors for my wife to consider, but the truth was I really wanted to save myself some work and
see what her boobs looked like several sizes bigger. This is a delicate situation because not all women are comfortable with or even capable of breastfeeding, so I tried to do everything I could to help out and be supportive, short of getting down there and sucking away myself, although I’ve heard some dads are into that. It’s a little too Oedipal for me, personally.
During her pregnancy, Jennifer had perused all the best maternity stores and websites to make sure she had the most up-to-date gadgetry needed for modern-day child care. She ordered an expensive machine off the Internet called a breast pump, which women use to suck the milk out of their breasts to freeze and save for later when needed. Seeing your girl using this contraption will either send you into therapy or make you laugh your ass off. It’s a funny-looking, noisy black box that sounds like it has a Volkswagen motor in it that sucks the milk out of her boobs with two little suction cups and makes her look exactly like a human cow at a dairy farm. No girl on the face of the earth wants to be told she looks like a cow even when she is sitting on the edge of the bed having milk extracted from her teats. This machine, funny and noisy as it was, became very useful for freezing some bottles for me to use later, when she’d gone out with the girls because I’d told her she looked like a cow.
One of the things I loved about breastfeeding besides me not having to do anything was that when the baby was hungry, no matter where we were, we were always prepared. Mom just whipped one out, covered up, and she was a walking buffet. We didn’t have to worry about having a bottle washed and ready or the right amount of formula and sterile water; we could do it anywhere, in restaurants, at the grocery store, in the park, who cares? That being said, I didn’t want my wife to be one of these nature woman-granola moms who sit around topless at the playground with a set of four-year-old twins latched onto each boob, expecting everyone to be cool with it, but when it was appropriate, why not? The problem was figuring out when it was appropriate.
We were out at a local Italian restaurant once when the baby started crying, and Jennifer said she was probably getting hungry.
“Well, go ahead and feed her,” I said. “No one will care.”
“I should just go out to the car. There’s an older couple over there staring at us and they might not approve.”
Sitting across from us at a table were a man and a woman who looked liked they’d just left a Republican fund-raiser. He was in a dark blue pin-striped suit and she was in a dinner dress and pearls, and they were both silently eating their Caesar salads and sharing a bottle of wine.
“Oh, come on. Just cover up with the tablecloth a little bit, they won’t be able to see.”
She relented and when the baby started nursing, I saw the lady across from us make a disgusted face and whisper something to her husband. I couldn’t hear her, but I imagined she was telling him to take a look at the dirty hippies breastfeeding their kid in a public restaurant. As a youth I was never afraid to fly the punk rock flag by occasionally wearing the standard uniform of plaid bondage pants, bleached spiked hair, and three-inch creepers, so I’d grown accustomed to having conservative types look down and scoff at me as a vile street hoodlum, even though I knew this was the furthest thing from the truth. Coming from a middle-class family in an affluent beach suburb and always getting everything I wanted for birthdays and Christmas, I was hardly your typical juvenile delinquent street punk, but I liked the feeling of being seen by the establishment as an outsider, as Derby Crash sang: a “puzzled panther waiting to be caged.” Now it was my turn to be disgusted.
I sneered to Jennifer with my best Billy Idol scowl. “Can you believe these Reaganomic, Bible thumpin’ snobs looking down their noses at us just because you’re breastfeeding? Is it so wrong for a couple to want to feed their baby in a restaurant when she’s hungry, while they sit over there stuffing their faces after a third trip to the salad bar?”
“Oh, big deal, don’t make a scene.”
“No, I mean it. What do we have to be ashamed of? This is a free country, and until there’s a law passed by one of their heavily lobbied congressmen cronies saying women can’t do what nature intended and breastfeed their child in public restaurants, we should be able to do it right out in the open. I say you should whip your shirt off right now and go tits to the wind just to show these puritans that we still believe in the Constitution and women’s rights. What are they so afraid of, that they might get flashed a nipple and lose their religion? These people make me sick.”
My wife knows that sometimes when I get on my high horse she has to just let me ride and take a few laps before I calm down. Just when I was ready to leap up on the table and whip down my own pants in the name of free speech and the first amendment, I noticed the gentleman across the way calling the waiter over and telling him that their wine had gone bad and they didn’t want it. Later on when they were finished, they walked by our table and said what a cute baby we had. I finished my meal knowing our baby was well fed and that the Constitution was safe.
DOOKIE
After feeding the baby, the next thing we always had to be aware of was when the kid had taken a little baby dump in its diaper. With our first encounter with a full diaper, we were extremely proud and wanted to call all our friends and bring the neighbors over to show them what our little gastronomic genius had done in her diaper, but we tried to refrain from doing this. Of all the cute baby stories, the ones people hate hearing the most are the ones about the cute little crap your kid took. It’s only cute to you, trust me. Later on, they weren’t so cute anymore and I had to master the art of not breathing for several minutes at a time to stifle my gag reflex, and my relationship with my wife became one where I was constantly coercing, negotiating, and ro-sham-bo-ing her into taking my turn changing the next diaper. It consumed our lives.
My problem was that, just like my complete inability to fold a T-shirt or pair of pants, at first I had real difficulties putting a diaper on the baby. My hands, thumbs, and fingers just didn’t seem to be able to work together to perform the task. My wife thought I was feigning incompetence just to get out of doing it, but I think I was just physically incapable of it. I would have just went through the torture of unbuckling and taking off the blue jean overalls, and unsnapped the five hundred snaps on the onesie, and recovered from the ungodly smell, and then cleaned and wiped up the skid marks from all the nooks and crannies and baby folds, and swabbed everything down, and then it’s time to put on a new diaper. But the baby is wriggling around too much and they always pull their legs up and try to stick their feet in their mouth when they’re on their back so you have to hold their legs down with one hand and try to strap the diaper on with the other, and the diaper has to be positioned just right but it never is because the baby’s butt is squirming all over the place. Then, when you pull one side over and Velcro it on and try to do the other, the first side pops open, then the legs go back up, and then it’s done finally, except both legs are out one hole and I had to use duct tape to get it to stay closed. Then I resnap the five hundred snaps on the onesie again and rebuckle the blue jean overalls and as soon as I’m done, I hear a really wet fart down there and realize I just have to do it all over again.
Even though I was horrible at diaper changing at first, I knew that in the age of shared duties and responsible parenting I’d be expected to take turns and do my fair share of wet cleanups. My wife started to notice that I would always be conspicuously absent, rushing out to the garage like I’d just been hit with inspiration, whenever the stench of a full diaper suddenly wafted into the room. We worked out a trade-off where if I did some task she hates doing, like cleaning the toilets, or if I agreed to go in her place to some boring school function, she’d work toxic cleanup for the next five changes. This way, I’m doing my part but also getting out of the hostile environment of poo management in the process. She’s probably only willing to barter this way because I take so long changing the diaper, and complain about it so much while I’m doing it, and make a huge mess that she’d rather do i
t herself. After a while, though, I became so good at it I could do it with my eyes closed, and after seeing the horror that can come out of a child’s body, sometimes I wanted to.
We soon found out that the most important tool in our arsenal of baby care supplies was a box of baby wipes. At one point I wanted to go out and buy an entire truck load because over the next several years, our box of wipes became our most valued and trusted best friend. We’d keep a box in every room of the house, the bedrooms, bathrooms, garage, tool shed, everywhere. We’d keep a few boxes in each of our cars and stash one or two at our parents’ and friends’ houses in the planter or hedges, without them knowing, for emergencies. We’d even bury a few boxes in the sand when we went to the beach. Once, during a particularly messy potty training episode, I made myself a little baby wipes holster so I could whip one out at a moment’s notice.
Once when we were all out at a California Pizza Kitchen at the local mall, just as we were seated, the baby filled her diaper, which was readily apparent because the smell drifted throughout the entire dining area like a cloud of mustard gas in World War I, and one by one the families at the tables surrounding us made disgusted faces and covered their noses and gave us dirty looks, as if their children had never filled their diapers in a crowded restaurant before. I scooped up the offending child and took her out to the minivan, which I’d just given its monthly turbo cleaning: having taken out all the stray bottles, sippy cups, Barbie dolls, and stuffed animals, vacuumed up all the cracker crumbs, bagel bites, and granola bars that had been smashed into the carpet, and swabbed down all the imitation leather seats. I laid the baby down on the passenger seat, undid the Velcro diaper tabs, and was confronted by an incredibly full volcanic diaper that spilled out everywhere, down the sides, up the back, and onto my newly cleaned imitation leather seats.