by Jim Lindberg
Immediately I looked around for a box of baby wipes but then remembered, Turbo Cleaning Day! In an effort to make the minivan spotlessly clean, I had taken out all the boxes of baby wipes and forgotten to replace them. Along with most of her body, all the baby’s clothing was covered in baby poo, so I stripped her down completely and then suddenly realized I had nothing new to clothe her in. I picked her up and for a while just stood there at a loss for what to do next. I had nothing to wipe her up with, and I couldn’t just stroll back into the restaurant with a naked baby covered in shit from the shoulders down and pretend everything was normal. If you had been driving through the Manhattan Village Mall on this fateful autumn night, you might have seen me at the back of a minivan having a total emotional breakdown, holding a half-naked child who looked like it had sat ass-first in a pot of chili con carne.
It seemed that my children would save their bowel movements of Biblical proportion for these inopportune moments of need. It couldn’t be one of the times when a tidy little dry turd the size of a hamster pellet comes out. No, the time I misplace my last box of wipes is when I’m treated with the ones that look like a mud slide on P.C.H. in Malibu. So now, you panic. Most parenting books will tell you to be patient and try to stay calm, but I think this is a situation where it’s okay to just lose it completely and curl up in a ball and cry because there’s no easy way out of it. After this episode I bought enough baby wipes to cover a small foreign country and saved myself a world of pain.
SLEEP
After eating and pooping, the other thing our first baby did was sleep, but not as often as we hoped. Weren’t babies just supposed to go down for the night peacefully at seven or eight o’clock, and only wake up for a quick fifteen-minute feeding or two and then go back to sleep? If so, why was my kid always still wide awake at 2:30 A.M., and why hadn’t either of us had our eyes closed for more than a few minutes since she was born? Every day it seemed to get harder and harder to get her to finally go to sleep, and we’d have to do all kinds of crazy things to try and get her to nod off, from driving her around the block in the car for hours, pathetically waving to the neighbors each time we passed them watering their lawn, to wearing tracks in the carpet walking circles around the house, bouncing her up and down and nearly giving myself a hernia in the process. She’d eventually fall asleep, but as soon as I stopped bouncing or walking, she’d let out a huge scream and wake up again.
With all this late-night and early-morning activity, I tried to remember how when I was younger and I could stay out all night and party no problem, the hours seemed to just fly by and before I knew it, the sun was coming up. When you are sitting on the couch staring at the TV station color bars and listening to nothing but the absolute quiet, dead of night, and you’re drooling and nodding off, but your kid is still jumping up and down in its bouncer, the hours tend to creep by a little more slowly. I’d be walking around downtown after the fifth consecutive all-nighter with the insomniac, and people would have no trouble coming up to me and saying, “Dude, you look like shit!” and I did look like shit. My hair was matted on my head, I had permanent sheet marks on my face and my eyes were always puffy and bloodshot with huge carry-on luggage bags underneath them. I think I personally started the whole bed head hairstyle just by walking around in public after only getting an hour of sleep the night before.
Eventually we got her to start going to sleep at a semireasonable hour and taking short naps in the day, but she was always waking up and fighting going down, and keeping us up all hours. To this day, she’s the last to go to bed, rarely sleeps through the night, and every morning I’m woken up by her standing beside my bed, pulling my eyelids open, saying, “Daddy, wake up!” Number two was only slightly better, but she at least would sleep through the night once we got her down. With number three, we were finally blessed with a child who sleeps like a rock, goes to bed early, wakes up late, and will instantly nod off for long naps throughout the day. The problem is we rarely get to enjoy it since we’re always having to keep her up late, wake her up early, and interrupt her naps for the nonstop shuttling of the older kids to sports and school-related activities. Sometimes I go on tour now just to catch up on my sleep. Lucky for us, when our kids don’t get enough sleep and become overtired, angry, and cranky, nature has provided them with a time-proven method of letting us know about it.
CRYING
If God is really mad at you for something you did in high school, you might get a baby with ‘colic,’ which is apparently when your baby spends most of its waking hours screaming at the top of its lungs. The scream of the colicky child isn’t like an “I want something to eat” whining cry, or the “There’s something wet and gross between my legs” annoyed moan; it sounds as if they are being dunked in boiling water or they’ve just seen a headless body behind you. Their little lips tremble and their whole body shakes and the more you try to get them to stop once they’ve worked up a ball of steam, the more pissed off they get. This can be a parent’s worst nightmare.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say daughter number one had colic, but she could sure let it rip when she wanted to. Sometimes during the day I’d have to walk around with headphones on, listening to G.B.H. just to try and drown it out. No luck. The crying went on and on, sometimes through the night. There were times when we just had to let her cry it out. I’d go in the garage and start playing my guitar, testing just how loud my Marshall stack could go without getting the cops called. When I would pause for a moment or segue into a dramatic breakdown, in the background through the walls I could still hear her wailing away like mad. I think this is why our fourth album has so few breaks in the action. If I stopped playing, I’d hear the crying again.
The incessant nature of it began eating away at my sanity. There were some days when she had been crying so much that I just wanted to start crying right along with her. I tried to consider it a test of just how much pain I could tolerate, like getting a tattoo across your entire back or several eyebrow and nose piercings. I meditated and read Buddhist verses and searched for ways to manage my stress that didn’t include a fifth of Jack Daniels or an eight-foot bamboo bong.
After a few weeks I started to become an expert at knowing which cry was for when the baby was hungry, which was for when she was tired, and which was for when she was just sick of me making baboon faces at her all day. I heard so much crying I became a connoisseur. At a certain point, my ears eventually started to become somewhat numb to the sonic frequency of a crying baby. I could hear it, but it didn’t annoy me as much after I’d listened to it night and day for several months. We would go on tour, I’d be sitting in a restaurant or on a plane with a baby screaming bloody murder right next to me, and I wouldn’t be bothered in the slightest. People around me are freaking out and I can’t hear a thing, all because I have three kids.
Babies cry. That’s what they do. It’s usually their way of saying something isn’t right, but sometimes it can be for no reason at all except sheer boredom, and letting out a big cry at the cold hopelessness of the world feels good when you’ve been in a nice warm womb for the last nine months having all your needs attended to. Nine times out of ten, the baby just wants to be picked up and held. Imagine being the size of a loaf of bread and feeling totally helpless; you’d cry occasionally too. We older folk are the ones who repress the biological need to let out a good long wail every once in a while, which is why most of us turn to therapy or alcohol or become lead singers in punk bands so we can scream our lungs raw every night. We all need to bitch and complain about the world and our predicaments in it—babies just have a better way of vocalizing it.
IT’S JUST ME & YOU, KID!
After going through that first emotionally and physically wrenching childbirth, and the first few months of dealing with dirty diapers, painful breastfeeding, and baby insomnia, the wife needed a night out with people who weren’t the baby or me. This was my first opportunity to show I was responsible enough to be left alone with our child and have us bo
th somehow survive the experience. As she was leaving, my wife ran down a detailed list of everything I needed to do and remember, including defrosting a bottle of breast milk that she’d pumped using the motorized milk extractor by putting the frozen bottle in a coffee mug and running hot water from the tap over it, then checking it religiously to make sure it was exactly room temperature before I fed it to her. If I wanted, I could give her a bath in the infant tub, but not with too much water because if I turn my back on her for a second when she’s in it she could drown. I was to constantly watch her and make sure she wasn’t choking on something and that she was still breathing. When she was ready to sleep I had to lay her down on her back because otherwise she could die of SIDS and I shouldn’t put her on my chest while I watch TV on the couch because I might fall asleep and smother her. She’d written down the name, address, and phone number of the place they were going and everyone she’d be with and lots of other carefully worded warnings, and I whisked her out the door telling her to have a good time and that I had everything handled.
I’d been helping out and doing my share of baby duties and knew I had everything under control so this was just going to be a nice, relaxing night with me and my daughter hanging out together, having a good time watching the tube and kicking it on the couch. While she was sitting in her little vibrating bouncy unit, gurgling and trying to bite her toes, I made myself a TV dinner and we settled in for a nice uneventful evening, when right as I took my first bite she started to fuss a little bit so I went over and showed her a little stuffed teddy bear and she liked that for a minute but then she got sick of it and started fussing again and so I started making faces at her and she looked at me strangely for a while but that didn’t help much and she started crying again and so I decided to pick her up and take her out of her bouncer but when I picked her up her little leg was caught on the belt that held her in and I tried to hold her and unbuckle it but I couldn’t do both at the same time and she kind of slipped a little and so I picked her back up but the whole chair came with her and was hanging from her leg and she knew something wasn’t right with this picture and even though she’s only a couple of months old she gives me a look like, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing do you?”, then takes a few deep breaths and starts crying in earnest.
So I unhook her from the bouncy seat and start to dance her around a little and say, “You want to hear some music?’” and I saunter over to the stereo and turn on the CD player, but apparently I had it up pretty loud last time because the sound of a radio commercial comes blasting out of the speakers and scares the living shit out of both of us, and now she’s looking at me even more nervously and crying harder. I quickly turn it down and switch to the CD player and it starts playing “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” by the Ramones, and she instantly starts to calm down. She must recognize the music because I’m always playing this album when I’m doing the dishes or fixing something around the house. I start to dance her around a little and we’re listening to Johnny and Joey and Dee Dee blasting away and we’re bouncing off the furniture having our own little father-daughter slam pit.
As we begin slamming around the living room together, she starts cracking up and laughing her ass off. I then start imitating all the different slam dance styles I’ve witnessed over the years. I do the guy who bobs his head back and forth like he’s doing the funky chicken, and she loves that one. Then there’s the flour grinder who flails his arms all over the place, trying to take out as many people as he can, the East Coast picking up change move, and the casual guy who cruises around the pit like he’s on a Sunday stroll, daring anyone to bump into him. (If there’s one thing our generation of bands has contributed to the punk scene, it’s that we brought slam dancing to a global scale. When mosh pits were just about a few punks bashing into each other at CBGB’s, now there are twenty thousand people slamming in a mosh pit as big as most parking lots. It’s pointless, ridiculous, and most would say stupid, but also a lot of fun.) With each different dance she’s laughing harder and harder and that giggle of hers is like music to my ears, and in my tiny living room we’re having our own little daddy-daughter punk rock show.
After going through most of the Ramones album and into the Dickies and Toy Dolls, two of her other favorites, we fall down on the couch exhausted. I figure she must be hungry and it’s time for her to eat so I bring her into the kitchen, get out the frozen bottle of breast milk from the freezer, and put it into a coffee mug and start running hot water over it, but it’s hard to do with one hand so I put her back in her bouncer and she doesn’t want me to put her down and starts to cry but I need to get her milk ready so she’s just going to have to yell for a while. I quick boil some water and put the bottle in there so it starts defrosting a lot faster and it looks like it’s working so I squirt some on the inside of my wrist like my wife does and it’s boiling fucking hot like hot coffee and now I have to cool it off under the cool water and check it again but I can’t tell if it’s cooled down enough yet because who says the inside of your wrist is such an accurate temperature gauge and so I’m squirting it on my arm and my thigh and my stomach and even take a few shots in my mouth and man that stuff tastes weird like sweet body milk mixed with sweat but it seems like it’s close to room temperature and so I give it to her and when she finally calms down enough she starts sucking it right down and we can both relax for a minute.
After she’s done, I put her on my shoulder and she lets out a giant burp that sounds like a barge coming into the harbor, and then gives me a little smile afterward. It must be the same feeling of relief I get letting out a belch like a long dormant volcano after eating a bratwurst and drinking a pint of Guinness. I decide to give her a bath in the tub and I’m amazed at how slippery a little soapy infant can be, because there are times when I can’t even seem to get a good grip on her. At one point I turn my back and look for the baby soap and then turn back around and she’s somehow managed to twist around and flip over in the tub. I grab her quick and realized I’d nearly drown my kid in about two inches of water. She gives me the “you’re a complete moron” look again but somehow she recovers without freaking out and she’s blowing little fart bubbles in the water every once in a while and I’m putting suds in her hair and giving her a little Mohawk and we’re both having a good time. I just splash her off a little more and get her out because I’m afraid she’s going to slip out of there like a cherry pit and go sliding across the floor. I dry her off and now it’s time for diapers and a sleeper and hopefully she can fall asleep.
I go into the baby’s room and search through the drawers, through all the thousands of different kinds of baby clothes, the fuzzy sleepers with teddy bears and furry bunnies on the front, and tiny baby T-shirts with Misfits skulls and “Little Punk” logos, and finally find the proper onesie with its eighteen hundred snaps and attempt to put it on her. This is never an easy task with all her limbs flailing around everywhere, and more than once I get her two arms out the neck hole so it looks like she’s wearing a little baby tube top and get the perturbed look from her again, but eventually I coax her into it, even though something about the way it was fitting her still looks a little strange. Onesies are cool and comfortable and babies spend most of their early lives cruising around in them and I had to admit that I secretly coveted the onesie and wondered if they came in men’s size 36.
Now that she’s fed, cleaned, and ready for bed and beginning to look tired, I start bouncing her up and down, trying to get her to fall asleep until finally I give up and lay down on the couch with her. Luckily she’s not fussing much and is just kind of laying there, looking up at me, and I wonder how she can be this close to me and not be repulsed by my large pores and garlic breath but for some reason she still likes me and is gazing up at me with those perfect eyes of hers again until she starts blinking and begins drifting off to sleep. As she lays there I’m looking down at her and realizing this is what they mean when they talk about unconditional love, and that even though I’m not ve
ry good at it, I’m her dad and she’s my kid, and we’re stuck with each other and will be forever and nothing can ever change that no matter what happens. It’s one of those perfect moments where nothing else matters except me and my kid laying there together and Alex Trebek is talking about “potent potables” in the background and the wind is blowing softly outside and everything’s peaceful and quiet, but then the next thing I know, my wife is shaking me, yelling, “Jim, Jim! Wake up, you moron, you fell asleep again!” I jump up thinking I squashed the baby or someone had kidnapped her, but thank God my wife was holding her and she seemed fine, if just a little frazzled and confused again.
So I rub my eyes and look around and say, “What d’ya mean? Everything’s fine, we had a great time. Look how happy she is. Why’d you wake her up?”
Then my wife says, “Do you realize you put her onesie on upside down?”
“What?”
“You didn’t notice that instead of it looking like she’s wearing a normal sleeper, it looks like she has a turtleneck on top, and cowboy chaps on the bottom?”
It seems that every time I watch the kids I do a great job and we have a great time together, but there’s always that one little thing my wife notices when she gets home, the water left on in the bath tub or the child playing with the curtain cord or a bucket of rusty nails, and it’s these little oversights that somehow make me look totally incompetent.
Eating, sleeping, diapers, and crying were some of the bigger challenges in this period of our child’s development. I tried to go through them with a cool head and make it a test to see just how mellow and controlled I could be when things got really stressed. When the baby shit really hit the fan though, I’d calmly tell the wife that I needed a little “me” time, and I’d get the paper and find out where there was a punk show going down that night, and when I’d get there I’d go into the slam pit and wreak bloody havoc. I’d own that pit until no one dared enter for fear of colliding with the stressed out dad who’d changed one too many diapers on a screaming baby. I did this one night and got my nose broken and it felt really good. I’d drive home feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready for the challenges that lie ahead.