Babyhood (9780062098788) (18 page)

“How much weight did you gain?” she says.

In these conversations, someone always gets hurt.

“You gained
four
pounds? . . . Really . . .”

The instinct seems to be to fib
down
, not
up.
If you actually put on thirty pounds, call it twenty. Piled on forty to forty-five? Admit to thirty.

The more clever women, however, realize that it's to their advantage to say they gained more than they did, because it gives them the biggest leeway when answering the next question:

“How long did it take you to lose it?”

“Well, I still have some to get rid of. Sure, it was twenty-three years ago, but bear in mind, I put on a hundred eighty-seven pounds.”

T
hroughout pregnancy, it's a challenge to avoid becoming too competitive.
After
the kid arrives, however, it's impossible. You do it uncontrollably. The moment you see another child, the race is on: Whose kid is cuter? Who's growing more? Whose kid is using both hands the way the experts say they should? Who's talking, who's not talking? Who's talking in sentences, who's making obscure literary references . . . ?

A
nd again the accepted convention is: Lie. For all the sharing and being open and vulnerable, the truth is that all new parents are Big Fat Liars.

We lie about things that don't even mean anything. Like Sleeping Through the Night. You wouldn't think your newborn baby's ability to sleep or
not
sleep consecutive hours would be potential grounds for ridicule. But you'd be wrong.

“Our daughter came home from the hospital, and from that night forward, she slept perfectly. Went down at eight-thirty, woke up the next morning at nine.”

Lies, lies, and more lies. Because if you told the truth, it might make
you
look bad. If your baby doesn't sleep through the night, it's a cultural stigma. It's like
The Scarlet Letter
—where the “A” stands for “We're still Awake, thank you very much.” So even if you both have bags under your eyes the size of steamer trunks—lie.

“Well, yes, last night she did get up seven times, but only because there was a fireworks display across the street and construction on her crib . . .”

“Well, that explains it then.”

“Yes, because otherwise, she sleeps exactly like however the books say she should be sleeping . . . and, frankly, a little better than yours.”

W
hy do we play this game of parental one-upmanship? One word: Fear. We're all secretly afraid that our child might be even one micro-measurement less than “Perfect.” Even if we're safely inside that generally wide and flexible normal range, it doesn't matter; if somebody's child is doing something our child isn't, we get nervous. Our kid has to be at least as Perfect as their kid. (If they turn out to be a tad
more
Perfect than their kid, even better.)

Of course, we don't want our child to be
too
ahead. A three-month-old doing advanced calculus in the crib is freakish, and you run the risk of them being officially labeled “Circus Act.”

And surely you don't wish ill on somebody else's kid, either. You want to all be in the same ball park, with your kid sitting in slightly better seats.

Does This Come
with Puppies Instead
of Clowns?

I
f “cool” is measured by how little we care what others think of us, then babies are the coolest people on the planet.

There are no apologies or disclaimers in Babyland.

You never hear a baby say, “I just had garlic bread, so forgive me . . .” Or, “You know I'm still a little sweaty from racquetball, so don't hug me . . .” Hell, they'll wear a pantsful of lunch and sit right down to dinner. These guys just don't care.

Can you imagine walking into a room with a thing coming out your nose the size of a corn muffin and not caring? And then even expect people to pick you up and hug you? No. But for babies, it's not a problem. I myself would pay to be that cool.

This wonderful sense of confidence is particularly evident when it comes to their clothes. We dress babies up with some genuinely stupid apparel, and they just roll with it. They don't know what's on them, and they don't care.

    

T
here are two basic types of baby clothes: the “little adult” look and the “Look at me, I'm a cartoon” look. The first approach tries to disguise the fact that the subject is only twenty-three inches high—little tiny suits that make your child look like a ventriloquist's dummy, pint-sized jeans with back pockets, as if a four-month-old is going to go, “Oops, my wallet . . . I know I had it when I left the crib . . .”

I'm also a big fan of those hand-puppet-sized tank-top T-shirts. These are worn by those big beer-bellied babies you see every summer, sitting on the hood of a car, whistling at baby girls and spitting at traffic.

The vast majority of baby clothes, however, are of the brightly colored, animated-figure variety. Most have animals on them. It's some kind of federal regulation: All infant apparel must be flame retardant and feature a bear, a duck, or a rabbit.

It's a custom I don't quite understand. It's as if we're afraid that
without
the cute critters, babies alone are not quite cute
enough;
we need to underscore the point. Cute animals, cute baby. As if perhaps without these visuals, we wouldn't be sure they're babies.

“Look at that bald guy over there, drooling. He's so unbelievably short.”

“Don't stare, that's just cruel.”

“Oh, wait a minute, he's got Winnie-the-Pooh on his chest—he must be a baby. Never mind . . .”

And why bears? I'm stymied by the proliferation of bears. Bears are not that big a part of our culture; we don't see bears, we don't generally have them as pets. We don't even see
pictures
of bears on a day-to-day basis. Certainly not on clothing. I don't recall ever seeing an attorney walk into court in a bear-pattern suit and a honey-jar tie. But babies, we feel, should begin acclimating themselves to a potential world of bears as soon as possible.

It seems almost
all
of an infant's initiation to the world is via the animal kingdom. We're constantly showing them pictures of animals and quizzing them on what they say.

“What does the dog say? . . . ‘Woof,' that's right. And the cow? ‘Moo,' very good . . .”

Why are we wasting our time on this? Babies don't need to know this. Animals need to know this. And my guess is they already do. Actual animals rarely forget their lines. You're not going to see a baby zebra say “Moo,” and have to be corrected by his mother.

“No, sweetie, that's cows. Now come on, talk regular.”

I feel if you're going to put something in a human baby's brain, why not make it something they're going to use in life, like “Pardon me, are you sure this is decaf?”

Or, more pressingly, “Who do I gotta suck up to to get some apple juice around here?”

Instead, we drill our kids on animal talk and pile on the animal clothes. Bear shirt, duck hat, rabbit pants—and the kids have no clue. They have no idea that, for our own amusement, they're walking around with their torsos covered in koala bears and their feet encased in rayon doggy-head slippers with tongues lapping. They never question. They never say, “Are you sure this sun bonnet in the shape of a possum doesn't make me look goofy?”

They simply don't care.

When it comes to fashion, newborns are basically human
props
—oblivious to the slogans and product endorsements, sentiments and attempts at humor stamped across their very bodies. Do you think they enjoy hawking the perennially not funny “Grandma-went-to-Atlantic-City-and-all-she-got-me-was-this-stupid-T-shirt” joke? I would doubt it. But they don't even know it's happening. They're miniature versions of the unlucky kid in junior high school with a “kick me” sticker on his back. They walk around simply for the entertainment of others.

T
he first time you step into a store's baby department alone is a frightening experience. It's like wandering into a ladies' bathroom, only cleaner, and without the thrill of the forbidden. Walking into a baby department just plain feels Wrong. In the past, I had only been in with my wife, and my job was to stand there while she bought something for someone else's baby and pretend that I had an opinion one way or another. That I could do.

But alone, and as an actual father, it's a bit daunting. In your gut you know you have no business being in there. Before I could steel myself to actually enter, I had to stand outside for a few minutes and just look. “Is there anyone in there I don't want to see?” “Am I going to be the only
guy
in there?” “Do other guys know how to do this any better than me?” “Are there women there who will mock me for my ignorance and incompetence?”

    

Finally, I took the plunge and walked in. It's a remarkably Non-Guy place to be. You're wandering aimlessly among pink and blue pajamas and party dresses and two-inch shoes. And clothes are not called what they are usually called. There are no “pants” or “shirts.” All you have are shelves full of “onesies,” “rompers,” “snugglies,” and “jumpers.” These are not words I enjoy using. Most of my friends would not want to be overheard in public uttering the phrase, “Do you have this in a onesie?” or “Does this jumper come with puppies instead of clowns?”

And where do these terms come from? What kid actually “romps”? I had a very happy childhood, but cannot recall having at any point ever “romped.” And if an infant can't even roll over, does he really need a “jumper”?

I say why not lessen the confusion and name the garment for what the kid is really doing at this stage.

“Excuse me, I'll take a ‘Droolie,' one of those ‘Lie-There-on-My-Backs' for my nephew, and one of these darling ‘Make-in-My-Pants-and-Stare-at-Peoples,' in blue, if you have it.”

I
was wandering around for a few minutes when one of the saleswomen came over.

“Can I help you?”

I felt like a twelve-year-old caught loitering in the dirty magazine section of a newsstand.

“Just looking, thank you,” I said.

The truth of the matter was I had never before needed help in a store more than I did here. But it was a knee-jerk response.

And as she turned away, I added, “Is this Sporting Goods?”

I couldn't even tell you why I said that.

I wandered around by myself, and tried to figure it all out alone.

I did learn a few things. For example, in the world of baby finery, the French seem to be industry giants. Not that the clothes are necessarily better, but they prey on our sense of cultural inferiority—our belief that our children are somehow more sophisticated if there's a French phrase scribbled across them. Apparently, there's a line of clothes called “Petite Toilette” that has as its logo a little baby squatting. I couldn't understand why they would want to put forth that particular image, or, for that matter, name the whole company “Small Bathroom.” I later found out from a French mom that in this case, the word “toilette” refers to a
procedure.
It's the
bathing
of the baby, and the “petite” specifies it as not a complete head-to-toe bath but rather a localized cleansing of the baby's bottom.

And that's when I realized how clever the French are. In English, nobody would ever buy pajamas called “Just Wash My Ass.” You're not going to drop twenty bucks for a pair of shorts that say, “No soap on my chest, please.” But in French, it just sounds special, doesn't it?

W
alking around the store, I realized that even just
handling
baby clothes among strangers makes you feel vulnerable. If you pick something up and simply consider it, you might as well be wearing the thing yourself, that's how dopey you feel. A grown man holding up pants the size of pliers going, “Yes, I admire
these.
I think this would be just the thing I'm looking for.” It's just odd.

Having never bought clothes for a person this small, I discovered that one of the challenges is
translating
the sizes. Your old tricks of holding a shirt up to yourself or finding a woman roughly the size of your wife and eyeballing a dress against her no longer work. Suddenly, you're alone, holding a tiny pair of pajamas up to your neck to see how far down they dangle. You walk around the store, waltzing a snuggly to see if it feels like anything familiar.

“Let's see, if the top of these pajamas are at my neck, and the booties reach my sternum, that should fit my kid just fine.”

And they don't have the customary Small, Medium, and Large. Instead, you're forced to calculate everything in terms of months: three to six months, eighteen to twenty-four . . . and my personal favorite, zero to three. That's the size you get if you're zero old. Is there anything that wouldn't fit someone who's zero? That's really just about as young as you could be.

“How old are you?”

“Nothing.”

I have several problems with this “months” thing.

First of all, it's too much math. Up to a year, I suppose this system makes sense, but seventeen months, twenty-two months? Who wants to divide by twelve?

Then, in addition to dividing, you have to multiply, because they tell you you're supposed to buy everything twice as big as what it says. (Which, by the way, would mean that “0 to 3 months” fits
nobody.
Even twice zero is zero. These are clothes for kids in utero, or, at most, driving home from the hospital.)

Of course, sizing clothes by age could be fun if they applied it to adults.