The Book of Dads

by Ben George

  I suppose the good news was that this hypersensitivity to the possibility of a baroque kind of disaster turned out, at least in Shep’s case, to translate into an intuitive empathy that could not have been more emotionally intimate, finally, in those moments when it did peep through.

  Some years before the sailboat and the scuba diving, maybe when I was five or six, I woke in the middle of the night petrified: giant blocks of the darkness around me seemed to be detaching from one another and spiraling slowly toward me and away. I huddled under the covers hoping this would go away, but it didn’t, and eventually I crept downstairs. I had no words for what was happening to me. “The dark’s moving,” I told my father. “I can’t get the dark to stop moving.” “You’ll be OK,” my mother, exhausted from a day of doing everything to keep the household running, assured me. “Just close your eyes and try to rest.” But my father quizzed me more closely. He couldn’t get anything more eloquent out of me, but he sat up with me and the next morning brought me to an ear, nose, and throat specialist, who discovered that I had a severe inner-ear infection.

  It was in moments like this that the logic of Shep’s worldview seemed to pay off. The darkness itself is moving? Well, it has to be something. Let’s check it out, and immediately.

  Now that he’s a grandfather, he’s transferred some of his anxiety about me as a child to my role as a father. At times after witnessing what he considers especially egregious examples of the casualness of my parenting style—like, say, my snuggling up for the evening with a four-year-old Lucy in front of Jaws—he’ll comment to my wife Karen with a wry resignation, “What chance do these kids have?”

  So far, thank God, our kids haven’t pushed the envelope at all, in terms of courting disaster. But maybe we can construct the intuitive empathy and emotional intimacy on other terms. It’s like I’m simultaneously hoping for the moon and hoping for not very much at all.

  And I’m reminded at such times of a comment made by the New York Mets’ original manager, Casey Stengel, who memorably articulated just how minimal his expectations for one of his outfielders were by telling a reporter about that outfielder, “And Greg Goosen, he’s only twenty, but in ten years he has a good chance of being thirty.”

  For my father and for me, it’s not much, and it’s everything, in terms of our hopes for those entrusted to our care. Those twenty-year-olds: in ten years, they’ve got a chance to be thirty.

  THE JOB, BY THE NUMBERS

  CLYDE EDGERTON

  BEFORE BIRTH

  Before the baby is born, go ahead and install the car seat and put together the crib. This will take four to seven days. For safe installation of the car seat, certain hooks are located out of sight in the backseat where you’d slide your hand if you were looking for something lost. If your car doesn’t have these hooks, you are required by law to buy a different car. One of your cousins or a brother or a sister-in-law will eventually inspect the installation of the seat and will get very, very upset because it’s too loose or not hooked up right, and they will call the authorities. This relative will be a vegetarian.

  Children cannot sit in the front passenger seat of an automobile until age twenty-four. Else the front-seat air bag will kill them. If the front air bag happens not to kill them, then the side air bag will try to. After they are eighteen they can sit in the front seat if they face backward.

  If you decide to get your car seat installed at a fire station, you will be required to ask the firefighter for a fire lecture. After the lecture you are required to buy chain ladders to hang from each window of your house—first floor included; and the firefighter will show you how to grab your baby and roll on it if it catches fire. A nurse will be on hand to tell you how to resuscitate a smothered baby.

  For the first few months, before using the crib, you’ll be using a bassinet. Most people buy expensive white wicker ones with little handles and a satin pillow and all that. My cousins Caleb and Cindy realized that a little baby can’t half see and couldn’t care less, so why not use an ice cooler? With the top removed. Not the Styrofoam kind. You know, the hard kind.

  When you need the crib, about three months after the child’s birth, you will be so sleep-deprived you will not recognize your baby, and will be falling down a lot. That’s why I’m saying assemble the crib before the baby is born. The crib comes in a big cardboard box with staples so deep that you will need pliers and a flashlight to get them out. Most of the instructions for crib assembly say things like, “Assemble Part B into upper part of Part B with plier.” I assembled our crib in our living room over a number of days, and when at four a.m. one morning, on the last day of assembly—having just heard the morning paper slap onto the driveway—I started rolling the thing to the child’s room, I found that it would not fit through the hall door. So, listen: put the crib together in the baby room. Remember, the baby room will be relatively empty because for the first three months the baby is in your bedroom in the cooler.

  While you’re preparing car seat and crib, you can bet on one thing: your wife will be cleaning the house. Mother Nature tells her to do this like she tells trees to grow leaves. Your wife, on hands and knees, will wash spots off baseboards with Q-tips. And when she asks you to do something, do it. In responding to her requests, don’t ever use the word “logical.” Before my first son’s birth, my wife asked me to get a wire clothes hanger, put chewing gum on the tip end, and go deep inside the lint holder in our clothes dryer and get every speck of lint out so the clothes dryer wouldn’t catch fire and burn the house down on our first night home from the hospital. You know what I did? I did it. You know what I said? Nothing.

  BIRTH

  When your wife’s water breaks, she will tell you. Your job is then to call her doctor’s office. When the recording says, “If you are a doctor or pharmacologist, press one,” press one. You will get a recording that says to press eight if your wife’s water just broke. That recording will say to stay at home until you can see the baby’s head between your wife’s legs. The recording will also say that your wife, in that condition, should not operate a motor vehicle. So you will need to drive her to the hospital.

  When you get ready to go into the birthing room at the hospital, a nurse will hand your wife a gown with snaps and will say, “The snaps are so that if there’s an emergency, the doctor can rip your gown off.”

  You do not have to worry about the birth part. That’s taken care of by your spouse. You just have to be there to embrace your wife (unless she says, “Don’t you dare touch me”) and quietly accept her cursing and screaming. Sometimes at you. You will forget the names she calls you just as she will forget the pain of birth. Within a few months home from the hospital, she’ll be saying, “Giving birth was a wonderful miracle. It was one of the most wonderful experiences I’ve ever had.” By the way, do not videotape the birth until after the birth part.

  If the birth is by C-section, it’s all quite different. In an operating room, you will be standing beside your wife’s head—which is poking through a hanging green sheet—and she will be smiling the whole time, in spite of the burning smell from the searing of cut blood vessels in her stomach, and when it’s over, both of you will be able to smile and cry and hold the baby. But next day, when the pain comes on sure enough, she may say ugly things to you. NOTE: Some wives do not talk this way. But they all think it. If only briefly.

  If the birth is vaginal and your wife chooses to get an epidural, you need to understand that the nurse giving the epidural will be a very nervous man who sits behind her while she sits on the edge of the bed, and he will ask her to be still while she is having contractions and he is trying to stick a very, very long flexible needle into the hollow part of her spine. Encourage your wife to get this done right away when she arrives in the admissions room of the hospital, where, by the way, she—with the baby’s shoulders now in view—will be handed a number (around fourteen) and a magazine and will now have time for the epidural or a liver transplant.

  Abou
t four hours after the birth, the baby and your wife will—because of insurance regulations—be rolled out in a wheelchair to your car. They’re rolled out because your wife is too weak to stand. (In the 1950s, new mothers spent months in the hospital, and she and the child both walked out of the hospital.) All the nurses from the baby ward will come down, put the mother in the car on a stretcher, then gather around the baby’s car seat like waiters waiting to sing “Happy Birthday.” They will inspect the seat and then vote on whether it’s safely installed. One “no” vote and your car will be impounded.

  On the drive home from the hospital you will experience an odd combination of two feelings: (a) extreme ecstasy—about the birth, and (b) deep worry—about how the baby will keep breathing all night on that first night home, and how to keep large rats away from it. NOTE: Rats have a hell of an easier time eating through wicker than through a cooler.

  AT HOME

  Once you get the baby home, you will read instructions about safe practices for how your baby should sleep. These instructions are written in a document signed by a doctor from your practice. (Whom you have not met because there are so many of them. Nor will many of the other doctors in your practice have met him. He will be from a small island in the Philippines and he will have started out in India as a phone operator for Sprint.) This paper he signed will say that if the baby sleeps on his back then he will die from inhaling vomit, and that if he sleeps on his stomach he will die of SIDS, and that if he sleeps on his left or right side then his heart will stop because of arrhythmia. There will be a picture of a $535 device (along with a prescription) that you can buy from most pharmacies. The device will have three poles that fit together like a tepee and several straps from which you can suspend your child by the chin and knees for safe sleeping.

  An older woman neighbor you’ve never met will come by for a visit on the second day you are home. She will have shingles. She will explain that shingles is not contagious, but that her grandson has some skin disease so bad he has to be bathed in Vaseline and wrapped in pajamas soaked in kerosene, and that, whatever you do, don’t touch the umbilical cord, because it will get infected—and needs to be covered in a mix of Vaseline and iodine constantly—and she’ll say that if the child ever gets a fever over 104.5 it will never be right again. And that a fever can shoot up in the middle of the night in minutes. She will leave a gift—a small picture frame with plastic animals glued to it, several of which have fallen off.

  You should share night feeding duties with your wife. That means when the baby starts crying just as you’re falling asleep, you pick the baby up from the cooler and take it to your wife’s side. Your wife’s doctor will have instructed you always to keep tabs on which breast she used last by noting in a notebook “L” for left and “R” for right. But the best way is to sort of juggle both breasts to see which one is heavier. This will normally wake her up, fresh and ready to feed the baby. But if she won’t wake up, whisper that you want to make love: she will try to escape, thus waking up. Unbutton her pajamas and prepare the baby for the appropriate breast. (No matter what that breast used to be like, it will now be great big.) The hungry baby’s head will bob and jerk around while it looks cross-eyed for anything that resembles a nipple; you should keep it away from the bedside radio because it will suck the knobs off it. Your wife’s nipples will be so sore that air hurts them, and the baby’s gums are like brass knuckles. The baby will bite your wife’s nipples for the first few weeks of breast-feeding, making your wife scream. But she loves the baby and will forget all this. When the baby finishes nursing, you take the baby from your wife, tell her to go back to sleep, and change the baby’s diaper.

  In the hospital a nurse will have taught you how to change a diaper. You look through the glass viewing window while she changes the diaper with one hand, holding somebody else’s baby in the other arm. While the nurse was showing you how to change a diaper, you had to lip-read because of the thick glass window. If the baby had a bowel movement, then the nurse cleaned up the mess with a thick wet tissue called a “wipe,” folding it six times with one hand in the process. You will have loads of fun learning about diapers and wipes on your own. Don’t worry. You’ll learn. And listen, don’t get one of those plastic cans, sort of like a covered trash can, with a hole and a revolving switchback device that is supposed to hold dirty diapers while not releasing a bad smell. Man, that thing is a big pain in the ass. It will start stinking because of stray feces that get hung in these cracks you cannot get to. The revolving top gets stuck all the time, and you will end up very frustrated, out in the backyard pressure-washing the crap from all the crevices. Here’s what you do, seriously: ball up the pee diapers and throw them in any trash can in the house. Put stinky diapers in a plastic grocery bag, tie the opening shut, place them outside the back door, and next time you go to the outside garbage can, take them along. That’s the best way to handle all that.

  One of the most unfortunate aspects of fatherhood is talking toys. Whenever I turned out the lights at night in the playroom, one of my first son’s toys would screech, “Good night!” I couldn’t find it because it would talk only in the dark. One night I took the toys out of my son’s two big toy boxes and put them on a table and cut the light out, and it wouldn’t say a word. Then back in the toy box it started talking again a few nights later. “Good night!” After a week or so, I caught it—a little plastic man. It was rummaging in the desk drawer where I kept my prophylactics. I tied it up, put it under the back tire of our car, and backed over it. One of the most satisfying sounds of my life—the pop and scattering on the driveway. My suggestion is that the birth announcement say something like this:

  It’s a Girl

  Born: 13 February 2010

  Name: Jessica Danielle Dorsey

  Weight: 7 pounds, 12 ounces

  Length: 21 inches

  Any Talking Toy Gift Will Be Burned or

  Otherwise Mutilated

  6. Discipline and all that. Don’t tell children to do something and then ask, “OK?” The one-sentence question tells them who is in control. Children need clear direction, clear structure, and clear limits. Man oh man. When a father is afraid of what a very small child is about to do, and then asks the child to make some kind of decision—like, “Well, Johnny, would you like to go upstairs or stay downstairs…go to bed or stay up?”—then the father is about to age fast, and will soon be taking directions from worried and impatient children.

  7. Sleep problems. Read and follow the suggestions in Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber. Best advice on babies I ever got.

  8. Play. I’m trying to stay away from advice, but…after the first few months, act silly. Put odd things on your head. Talk goofy and make funny faces. Slobber. Pretend you are a dog, a turkey, a computer scientist. Get down on the floor with your children at least once a day. If you’re very tired, then you can doze off and let them play on you.

  9. Reading. OK, this is it on advice. The best way to handle some of those sentimental children’s stories is to thumb through the book and ask the child where the bird is, where the cow is, where the moon is, and all that. Wait until they’re older to worry about reading the text. And then get the original Brothers Grimm. (a) That will hold their attention and (b) they damn sure won’t get up and wander around the house after lights out. Also, please read Br’er Rabbit in its original (and beautiful) dialect, not in that god-awful Standard English text.

  DOWN THE STRETCH

  Family meetings. Have them. At one of them—after some sort of misbehavior or broken window—you will give a short meaningful talk, and then your wife will do the same. (Or she may go first.) You will then ask if your children have anything to say. This will be a serious meeting, somber tone, etc. Your two-year-old will say, “I want to speak.” You will say, “OK. What do you have to say?” And the child will say, “Poopy butt.” Freedom of speech is important.

  Kindergarten. After the first few days, your child will—at the dinner ta
ble—say something like this: “Everybody in this family who has stuck your finger in your butt, raise your hand.” For a second you will wonder what to do, but you should be honest with your children.

  High school. If you come to believe your teenagers are never going to speak to you again as long as you live—and chances are they will tell you this—then you will be relieved. No, seriously, though they may tell you that, chances are that by their early twenties they will come around the bend and you’ll be able to talk and laugh with them again. And rebuild the trust that was always beneath the surface.

  POST-NOTE (FOR FATHERS ONLY)

  I’m sixty-four as I write this. I was thirty-eight when my first child was born. She’s now twenty-six and brings me happiness and joy. My other three children were born five, three, and two years ago. They bring me happiness and joy. I am blessed with happiness and joy and children. So my wife and I recently decided that I’d get a vasectomy.

  The preparation information and instructions I brought home from the doctor included orders to shave my scrotum—no more than twenty-four hours before the operation. My appointment was for two p.m. on a Thursday and somehow I’d put off the shaving until just before one thirty. I wasn’t about to shave early and go in there with a five-o’clock shadow.

  I didn’t want to use an electric razor—my electric razor, anyway. It tends to pull. I needed a disposable razor. I asked my wife if she had one.

  “Single blade or double?” she asked.

  “Double, I guess.”

  I stood naked in the bathroom, holding the razor in one hand and a can of her shaving cream in the other. I looked around. Tub should work.

  I decided the best thing to do would be to sit on the edge of the tub with my feet in, turn on the faucet (to my right), lather up, and proceed. But when I got situated and ready to go, I realized that my position wasn’t quite right, so I straddled the tub wall, faced the faucet, and shifted to the left so that I could get at my job more easily.