Life, Punctuated

I’m no longer in charge. E is in charge. This gets tricky, because he’s not in control. So our household dynamic finds us in the situation in which those in control aren’t in charge while the one in charge isn’t in control. As is likely the case with all parents, our task is now to balance E’s demands with our own abilities to maintain and provide. Like a couple stagecoach riders propelled by a dozen horses that a moment ago stomped on a nest full of angry hornets and are now hell bent for leather on outrunning bees that can fly at a hundred miles an hour.

Lousy analogy demonstrates complete lack of flow from mind to keyboard. Obviously, it’s time to swap laundry from washer to drier. Not only have I lost what little control I thought I once had but I’ve abandoned use of definite articles.

Actually, he can control some things. He can control which way he points his eyes, thereby controlling what he sees. And he can control his little mouth by trying to keep it closed while I’m trying to make it open as I force medication between what will someday be his little pearly white chompers.

… assuming he gets his teeth genes from his Mama and not his Poppi. The maternal side of his genetic conglomeration is populated by pearly white chompers. The paternal offers little more than discolored things prone to both traumatic injury and decay.

Orally medicating a baby isn’t as hard as it might sound, really. E loves to be naked – a characteristic that we’re not sure comes from the maternal or the paternal side. So when we’re having fun changing diapers, between making urine fountains on the one end and spitting up milk on the other, Daddy finds the perfect opportunity to take advantage of this bambino’s cheerful disposition and gets the application of medicinal goop quickly accomplished.

We, his parents, are more freaked by control – or lack of same – than we are control freaks. At least that’s my assertion – I already know some of you reading this will disagree; and because I’ve sensibly predicted this disagreement and have stated such, there’s no need for anyone to be sending me emails about how wrong I am in this regard. Thanks anyway.

Another dynamic a new kiddo brings: punctuation. So if you’re right in the middle of something – anything – and there’s a bambino around, you’ll learn to live in such a way that you can instantly drop whatever you’re doing and attend to He Who Is In Charge. The flow of life radically changes faster than you can offer a fond adieu to the Old Ways. The ways that saw you working in the garden for hours on end while taking advantage of your ability to skip a meal or postpone some other typically typical activity that’s part of a reasonably reasonable daily routine. Or the ways that allowed you to, say, swap out a brake master cylinder on an old car. You can drop the wrenches easily enough, but it’ll take a good 5 minutes before you can get yourself clean enough to handle anyone else. Especially babies.

The necessity of living in a state that requires you be so suddenly available is the difference between delicious poached eggs on perfectly buttered warm toast and boiled eggs wobbling around atop something closer to old soggy cardboard. It means a fundamental change to your ability to enjoy any reliable frequency of the underappreciated and unimportant (but pleasant) activity we call bathing. Not since I was a Wildlands Firefighter have I been aware that three or four days without a shower could be so easily (and so completely without intent) achieved. Back then, we didn’t have access to a shower. Now I recognize it as the unused end of the bathroom as I gaze wistfully toward the shelf laden with the frequently unattainable cleansing elixirs.

Should anyone marketing deodorant need proof that continually adding more layers of the anti-stench stuff over successive bouts of sweat gland activation fails to provide a pleasant olfactory experience for anyone in the subject's proximity; I submit my simple existence as irrefutable evidence of exactly that. I don’t really know what happens when you mix Roquefort with Lysol but I might be getting the idea that it isn’t really anything you’d want to have inside your house. Or your garage. And it's a slurry you especially wouldn’t want attached to yourself such that escape or relief remains impossible. Given that I stink anyway, I would just keep wearing the same shirt between showers, but E spits up unexpectedly and frequently enough that I’m swapping t-shirts out at the rate of two or three a day. Without him, my hygiene would undoubtedly suffer further.

If you aspire to write and spend time doing just that, you’ll find that the notion of getting into a groove – or being on a roll – vanishes. Once that train of thought departs Grey Matter Station and begins picking up steam, the child’s built-in alarm system calls a halt to the rest of the world and you find yourself again consumed with taking care of the basic needs of the most important person in the world. Which is exactly what you really do want to be doing. A couple of times I’ve wished that E’s timing could be tweaked a little so that I’d know once in a while that I had (for example) a full hour to spend on some task. It’d be something like twenty minutes for a thorough shower, twenty minutes to take the Lambretta for a ride and twenty minutes to catch up that sleep thing that everyone in the house that isn’t E has been wanting of late. Though I miss the shower and the time watching eyelid theater, what I’ve learned is that there’s something really calming about not having the luxury of time that would facilitate such activities. It shifts one’s entire focus. All the things that were important – including whether or not you might have lunch sometime between ten in the morning and three in the afternoon – are now secondary. It’s probably exactly like meditating amidst the discharge of live ammunition. I should be so enlightened.

If you’ve got kids, you already know all of this. Nothing is more important. And it’s actually really cool to have something that’s so completely more important than anything that feeds your own desire, appetite, or ego. The transition into parenthood brings newfound purpose and worth.

I won’t add “meaning” to that list. I believe that meaning is internally manufactured by individuals and exists entirely independent of outside forces or influence. Meaning is a chosen response generated by the audience. But that’s a whole different topic that’s so convoluted and abstract that we’ll have to save it for some other day. Which is probably never.

As a new Daddy (and according to a couple friends, as a Libra) I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how this is going and how things could be better. I don’t spend much time thinking about how they might be worse (what’s the benefit of that?). As a wannabe writer coupled with the aspiration of becoming a “good” father, some amount of time has gone into researching what other parents are up to and how they’ve gone about securing their status among the Good Parents. That’s the list I’d like to join. At least I thought it was.

So here on the blog-o-rama, in the midst of my conversations with friends and family, and across that wide arena that is the internet itself, I find myself at the center of What Everyone Else Thinks. A vortex of influences clamoring for legitimacy. And these influences are, in fact, completely legit, which is unrelated to whether or not they each meet with my rather biased approval. The challenge they face is where they might rank within my own weak minded assessment as to their relative value of what Good Parenting might include.

I’ve mentioned some of the medical things we’ve addressed with E and I’ve credited the good medical folks who have helped us through some challenging moments. And the truth really is that E remains among the living thanks to their efforts – this became the case before he was born and was reinforced days later. Nothing I can do will demonstrate how completely grateful D and I are for what the medical peeps have done for us and for our son.

Fortunately, I guess, the medical peeps are satisfied to accept checks in exchange for their awesomeness. This is both simple and challenging.

The most recent round of medical stuff isn’t at all life threatening and hasn’t called for late night highway Subaru rocketeering from deep SW Portland to the Children’s Hospital in NE. And that’s a good thing – the Subaru transmission hasn’t been the same since. But we’ve come up with a new medical thing to deal with that led us to call the pediatrician’s office during their off hours. We got a prescription over the phone, got a concise list of instructions that would be easy to follow, got the scrip filled at the local pharmacy by a pharmacist who gave us more instructions that would also be easy to follow, and we went about our typically attentive approach to ensuring that we followed all of everyone’s instructions to the letter. We’re trying to do this parenting thing well and we’re still under the impression that the people who make metric tons of money ensuring that little baby boys like ours remain healthy possess an expertise on which we’re smart to rely.

Therein, as they say, lies the rub.

Our first medical challenge from several weeks ago found us doing exactly as we were told and coming up short in a really scary way.

Our second challenge that happened shortly after the first found us doing exactly as we were told and coming up short in a less scary but still significant way.

Our third challenge, which we’re still in the middle of sorting out, finds me walking a thin line between acceptance that not only am I not in charge but I’m also not in control (and trying to make peace with my stubborn and impatient self about this) and frustration or irritation or sometimes a little bit of disgust with the very industry I owe my deepest thanks. Here we are again but in this instance with a thankfully simple thing to deal with. Here we are again with a specific set of instructions we’ve followed precisely. And after a few days without any improvement, here I was again on the phone asking that same “Given our lack of results thus far, what’s the next step?” question I’ve rehearsed so many times in the last 7 ½ weeks.

Through this most recent inquiry, the answer we’d liked to have had at the start was finally bestowed upon my apparently only marginally qualified self after the whole thing should have been effectively resolved rather than having become progressively worse. Which is, quite precisely, the case. Everything we’d been told to do is really only about half of what we needed to do. The sole reason we didn’t do the other half of everything we needed to do is because we’d never heard anything about that other half. Because when we asked the very specific (I thought) question, “Exactly what do we need to do to ensure that this gets better as quickly as possible?” whoever was answering apparently heard something more along the lines of “I’d like to demonstrate that I’m really a half-assed parent and set myself up – again – for failure in the eyes of others, so please ensure that you tell me only enough of how to deal with this that I can spend the next several days causing my baby boy to cry his eyes out four times a day as I engage in this medicinal thing even though it’s not going to help in the slightest.”

Now that I’m thinking about it, I realize that sometimes I’m more than a little frustrated.

Due to my interest in what other dads are up to and what they might have to say about the challenges of being parents, I’ve checked out a number of dad blogs, articles written by dads, organizations that include dads who share my aspiration of getting a clue about parenting. All that kind of stuff. My friends who are parents have, generally, expressed some margin of understanding and an ability to relate their own experiences with mine. Certainly, there must be more people with questions and concerns like mine out there in the rest of this big world. And because we’re not among the first on this path, there must be an enormous resource base on which we might draw.

What I will never do is consult the television. Every time I see a news teaser, it says “coming up at six, blah blah blah, and what you need to know to keep your family safe.” Or it says “blah blah blah and why you should be afraid.” Screw those guys.

One of the blogs I checked out is written by a pastor who has kids. I figured that because he had something like nine hundred comments for one of his entries that he was probably really smart and that I’d learn something from the insight he readily shares. Conveniently, I forgot that agreement doesn’t equal truth – so I fell right into that trap. Everyone agrees, thus it must be truth. Insert analogy of ill-informed political parties making absurd assertions here.

Then I read about how this pastor is sure he’s not the only parent who’s had the thought of holding their kid underwater, just for a minute or two, because of how frustrating parenthood can be. He continues, talking about how parents shouldn’t feel guilty if they give their kids Chicken McNuggets once in a while, and that forgiving yourself for screwing up is important. I can accept the McNuggets thing and I can agree with the forgiving yourself bit. But that “pretending to drown your own children” thing strikes me as really plain awful. And there’s a long list of accolades from other parents, thanking this pastor guy for being the one to speak the words that all these other parents were previously afraid to admit had wandered through their own minds. Hundreds of parents, thanking this guy for his courage to admit what they also felt.

I was floored. I told my terrific wife about it and then we were both floored. This was a blog recommended to me, not one that I’d found by surfing the net. This man is plain sick between his ears.

Anyway, I won’t be visiting that pastor’s church unless I’m looking for a doorway in which to expunge the results of poorly prepared and undercooked shellfish and an overfull bladder. My stubborn self is now quite certain that this man has absolutely nothing of value to offer me.

Realizing that every abstract thing on the internet can be found on facebook in a much neater package, I looked for some dad blog stuff there and found Dad Bloggers. Perfect! I have peers, and they’re right here on facebook!

Er. Wait a second. Most of the stuff on their page includes links to Iron Man action figures, Star Wars stuff, comic book giveaways, something about angry birds and a blurb on the Superman Blue Ray thing. Interspersed among these commercial seeming entries are links to other dads’ blogs, some jokes, and references to things that seem like they might actually be interesting and useful. But what’s with all these posts that look like ads for toys? It’s like television without moving pictures. Not for me. I get enough advertisements on the regular Facebook thing that I don’t need to go looking for more.

All the time leading up to E’s birth I was wondering how I’d handle dealing with the challenges that E himself presented. And now that he’s crying and fussing and cooing and smiling and eating and sleeping and barfing (and finally laughing!) his way through each day I find myself surprised that the challenges of child rearing have more to do with the continual input regarding all the ways I ought to be doing this thing differently. I have only myself to blame. If I hadn’t taken the initiative to seek out the expertise of my peers, I wouldn’t have learned that pastors who blog about their wives regaining their pre-baby figure and that they think it’s okay to daydream of waterboarding their own children are, according to the internet, speaking on behalf of parents around the country.

I want no part of this alleged norm.

I wonder if the medicos who continue to not disclose critical bits of information that directly affects E’s well-being are lumping us in with parents who confuse McDonalds with actual food or if there’s something about us that indicates that we’re too stupid to follow directions more than three lines long. I’d like to say that I want no part of this apparent norm, too, but the truth is that we’re kind of over a barrel. We’re going to need doctor types again. I guess our task is to figure out how to present ourselves as the kind of parents who actually intend to follow through.

We’re the parents who, when we say “We will do whatever is necessary to ensure a positive result,” we actually know what we’re saying. And we actually mean it.

I’m disappointed to realize that our use of diplomacy and kindness seems to have been mistaken for weakness and a lack of resolve. I’m bothered to realize that I’m now having trouble coming up with an approach that won’t include posturing and loud voices and acting like a lunatic to get my simple point across.

Our next appointment is in less than a half hour. Which means I don’t have time for a shower.

This should be good.

All best,

Cameron