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January 11, 2013
Where Emma lays, sound asleep in her crib, surrounded by her soft and fuzzy friends, it is Friday, a full five days since I last held my daughter. Indeed, since Christmas, I’ve spent just a few, too short days with my darling girl. And it’s killing me.
The backstory is complex, but suffice it to say that as the frequency of travel grows, the desire to not drag your daughter around grows, and so, at times we, and later I, left Emma behind, to be cared by for by trusted loved ones. The first break was nearly 11 days, and several things happened during that time that were unexpected, despite their obviance.
Children grow at a rate that rivals bamboo, and clutter. I’ve known this, indeed I’ve witnessed this first hand, day in and day out. Emma grows tall, she grows trim, she grows plump, her eyes gain extra perception, her movements grow quicker, more refined, her face more defined, and her personality and awareness more vibrant and captivating. But my view has been up close, with a constant eye on who she grows and changes. Separating the observer from their subject for so much time is unsettling, as much for me, it turns out, as she.
We met up at a salon where she’d be having her first hair cut, an odd place for a reunion but the only one that presented itself. As she pulled up I saw the differences clearly. She had stretched out and the growth spurt had given her face a leaner appearance, which emphasized her large, twinkling eyes.
I approached the car door with a goofy grin strewn across my face and she lit-up. From my one psychology class in college I know that there are three factors to make a thing memorable, and their a bit depressing. Primacy, recency and repetition are the most important factors in human recollection. Given a list of several words, with one word repeated several times, you are most likely to remember the first word, last word and the repeated word easiest.
This all applies to more than just words, though. And so, her smile was no surprise. Yet, once I’d lifted her from her car seat, and she got used to being unrestrained, it was her Nana, with whom she’d spent the last 11 days, that she wanted to cling to. I wasn’t hurt, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little jealous. I wanted almost nothing else but to hold and love on my daughter, and here she was opting to shower affection on someone else.
My jealousy was soon soothed as I watched her walk around. Her steps had become more awkward as her legs gained length. She had developed a range of expressions that I hadn’t yet been envisioned. Her smiles, once graded as small and big, now could be coy, mischievious. Her eyes were no longer slaved to her mouth for expression, they could betray a meager pout as being more show than sadness. And even her quietude was filled with activity, as her whole posture and expression revealed the careful analysis of a girl encountering a stylist’s chair for the first time.
The haircut was uneventful, and she was left ever more beautiful for it. I was privileged to get to hold her through the ordeal. Which featured just a few alligator tears, and a furrowed brow, whenever she caught sight of the combs and scissors involved. As Rachel, the patient stylist who was the only person we trusted to take on this task, leaned in for a picture, Emma reached out and stiff armed her, pushing her away. The gesture was rude, and unfortunate, but without any doubt in my mind, but having never make so clear her antipathy for another person, I couldn’t help but smile.
As i write this I’m sitting in a red-eye, making quick progress to my next reunion with Emma. She has been near the top of my thoughts this entire trip and, though I hope my absence hasn’t burdened her thoughts, part of me hopes that on first sight, she’ll light up as before, and be ready to hold me and never let go.
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July 20, 2012
When I woke this morning I checked Twitter for the overnight entertainment. @amaeryllis was in a fight with anti-vaccine crazies. There were a handful of Dark Knight Rises tweets. Emma’s been in Virginia with her grandmother for the last two weeks, a choice that my wife and I were pensive of, and equal parts glad and sad that she handled our absence so well. Then I saw the news about #Aurora. My sadness was fully realized when I saw,”@: Someone claimed they saw a baby shot. Horror.” The infant is reportedly 3 months old. I feel my daughter’s absence more right now than in the whole of the last two weeks.
Mr. Berney’s tweet continues, “(ALSO WHO THE F**K TOOK A BABY TO DARK KNIGHT RISES).” Please, everyone, stop asking this. My heart aches for the child. My heart breaks for the parents, crippled by fear and guilt. Fearful that the worst guilt-ridden by a choice they made foolish or not. There was no way they could know to expect this. And this will haunt them, far more than it will haunt you or I.
I was going to write a post about our efforts to cope with the strangeness a parent feels in their child’s absence. What a pathetic topic to even mention now. My daughter is safely tucked away in my mother-in-law’s safe, warm home. Their daughter is in a far worse place.
God, spare the child. People, spare the parents.
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June 23, 2012
Ok, yes, the tots thing is becoming a theme. Let’s move on.
A while ago, while walking the entourage, I was met with this missive, “Nice dog, pussy.” The speaker was a passenger in a silver SUV that was in the midst of pushing through a red light at the intersection where we stood. I was entirely dumbstruck. For one thing, she is a nice dog. Gabby is a beagle mix, whose breeding has left her with a lean body, jaunty tail and an ever present grin. When set side by side, my daughter generally nets fewer compliments from the public than my dog. But the epithet was so crude, so base, and so entirely unfriendly.
I grew up in Northern Virginia, home to plenty of entitled, uppity white kids. I say this to impress on readers that I’m familiar with rudeness. But when you spend most of your day with a preverbal infant, this language becomes as foreign as Russian synthpop, and nearly as offensive.
At his crassness, the three other boys in the SUV began chortling and lauding him. These boys, and their female analogues, are a primary concern for any parent. The boy’s words didn’t hurt my feelings, and weren’t offensive in a personal way. They offended my outlook on people. During a brief cynical time I allowed myself to assume that most people were pretty intolerable, and the best you could hope for was to find a small handful that weren’t utterly repugnant. My wife worked very hard to break me of this belief, and was alarmingly successful. But to think that anyone would think it would be appropriate behavior to insult a man on a walk with his child is maddening. Worse still, to think that amongst that juvenile quartet it’s not just appropriate behavior, it’s encouraged.
People come in all sensibilities. I wasn’t born to take an fool’s words terribly hard, but what about Emma? What if she encounters the same idiot and feels hurt by the encounter? What if her fate is to be plagued by idiots? Emotional resilience is not necessarily part nature takes little role in building toughness.
And nurturing toughness demands of parents a willingness to let their child take some blows, not an easy thing, for sure. And of all the things I’ve read on child rearing, I have so far found now answer for how to make her stronger. And my only instinct is to cloister her away from the trolls lurking under bridges and intersections.
But ridding her world of insufferable trolls is foolhardy. So, I’ll remember his words. “Nice dog, pussy.” And I’ll wait for the day that Emma comes home from school, crying because of some unkind words, uttered in her direction. And in the interim I’ll strive to find the words to let her know it’s really ok. That the world isn’t full of meanies and bullies. That those unkind words weren’t true, and have no weight. That the good people in the world fa and that the bad aren’t really bad, just misunderstood.
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April 18, 2012
So, first, let me apologize for not posting as regularly, or at all. I’ll do better.
Now, I haven’t discussed much the actual choice to become a full-time father, nor how I feel about that fact. I love my daughter, and the circumstances were right. That’s really all anyone should need to know on the first point. How I feel, though, is a more in depth matter. And it’s been brought to bear, somewhat, by the recent firestorm over one woman’s comments about another woman’s ability to represent her gender on the topic of economic hardship. If you haven’t heard about , good for you.
Amidst all the rancor about Rosen “attacking” Romney, there was born this notion that
had declared a War on Moms. Since the matter first broke last Wednesday, every outlet has covered the comments, their
and , and a larger discussion on women’s role in the modern economy, and who, if anyone, is really at war with mothers. And in the midst of all of this, there were so many answers offered to the question of why mother’s choose to stay home, or its analog, why they choose to remove themselves from the work force. And roughly 1 out of every 10 articles, tweets or videos, included a passing mention of the incidence of stay-at-home fathers.
My wife is a physician, engaged in her residency in Internal Medicine. She’s a wonderful physician and a wonderful mother. My medical readers will understand perfectly the time commitment residency demands. Any readers that are lawyers understand the time commitment based on what I know about the first few though, their compensation is roughly three times what my wife earns. Other careers may be as strenuous, but to those that need perspective, think about how much time you spend not at work (including time spent asleep). That’s how much time my wife spends at the hospital. And while medicine used to be a ‘boys club,’ easily half her class are female, as is the program director and two out the three chief residents. Each of these women must consider their careers in choosing when or if to have children. We chose to have Emma.
Losing half our income to child care, or sacrificing half our income so one of us could stay home was a scary choice, but not a hard one. We never wanted a group of strangers to spend more time with our daughter, cumulatively, than either of us. And since residency doesn’t wait, that meant I would be it. At once excited and terrified, I sought some help. From the internet. Google ‘.’ The first entry, is the
entry on the subject, the same as when you google ‘,’ or ‘.’ The subsequent entries are an even split between the handful of support sites for such fathers and news reports on their growing number since the ‘mancession’ began. Follow of those links and you learn that the chief focus right now amongst the stay-at-home dad lobby is to gain recognition by the Census Bureau. Presently, stay-at-home moms have their own check box, where as their male counterparts fall under the category of ‘alternative child care.’ So, the War on Dads is Grenada in scope. And yet here we are. Strong. Masculine. Wearing a Baby Bjorn.
The ‘nuclear family’ is a sociology term that was outdated shortly after it was first published, and serves to illustrate my point. Aside from calling them families, there’s no real way to cubby hole the American household. There’s too much depth and variety to really expect any handful of words to capture any family, let alone the whole panoply of American families. Does Ann Romney have a good perspective on economic issues affecting mothers today? Who knows? Maybe the Romney’s lead an austere life in spite of Daddy Mitt’s capital gains. Maybe during her free time Ann educates herself by reading tweets and articles from childless economic and or perhaps more effectively, she spends her days doing outreach at her local schools and churches.
And I don’t mean to entirely snark childless economic and political reporters (I love you all); to be fair, this would have been a Twitter flame out if it hadn’t been for the Democrats’ eagerness to line-up single-file to repeatedly throw Rosen under the school bus.
Yet despite all the words I’ve read on this tweetstorm (which has hopefully run its course), I haven’t heard anything useful or elucidative about Ann Romney’s experience with regards economic issues affecting mothers. And what does this all have to do with how I feel about being a stay-at-home dad? Marginalized. That’s how I feel. Even before the War on Moms devoured the media’s attention, I was often left to wonder whether what I do exists beyond the puff pieces on ABC and a statistical blip in an economics report. When I go to the grocery store with Emma, I’m stopped almost constantly. We live in an old money area, and there’s nothing a great-grandmother likes to do more than coo a pretty 9 month old girl. But for every 9 coos, there’s one elderly person that smiles and declares, “Oh, isn’t that cute, he’s like a Mr. Mommy, how nice.” It is nice. Thanks.
Parents, working or otherwise, moms or otherwise, are all dealing with the same fears and challenges with which every family copes. Rosen adopted her two daughters while with a homosexual partner, and with whom now she’s a single working mother, that sounds like a challenging thing to handle. Ann Romney bore and raised five children while also meeting the requirements of a political spouse, that’s a kind of pressure I have no interest in. Statistics and analysis can suss out all sorts of minutiae about what helps or hinders the American family, but it’s hardly anything groundbreaking or startling. Quality health care. Safe, affordable food. Effective, empowering education. Shelter. Economic stability. That’s all we need.
The American family is not a wedge issue, but its concerns should be prevalent in the discussion. And those issues apply far beyond traditional stereotypes. I am not the margin. Nor is the wife of a millionaire. Nor the homosexual single mother. Nor the working mother. Nor the childless economic or political reporter. Nor anyone. We are all the American family.
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So, we took a two week trip to visit family and friends throughout Virginia. If we visited you, you know it. And we’re sorry. At the end of the first week of the trip, Emma picked up a GI bug. Before long, everyone in the house had it. For each of us that got the bug, the misery was short-lived but with two distinct stages. The first stage is what you’d expect. Nausea. Vomiting. Diarrhea. This persists for about 24 hours, and is followed by the malaise and myalgias you expect from the flu. For Emma, though the disturbance was extended. Having had her insides flushed out from the disease, all the progress we’d made in introducing new foods, and the pleasant changes to her stools that implied, was undone. Every meal was followed by misery, and we went through countless diapers in just a few days.
Now here’s where we erred. We assumed that all of our friends, would gladly risk a few days of discomfort to spend time with us and our beloved daughter. We assumed that the disease would have a moderate virulence, affecting mainly those with close, direct contact with her (poo). We assumed the contagiousness would abate after a few days. We were wrong on all fronts. We stopped counting how many had contracted the illness when it hit the double digits, with victims stretching over 300 miles of our beloved Virginia. What really makes this all the more depressing is that we were so diligent about hand-washing and warning all our friends. We even tried to keep her out of others hands so as to minimize their potential exposure.
The lesson: if your child is ill, cancel your plans. This seems extreme and disheartening, but seriously, this was nasty. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll see all our friends and family again. And we’ll apologize sincerely, again, for the illness we left them with. And they’ll brush it off, but we’ll share a knowing look that says, “Yeah, that was awful. Terrible. Disgusting. Among the worst days of my life.” And they’ll awkwardly ask about Emma’s health since then. Before cautiously taking her in their outstretched arms.
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Today, as I walked around the bed to finish making the other side, and I caught Emma’s eye and saw her light up with a smile, I thought, she’s my best friend, and suddenly I wondered whether this was a good or a bad thing. It was true, in some definition of the word. For the last few months she has been with me through it all. She has been my companion and shared every experience with me. Being apart from her is a challenge, and being reunited I always feel an urge to let her know what I’d done, how I’d been. It was such an odd revelation to have in the midst of such a routine task, and yet this is exactly the sort of thing we had been sharing for, now, the majority of her life. Daddy and Emma, making the bed. She’s my sidekick. My Tanto. My Sundance Kid.
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January 2, 2012
One topic will make its way into more posts than any other, so let’s just get things moving. There are three things that a newborn will be doing several times throughout the day, and two are mutually exclusive. Babies eat, sleep and poop. They can’t eat while they’re sleeping, but they can poop anytime. And so a father must be prepared.
Emmaline is nearly six months old, and in the half-year since her birth I’ve seen countless permutations of color, consistency, smell, frequency and volume. Let’s cover them all then.
Initially, the colors you see will have no relation to anything but whimsy. There will be browns and greens, yellows, a pale color that’s only identifiable as pertaining to the GI system. The hues vary, too, though rarely within a single sample. There are colors that can be worrisome. Reds are generally a good sign that it’s time to call an expert. As your baby grows, you’ll begin adding different foods. This will expand the infants palette considerably. Sadly, wielding control over an aspect of this process makes it no less unpleasant to behold.
In day to day life, adults have little interaction with poop. The little interaction that one has is rarely tactile. Being a father, though, is a rather hands-on job. As such, a father discovers that the distance between stone and water is wide, and filled with untold textures. The ability to identify, or better yet predict, consistency has being able to identify the amount of work that will be involved in resolving the issue. And how much precaution must be taken to prevent . . . incidental contamination of your person, or your surroundings.
I considered an entire post on smell, and readers may find themselves subjected to it another time. Suffice it to say that there’s no getting used to the smells you’ll encounter. Some, though unpleasant, are tolerable. Others attack your nose with cruelty and disdain. These smells are not content with squinching your face in displeasure. These smells want you to reel back and shield your face, like an actor in an action movie reacting to an explosion. When presented with these smells, know that danger lies ahead.
If you consulted a pediatric gastroenterologist they would tell you that the normal interval between bowel movements for a newborn is between every 4 hours and every four days. Our pediatrician told us this when we called him in a panic. She hadn’t pooped in two days. We should have counted ourselves lucky. Assume that the child will poop the moment it is most disruptive to whatever you’re hoping to accomplish that day. Have a doctor’s appointment? Call them the day before and let them know you’ll be late. Don’t let them reschedule. You can’t fool children. Somehow, they know our tricks. It’s pointless to try.
I’m a bit of an analytic guy. Things make sense to me based on empirical data. So it was with some surprise that the sheer amount of poop my daughter was able to produce was clearly not correlative to her size, nor the amount of food I had perceived us giving her. Things have settled out since the earliest days. But just know that you when you open that diaper, you might find yourself with a much bigger challenge than you anticipated.
So that’s the basics on poop. If I was to be surprised by anything involving fatherhood, it’s the fact I just typed the prior sentence. But there you have it. This topic will appear again, so don’t be surprised. And this post will always be here, in case you need a primer on poop.
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December 30, 2011
We had joked about it enough times. Indeed, there was even an open offer that would put me behind the wheel of a bright red Ferrari in exchange for the duty. But I don’t think we ever really expected it to happen. Stay-at-home dad. Mr. Mom. I prefer Full-time Father. Anything else seems diminutive. Not to me mind you, but to parenthood (motherhood, inclusive) as this as if anything deviating from a woman cooking, cleaning and rearing her children, while spending the vast majority of her life at home is alien. No life is so straightforward, nor would I ever wish it so.
We’re nothing if not list makers. So, shortly after we decided to start down this path, we filled out our collection of books on parenting, and hunted out guides. I wish it was a little more surprising to discover that there are scant few resources for fathers out of the workplace. Mothers’ guides are lite but the trail for fathers, though old and well tread, is uncharted.
So, that’s what I’m doing.
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Topic matches for meters brewer
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