The Book of Dads

by Ben George

  Above all, these actions require a radical shift in our mind-set as parents. We have to recognize that caring for our children, far from granting us a free pass, requires us to make the concrete sacrifices associated with a social conscience. In the face of leaders who like us best as indulgent children, we must strive to be adults who teach our sons and daughters how to be adults, each and every day.

  A TALE OF TWO FATHERS

  DAVID GESSNER

  ELEVEN THOUGHTS ON BEING THE FATHER OF ELEVEN-MONTH-OLD TWIN BOYS

  DARIN STRAUSS

  1.

  Everyone with a TV or some movies under his belt knows about the start of fatherhood—knows the stations of that particular cross: blue hospital scrubs, handshakes/tears, y’all be careful on your way home now, OK?

  Thing is, if you’ve never actually lived that initial parenting moment, and then do—if you experience that atmosphere of shrieks and moans, that nausea-enforcing blood and that five-hundred-words-a-minute doctor language—there’s a good chance you’ll miss how it’s all really profound and sacred, and beautiful. I did.

  I don’t like to think I’m unprecedented in this. I see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn’t properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information, the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark.

  That’s my one parenthood regret, so far.

  2.

  In 2000, I wrote a novel called Chang and Eng about famous identical twins; in 2007 my wife gave birth to identical twins. And at the very time that I was spending my children’s first days in a postnatal intensive care unit (the boys were born three and a half weeks prematurely), I had to scan the proofs of my forthcoming book More Than It Hurts You, which is in some part devoted to children’s hospitals: to that frightening world of oscilloscope blips and ventilator beeps, to the cosmic creepiness of a baby ICU. The novel follows an eight-month-old baby; my own babies turned eight months old the week the book finally came out. You get the idea.

  Reading my own attempts to describe what happens in such a complex nerve center right when it was actually happening to my young family made for a weird vibe, something about portents getting charged into reality. It sounds hokey. (But so much about parenthood sounds hokey. This is why everybody hates stories about others’ kids.) Anyway, all this stuff added to the vertigo there in the ICU, to that hard-to-describe thing all glazed new fathers have, the sense of a deep incongruity to it all. My babies seemed not to be real—yet alone my—children. (That everybody hates stories about others’ kids probably explains my own fear about, and the obvious hard time I’m having so far with, this essay.) What my babies seemed to be, rather, were tiny special effects that some audience at home, watching the sitcom of my life, would get a kick out of. “This space case is getting kids?” they would say. “Him?”

  3.

  These sorts of humdinger events—births, weddings, even deaths, I imagine—are so familiar to us that they seem banal, which makes for a whopper of a contradiction. The banality comes in part from our having caught these scenes on TV many times (read above); but there’s a reason we’ve seen them so often: they’re in fact the opposite of banal. They’re in fact so inherently un-banal that they’re probably the dramatic motor in one of every ten narratives we come across. I doubt people in pre-TV generations felt this banal/humdinger paradox. I bet they, on a gut level, felt the bigness of all their big events.

  Anyway.

  This paradox stuff and the quirky similarities between my sons (Beau and Shepherd) and what I’d been writing about dulled, for me, the reality of their existence.

  4.

  The first day we got them out of the hospital, all was chaos. One baby would cry while the other tried to sleep; then they’d switch roles. It was a twenty-four-hour wail-fest. My wife and I took them to their first pediatrician’s appointment, and the entire way there we laughed the laugh of the terrified. This wasn’t parenting; it was Keystone Cops stuff, Farrelly brothers mayhem; it was, surely, not doable for much longer. And we were only at the first day.

  In the doctor’s office, Beau had dirtied his diaper. (Oh, one other thing: don’t you hate the gag-making nicety of our children’s phrases? Why do we have to talk like babies when we talk about babies? Why do I blanch from writing, “He crapped himself?” Why?) So, I took my son into the men’s room, feeling ready to change my first diaper. I did it, to my surprise, fairly successfully. I simply laid my son on the changing table and scrubbed his butt clean. Problem solved. Next, I bent to throw away the browned Huggies baby wipe; when I stood, Beau had crapped himself again. Everywhere. Onto the heretofore clean diaper; onto the changing table itself. Onto, at least a little bit, the floor. I panicked. Before had been minor league stuff, not Keystone Cops at all. Now this was, literally, a comedy shitstorm.

  Laying one hand on Beau to keep him from slipping, I contorted myself so my fingertips might reach the door. Now in a sort of gymnast’s candlestick position (hand A opening door; hand B on baby’s tiny chest), I yelled to my wife, with even less sangfroid than it reads on the page: “Honey, Jesus, come quick! There’s an emergency with the baby!”

  “What?”

  She ran over in what seemed two floorless strides, her face gone the way of any new mother’s at hearing the words “emergency” and “baby” in the same sentence. “What’s wrong?”

  I explained in agitated voice that Beau had gone number two, and there were no more diapers or wipes.

  Next there came one of those moments when you notice someone you love sizing you up, as if for the first time. The eyes narrow a bit, there’s a pull on the brow, and the person looking at you points out, without a word, how far your shares have dropped in her index of cool people. “Where,” my wife said evenly, “are you?”

  Now, this surprised me. We were standing two feet apart at the moment in question. “The men’s room,” I said. (Duh.)

  “And what is a men’s room designed for?” she said—with the deliberateness of someone explaining to a Zemblan tourist that he’s on the uptown A train when, in fact, he wanted the downtown F.

  I waited. I waited for the electric bolt of comprehension. It never came.

  “Bathrooms,” she was saying, “are the one place in the whole building designed for just these kinds of emergencies.” And she walked away, holding our other crying son.

  “Right,” I thought. “I’m in a bathroom.”

  Using toilet paper and water, I got the mess out of the way. First real step toward fatherhood.

  5.

  What makes writing about babies difficult is that everything about them is known and clichéd and sentimental, and yet true. At first, you see your children through a pall of helplessness. They cry, and they eat, and they shit, and you bust your hump trying not to hinder them in that. And they give you nothing in return. And they look like Winston Churchill on the nod. My initial thoughts were similar to what my friend Melissa Guion says she felt on her first night home with her mewling, hungry, clinging baby: “Fuck this noise.” But then, once you’re at your most sleep-needy, once you think you can’t clean another shit-flecked buttock or make it through another three a.m. feeding, the child looks at you for the first time; I mean, looks at you in a way that registers a kind of recognition. The gaze sharpens, the mouth bends smileward. And then you’re done for.

  For me, getting my boys to laugh became an addiction. What were they laughing at? At three months, they didn’t speak, they couldn’t crawl, they barely seemed to acknowledge each other’s existence—but something you would do (blow out your cheeks to play mouth-trumpet, or hum into their bellies) would make them crack up. This is a selfish and embarrassing and transparent admission, but here goes: making my children laugh at my “jokes” was the way I first began to love them.

  It’s different for women, I think. When the boys were a minute old, my wife held up Shepherd and asked, “Don’t you love him so m
uch?” I didn’t really understand how she could ask such a thing. That purple squirming howler? “He seems nice,” I said.

  Men, I think, need to be won over. For me, it was Shepherd’s laugh—a raucous, yelpy, nonhuman gurgle that can run for minutes. And with Beau, it was his outlandishly soulful smile; I know it’s hard to believe, but there’s a decency and a poignant sweetness apparent in his face. You can just tell he’s already a kind and slightly vulnerable person. These boys still haven’t said a word to me, but I believe that they (along with my wife) are my best friends in the world. I know. It makes no sense.

  6.

  As you read in thought number two, the babies were eight months old when my third book came out. I had to leave them to go on a twenty-two-city book tour. This was nice (the publisher was willing to send me all over) and terrible (I’d be leaving the kids for the first time). After three weeks on the road, I got to see them for a few days before I had to head off again. My wife and sons had been staying with my parents-in-law, and when I walked into the twins’ bedroom, they showed me an expression, a blank glint of: “I don’t know who you are.” This was a heart-hurting moment. I kept waving and smiling, trying all the old prods. Nothing worked. Then Shepherd looked sideways at me for a second, and fired a quick toot from his mouth. That laugh was as if he’d said: “Oh, yeah—this clown.” It was better than nothing—a lot better, actually.

  7.

  As a very young kid I was as thin as soup-kitchen consommé, unathletic, given to homesickness. In the fifth grade a little girl called two of my friends and me “the Shrimp, the Blimp, and the Wimp”—and the phrase stuck. (I had one short friend and one heavy friend, so you can guess which name they hung around my neck.) My skinniness kept me in an internal slough of unease.

  My own father, on the other hand, was a killer high school and college athlete (1962 Mason-Dixon Hurdles Champion; basketball prodigy at American University). Dawn Steel, the first woman to run a movie studio, knew my father back when and wrote about him in her memoir They Can Kill You but They Can’t Eat You. She called him, if I remember correctly, a “paragon of elegance and style.” Even as a senior at Great Neck North, he had a Nike swoosh of gray hair just above his brow. A born lady-killer. But he’s also kind to a fault. He didn’t want to be one of those fathers who push their children too hard. As a result, he didn’t teach me how to play basketball. Or, rather, when he saw I wasn’t good at it, he stopped teaching me. I suppose I hold a slight grudge about this. (To be fair, he was my Little League coach; I spent a lot of time in the outfield, spinning around, looking at the cool effect that my spinning had on my view of the grass and three-leafed clovers, etc.) I do remember the one and only time my dad taught me how to play ball. With a grunt, nine-year-old me heaved shots underhand. At this blacktopped outdoor court, the orange-painted hoops had chain nets that jangled, if your shot went through, like house keys: an addictive sound. Once, to my surprise, my dad blocked my shot. And when he swatted away my desperate hurl, the outdoor ball made a cartoon, Road Runner-ish ping!

  It’s unfair, but this is the memory I keep coming back to. Me throwing the ball, my father slapping it away. It’s unfair; my father is kind, and we’re still close, and he did a good job raising me, and he made a tough call—the call not to pressure me to be an athlete. But I wish he’d taught me how to play basketball for real—more than that one time—and I wish that my memory of the one time wasn’t that. Now that I’m a parent I want to call him and apologize for what’s on my mind. It’s unfair.

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

  8.

  To get specific about what’s downright cheesy in fatherhood—or about writing on fatherhood—it’s that becoming a dad shows you that love is the fundament of all existence. You feel like some Republican candidate at the GOP Convention just for saying this stuff.

  All the same: I love my wife; I have, though not with the same seriousness or for as long, loved other women before her—and I love (some of) my other relatives, too. But being a parent is like taking an SAT on love: a more concentrated, stressful, more important test.

  My wife and I and both our kids were sick last week—the normal, fluish, change-of-season bummer. And, bad as I felt, I caught myself saying, “I hope the kids get better soon.” Now, again, I love my wife. (Do I sound like Bob Dole yet?) But if it had been only the two of us who’d had chapped nasal philtra and thermometers wedged in our mouths, I don’t think I’d have wished that she would be the first one to shake off our flu. Not to get all preachy about it, but that’s parenthood, I think: wanting your kids to feel relief more than you want yourself to.

  9.

  The reason I thought the audience at home, watching the sitcom of my life, would think, “Why is this clown getting kids?” is that I’m a chronic fuckup. I have trouble paying bills on time, I often go out of doors with dumbly mismatched socks, etc. My wife, for good reason, hates it. This July, I killed four hours looking for my car in the La Guardia parking lot.

  Maybe it’s an occupational hazard. The novelist Italo Svevo is said to have come home alone from a trip to an amusement park to which he’d taken his son. “Where’s the boy?” his wife asked (in Italian, of course). “Oh, no!”—Svevo grabbed his coat and hat. “I’ll be right back.”

  But 2008-vintage men don’t get to be Italo Svevo. I care for the boys alone from 6:50 a.m. to 8:30, when I leave to go to my office to write, and I come home early, every day, to have them from four to seven p.m. I usually wheel them in our double-wide Urban Buggy to the swings in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The day before yesterday, however, it rained; our stroller seats had become tiny twin reservoirs. I decided to try getting the boys to the park anyway. I somehow managed to carry them both—my grip on Beau’s pants loosening as he bit into the dorsal-venous network of my left hand, Shepherd holding my shoulder and throwing his head back like a dance partner impatient for the dip—to my upstairs neighbor’s apartment. “Can I borrow your stroller?” I asked the neighbor, who has an infant of his own. He let me take two strollers.

  “Great!” I thought. “I’ll just push them side by side.” This was a mistake.

  The wheels of the two vehicles kept crossing; Beau was too small for his stroller and just missed doing a face plant onto the sidewalk. Curbs were a challenge (which one to lift first?), the passing of every car a kind of Sophie’s choice.

  There’s supposed to be a coherent end to this point, to good old #9 here; something in the spirit of: but I’m getting better every day and with extra diligence blah blah blah. The truth is, it’s hard to stop being a fuckwit when you’ve always kind of been one. But you love your children and you do the best you can and hope nothing goes wrong.

  10.

  If you’re going to have more than one kid, I highly recommend going the twins route.

  When I heard we were having identical boys, I panicked. Too much work! But it’s sneakily great. You get all the hard (sleepless, messy) stuff out of the way in one stroke. Which is like paying for a house up front. And your kids are always on the same developmental clock; you won’t be breast-feeding one and potty training the other. Also, and this is a big plus, they have a built-in friend. Even in this preverbal present, my sons hug and crack each other up when we try to put them to bed. It’s heartwarming. And I know you cringed when you read that—the brightest-neon cliché there is—but it fits, because when I see Beau make Shepherd laugh, and then the two of them start to snuggle, my heart is a spurting hot-water bottle everywhere in my chest.

  11.

  At first they looked like no one, puffball things, the only human detail being their eyes, and even those—just blue marbles set in dough—lacked the quickness of thought. But watching them become people is like looking at a fossil record: picking out what of our faces has endured in theirs. My wife’s high regal forehead is there, and the shape of my mouth is. It’s a reminder: we’re all pretty much Mr. Potato Heads, having been thrown together ou
t of a narrow kitty of nostrils and ears and temperaments in some embryological playroom.

  And they already have distinct personalities, which is, I suppose, a testament to the mystery and magic of Self.

  When I catch one of the boys focusing the cloud of his nascent personality—Shepherd bashfully looking at his brother for approval, Beau trying to make someone laugh by pulling a funny face—I feel the need to rush out and embrace them, as if to scoop the boys away from oncoming traffic. I don’t know why it’s so urgent. But most of the time I sit without moving, hoping they won’t even notice I’m in the room. It’s silly, and hard to put words to, but it’s almost as though I’ve convinced myself that if I can be quiet and still to the point of seeming not there, they’ll stay this age forever, and so will I.

  REMEMBER THE BANANA

  BROCK CLARKE

  Before I became a father, I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to be one; I wasn’t sure I wanted to have a son (I never even thought of wanting, or not wanting, to have a daughter, maybe because I had two brothers and no sisters and so couldn’t imagine living with a woman who wasn’t my mother, or then, later, my girlfriend, and then, later, my wife). One hears this kind of stuff from men my age (I’m thirty-nine years old) all the time, to the point where you wish these guys had been so afraid that they actually hadn’t had a son, so they wouldn’t be able to yammer on about the time when they weren’t sure they wanted one. One wishes that each and every one of them had had a vasectomy. One wishes that each and every one of them had become a public high school principal who, as a role model for his students, decided not to just preach his school’s Abstinence Is the Most Effective Birth Control policy, but to practice it. Forever. One wishes that, if they really wanted to exercise their right to procreate, they would then be forced to surrender their right to talk about it. One wishes never, ever, ever to be told by another thirty-nine-year-old white, middle-class, highly educated man who treats every subject, no matter how serious, with flip irony, except the subject of fatherhood, which he treats with sickening reverence, that he was afraid to be a father, that he wasn’t sure if he was ready to be a father, really ready, but then again, he adds, is anyone really ready for something that will end up being the very best thing he has ever done or ever will do? One wishes these guys would be assigned a parole officer of a sort, someone who, once a week, would force them to blow into a specially rigged BabyBjörn that would be able to tell with 100 percent accuracy whether, since they last took the test, they’d bloviated on the subject of fatherhood. One wishes that these guys, if they failed the test, would be forced to move from Brooklyn (according to the New York Times, all of these guys live in Brooklyn) to, say, anywhere else in the United States, thus ensuring that they would forget all about the subject of fatherhood and instead hold forth on the subject of Brooklyn, how they miss it so much.