One Sunday night about ten o’clock, my brother called and said, “Guess what? We’re pregnant.” We were very happy for Jay, and, naturally, a bit jealous. So that night we tried again. The next morning, right in the middle of making coffee for breakfast, Gregg suddenly said, “You know what? I’m pregnant.”
I said, “Get outta here. We only tried last night.” (I kicked myself under the table for not having asked her about insanity in the family years ago.)
She said, “I’m telling you, I’m pregnant.”
Just to show her that neither my years spent carefully observing the mating habits of farm animals, nor our taxpayer dollars spent on health education in the public schools had been wasted on me, I put down the newspaper, threw on sweatpants, and ran three blocks down the street to the store. I bought two EPT’s and came back. She took the test…and she was pregnant. She took it again. Same answer. I called my brother. “You’re not going to believe this. We’re pregnant, too. Yeah, it’s great. Oh, listen, while I’ve got you on the phone, do you know how to get in touch with the people from the Guinness Book of World Records?”
After the doctor confirmed the home-test results, we told everyone in the family the good news. When Big Jim found out I was going to be a dad, he just laughed and said, “It’s payback time for all the shit you used to do.” He was right.
Kids are exactly like marriage and sex in the sense that you can hear other people talk about it, but until you actually do it you have no idea. (Death is the other mystery, but as of now no one’s come back to fill us in.) Instead of boring you with the usual heap of platitudes and parental commonsense that you can frankly find in many other books, I’ll just pass along the simple advice I give most couples when they’re pregnant with their first child.
Sleep.
Let me expand on that. Sleep around the clock. Come home from work and take a nap. Take a nap at work during your lunch hour. Sleep at stoplights and business meetings. Anything will work. You’re stockpiling because you’re never going to sleep the same or as well for the rest of your life.
To be totally prepared for childbirth, Gregg and I did what all beginner parents do: We took a Lamaze course. I don’t know who this Lamaze character is, but the class was chock-full of wonderful tips and stories. One of my favorite moments occurred when the teacher told the group this very important information.
“Now, after your wife’s water breaks, do not have sex.”
I raised my hand. “Is this really a problem?” I asked. “Are there really men so insensitive?”
The look on her face told me the scary truth: She wouldn’t have mentioned this unless someone had actually done it.
“So just how far apart are the contractions there, sweet thang? Seems like a shame to waste this semiprivate room.”
It never really struck me that we were having a baby, despite nine months of vomiting and Gregg’s stomach the size of Guatemala. I only realized it when the doctor held up my oldest daughter for me to see. (By then she was already two years old and I suddenly understood why everyone had been trying to get my attention.) Seriously, I didn’t know that when babies were born they were blue, and that they didn’t kick and scream. When I saw her she wasn’t moving. I went from that “it hasn’t really sunk in” feeling to the “somebody hit you in the stomach with a baseball bat” panic that something was wrong with my kid. The nurses took her over to the table and started working on her, and in a minute I heard “Wahhh.”
Only a year after my daughter was born did I tell Gregg what had happened and how I’d felt, and then I just started crying.
Everywhere I go people keep asking me if we videotaped our daughters’ births. No, we did not. Got some nice footage of the conception, but nothing on the delivery. I mean, why would anybody want to film that? Because it’s such a beautiful moment? I was there. Having a baby looks like a wet Saint Bernard trying to come in through a cat door. Do you really think I need a film to remember this? I think any guy who films his wife giving birth ought to return the favor by letting his wife film his hemorrhoid surgery later.
“Look girls, here’s Tony fully dilated. What a trooper he was.”
I learned a lot about babies pretty quickly. For instance, babies are nauseated by the smell of a clean shirt. You put on something freshly laundered and they’re gonna spit up just like that. My wardrobe looked like we had condors living in our yard. If you play with babies too hard, they’ll spew like a can of beer. I used to shake up my daughter, then hand her to people I didn’t like. “Hold her just a minute, would ya?”
I also learned that you have got to change those diapers every day. You do! When it says “six to twelve” pounds on the side of the Pampers box, they’re not lying. That is all those things will hold.
Changing a diaper is a lot like opening a birthday present from your grandmother. You never know what’s inside, but you’re pretty sure you’re not going to like it. Changing a diaper after your kid eats a box of Crayolas will stop you dead in your tracks. Looks like a souvenir from Jamaica.
Babies have taught me a few things about moms, too. Moms will clean up anything. I read recently in Scientific American that a mother’s spit duplicates the exact chemical composition of Formula 409. It can get rust off a car bumper.
I love being a parent. It’s weird, it’s hard, you sacrifice decades of your life raising someone who, I guarantee you, will one day tell you that you didn’t do a damn thing right, and move out in a huff. Next thing you see the kid on Oprah blaming you for everything from her mustache to wanting to sleep with his sister (the one with the mustache). I’m getting a little tired of that. Just once I want to see somebody go, “You know what? My daddy was great, my momma was great, I’m just a jerk.” Just one time.
People have always told me that I’d learn more from my kids than they’d learn from me. I now believe that. I’ve learned that as a parent, when you have sex your body emits a hormone that drifts down the hall into your child’s room and makes them want a drink of water. If you’re extremely lucky they will call this order in, because there are few surprises in life to match looking your wife directly in the eye and feeling somebody tickle the bottom of your foot. So now every night we just bathe the little girls and put them in their nightgowns and their cowbells.
Our youngest child has discovered the little silver handle on the back of the toilet. She’s making more stuff disappear than David Copperfield. My wife’s lost three combs. I lost my good sunglasses. We’re pretty sure she flushed the remote control because every time we go to the bathroom the TV comes on.
Once when I came home from work I discovered that somebody had colored on the dining room wall. My oldest daughter told me the dog did it. I about went crazy. We’ve had that dog eight years and now he starts coloring on the wall.
Between the youngsters and the animals the house just goes to hell. The rule around our place is: If it ain’t broke, it ain’t ours. They’ve destroyed everything. My wife has this little statue. It used to be a ballerina, now it just looks like the victim of a tragic farming accident. We have a sofa, but if you sit on it in the wrong place you can’t have kids.
Babies today come with technology. Anybody with a baby has a monitor, which for those of you without kids (and who swear after reading this that you will always be without kids), it’s like a one-way walkie-talkie that allows you to listen in on them. You have to be real careful to put the right end of this thing in the right bedroom. We realized we’d made that mistake when we didn’t hear our daughter cry for five months and her first words were, “Oh yeah baby, just like that, that’s really good, that’s good…”
Anybody with kids knows I’m lying now. When you’re young and you’ve got a choice between sleep or sex, you take sex every time. When you start getting older and you’ve got a choice between sleep and sex, you take the sleep and just hope you have a dream about sex.
All parents think their kids are the smartest kids ever born. My mom thought my daughter was a
genius because she would lie on the floor and talk to the ceiling fan. I said, “Mom, Uncle Harold does that and y’all call him an alcoholic.”
It’s not that I don’t think my daughters are bright. Even if they are my kids. (Gregg’s got strong genes.) It’s just embarrassing to say so out loud because then I sound like every other parent. Who takes these parents seriously anymore? When’s the last time you visited someone with little kids who said, “Hey, come in here and look at little Tommy. He is as dumb as a brick, boy. Turn on the light. He won’t even know. Turn the light on. He’ll just sit there all day long, cross-eyed and drooling.”
I have a cousin who thinks her oldest child is going to be the next Einstein because this kid stands out in the yard and goes, “Air’pane. Air’pane.”
I finally took her aside and told her. “Listen. He’s fourteen years old! It’s time to reel it in. I don’t want to break your heart, but he’s got a job with deep fat frying in his future.” I think I may have whispered too loud because a couple of my relatives suddenly said, “Wait a damn minute here.”
One thing I will brag about is how cute my daughters are. Intelligence is ephemeral, but pictures don’t lie. (If you believe that, please put this book on your nightstand next to the copy of Eleanor Roosevelt: The Supermodel Years.) I am glad my daughters are comely because frankly I worried about that. Can you think of anything worse than people who have ugly kids? Gregg and I call those unfortunate children “Hi babies” because when you meet a kid so ugly that you can’t say anything nice to its parents you say, “Hi, baby.”
Parents with “Hi babies” are also always the first ones to whip out their snapshots and shove them in your face. This annoys me so much that when I worked at IBM I got this baby picture that was actually a composite of the ugliest features of forty questionable looking infants. The result was fairly horrible. Whenever guys would start pulling out pictures of their kids, I would dead-serious take out my composite snapshot and go, “That’s my son.” I just wanted to watch their faces. This “baby” had crossed-eyes, huge ears that didn’t match, one eyebrow, one tooth that was directly in the middle, and huge nostrils. People were afraid to say, “That is not your kid,” because it might have been. So they’d try to say something nice, and go, “What a cute outfit.”
When our oldest child learned to walk we finally had to babyproof the house. You’ve all heard of this, right? You have to put latches on your drawers and cabinets so your children can’t hurt themselves. We don’t want them taking knives out of the silverware drawer and playing Ed Aames on the Tonight Show anniversary reel.
I remember when I was a kid, my parents had a 900-pound television on top of a TV tray. The Eiffel Tower standing on its point was safer. But my dad’s theory was “Let him pull it on his head a few times, he’ll learn.” He had a similar attitude about sticking metal objects in electrical outlets. “Oh, you want to put a penny in the light socket? Sure. Try that out. Oh, hurt like hell, didn’t it? Don’t do that no more.”
Raising kids is the hardest job in the world. It’s a lot like that military commercial: “We do more before 9 A.M. than most people do all day.” That’s our household. Now we look back and realize why we suddenly stopped seeing our friends who’d had kids. We thought we’d done something wrong. The truth was, they’d moved on. They had a responsibility that could not be ignored or even postponed. You can change jobs and spouses and houses, but you can’t change your kids.
I read in the newspaper about someone who got in trouble for trying to lose his kids in a mall. Obviously he didn’t know that the law only allows you to do that with your wife.
Now that we’re parents we are on the other end of the equation. We used to have single friends, but not anymore. We miss them, but we understand that single people don’t want to sit around and hear our conversations about birthday parties, car pools, and the preschool staff. My single guy friends are interested in dating the cute kindergarten teacher. The dads I know just want her to watch their kids so they can take a nap. Single people want to talk about things other than tinkle and poo-poo and pee-pee. We college-educated parents would also like that, but you’d be amazed at how “doody” has become a sizable part of our vocabulary.
As our kids grow, they’ve also adopted our terminology. Gregg and I have a code phrase for having to go to the bathroom. “I’m going to go check the mildew on the shower curtain.” Recently our four-year-old walked into our bedroom and said, “Mom, I think I’m gonna go check the mildew.”
Gregg said, “Where did she get that from?”
I just looked at her and said, “Where do you think?”
Gregg did a double take then said, “Oh she’s so smart.” Just like a parent.
Sometimes when I help around the house Gregg really appreciates it. Not only will she shower me with praise but she’ll tell her girlfriends.
“Oh, he fed the girls dinner and he’s bathing them now.”
“He bathes the girls?!”
“Oh yeah, he bathes them every night.”
Unfortunately, those friends then tell their husbands.
“Robert, do you know that Jeff bathes their kids every night?”
Soon I’m getting angry calls giving me a hard time for making the guys’ lives miserable.
“Thanks a lot, you sonofabitch. I got railed on for a week because you bathe your kids.”
All my oldest daughter wants to do from the moment she gets up is play. I wish she’d learn to tell time already so she wouldn’t wake me up so early to play with her. But that said, all I really want for her is to enjoy this time of life since it’s the only time she’ll get to play so freely. What would be nice is if life worked the other way around. When we retire we should all get to sit on the floor and play, and not just in senior homes.
As a dad, I’m a pretty good playmate considering that I get tired after about twenty minutes of fooling around with Legos or my daughter’s pocket puppies. I don’t mean to complain. Playing with those is actually easier than trying to keep up with a kid’s imagination. Plus, my scenarios are always a little more gross than Gregg’s.
“Oh, Winnie the Pooh ate too much honey. Bluh, he vomited all over Tigger!”
Gregg will roll her eyes, but my daughter loves it.
She is an interesting child. She likes accident stories.
When I put her to bed at night I normally say, “We’re going to read a couple of stories.” Her eyes light up and she says, “Then we’ll tell accidents?”
“Okay.”
“Dad, tell me a frog accident.”
Then I have to make up a bad accident that happens to a frog. “Frog went out to play; he was jumping, chasing a butterfly, and he bumped his head against the tree.”
“No, Daddy, it’s got to be a better accident than that.”
Then I have to come up with something involving stitches or a cast or dismemberment. Frog parts winding up in a French restaurant is always good, although there should be a happy ending, if possible, like “and he tasted very much like chicken.” I’ve now struck a deal with her that she’s got to tell me one accident story for every one I tell her. She’s getting pretty good at it.
“Okay, Daddy, the bird was flying in the air and he ran into a giraffe, and his beak poked the giraffe in the eye and the giraffe had to go to the hospital. They put a patch on it and they thought he was going to be blind. But after a few weeks the rhinoceros doctor took the patch off and the giraffe could see, and his mother was so happy.”
Just to keep this from being a totally bizarre and sick experience that is guaranteed to make her need therapy, Gregg and I use the stories to teach her important lessons like not going into the street.
“Dad, tell me a rabbit accident.”
“There was a rabbit named Donny. One day he wanted to go play with his friend across the street, but Donny didn’t always mind his mother and daddy and he didn’t stop, look, and listen. Donny hopped into the street and just then a big truck ran over him an
d crushed his legs. The bones were sticking out.”
Just trying to get my point across.
We have a doctor friend who visited recently and she loved the accident stories so much that she actually wrote a kids’ book. My daughter described the accidents and our friend Jane wrote them down and did illustrations.
“Okay, there were two cows and one’s name was Yakky and the other one’s name was Shoe-new. Shoe-new was not a nice cow and would stab Yakky in the stomach with his horn. One day Yakky died and Shoe-new was so mean, he died too.” We always try to include a moral to the story. For instance, “Never stab your friends in the stomach with your horns.”
We now have a book full of accident stories that the insurance companies would love to get their hands on. We’re saving this for when she grows up. It will also come in handy as a discipline tool should she turn out to be a difficult teen.
“You’d better straighten up, young lady, because we’ve got all we need right here in this book to send you away to a girls’ school for the rest of your life!”
A kid’s job is to drive his parents crazy.
I like to think of my childhood as a job well done.
My mom was always “having a nervous breakdown.” Sometimes she’d say we were giving her a brain tumor. Seems like she’s had one since we were four. We think the tumor is mobile. Sometimes it’s on the left side of the head, sometimes it’s on the back. I just thank God that in thirty-three years it’s never become fatal.
Too bad Carole was never much good at discipline. She couldn’t hurt you when she whipped you. She would think she hurt you, but we never really felt it. That’s when I first learned how to act.
“Oh God, Mother, stop. Oh, oh, I’m just about to pass out.”
“You are not.”
No Shirt, No Shoes...No Problem! Page 16