Babyhood (9780062098788) (19 page)

“I need to buy a shirt for my husband. He'll be forty-six in March.”

“Play it safe. Get him something for a ninety-two to a hundred-year-old.”

A
s I wandered around the store, I did notice other fathers, equally lost and confused. All with the same sense of discomfort. You would think we might bond over our shared predicament. Reach out to one another in support. But in truth we're too embarrassed. We look away, and if we do accidentally make eye contact, we quickly glance at our watches, tap our feet, and look annoyed, as if we're thinking, “My wife said she'd meet me here twenty minutes ago . . . Where is she?”

Finally, the saleswoman comes around again.

“Are you sure I can't help you?”

A few of the other dads look my way. I think, “Me? Need help? Just because I'm standing in the middle of a department store with a pair of clown pajamas hanging from my neck trying to perform eighth-grade math in my head on forty-five minutes of sleep?”

I respond, “I'm fine, really . . .”

But before she gets away, I quietly follow her and ask, “Um, do you double the size or halve the size?”

She looks at me compassionately and says, “Why don't you just tell me what you need.”

The eyes of the other dads are all upon me. I look at my watch. I've been in the baby department for an hour and a half and so far I've got nothing but a Yankee cap that would fit an orange.

“All right,” I say. “I need a romper, a jumper, some bunting, and a onesie.”

“How big is your child?”

“Smaller than you, bigger than your purse . . . See that stuffed dog? About like that.”

“I'll get right on it.”

“And one more thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“I prefer puppies to clowns.”

“I'll do my best.”

As she leaves, I try to make myself invisible to the gazing eyes of the other men. I feign an intense interest in a pair of
Hunchback of Notre Dame
slippers. But out of the corner of my eye, I see the other dads looking at me. One by one, they approach. I fear this might be like one of those marine hazing things where they tie me down in a crib and pummel me with knotted-up rompers.

The first guy comes right up to me. I tense. He looks me in the eye and says, “Man . . . that took guts.”

“What?”

“The way you asked that lady for help. That was really something.”

The guy actually admired me.

How's that for irony? You spend your whole life trying to get “guy respect.” And how do I get it? Buying little pajamas with fuzzy feet.

Elephants Never Forget

“W
ow.”

“What?”

“Is he still sleeping?”

“Yeah . . . oh my God . . . he slept through the night . . .”

“That means
we
slept through the night.”

“Geez . . . I feel terrific.”

“Me, too . . . Hey—”

“What?”

“You're attractive. I forgot.”

“You're not so bad yourself.”

“There's no reason we couldn't have sex here.”

“None at all.”

“How much time do you think we have?”

“I don't know—
go.
”

Swingers

I
t was in the midst of trying to invent a new and exciting activity for our little guy that we rediscovered the classic fun center of all time—the Playground. These little oases of activity that we've driven by for years and taken for granted, now, with a crabby youngster in the backseat, suddenly shimmer like Coke machines in a desert.

But they're not exactly the way I remember them. Like sandboxes, for example. When I was a kid, as best I can recall, sandboxes were just big enough to hold about a half dozen toddlers. Now they put sand throughout the entire surrounding area, so that grown-ups are walking around in sand, too. An enormous litter box for humans.

Maybe this is designed for those among us who find that having a child is not enough to reconnect to their own childhood. So, in addition to pushing yellow Mighty Mouse swings, they also need that mushy feeling underfoot. Whatever the reason, I don't like it. When you're forty, you shouldn't be walking around with sand in your shoes.

H
aving not been inside an actual playground for a few decades, I was surprised how vividly my own childhood memories came back. And not all of them pleasant. I had forgotten about the whole social component: the interacting with others, the animalistic “sniffing out” process that quickly makes friends or enemies.

As my little one was sitting in the swing, another kid—a stranger—waddled up and put his hands on my kid's swing. Maybe it wasn't exactly hostile, but it was certainly confrontational. There was a challenge in his walk, daring in his eyes . . . the kid spelled trouble. Granted, he was no more than eighteen months old, but I'm telling you, he had a swagger, an in-your-face quality not unlike a very small Joe Pesci.

Instantly, I remembered every bully that pushed me around, every punk that wandered in from another neighborhood just to play “keep-away” with my hat . . . It all came back.

But this time I was bigger.

I said, “Hey!”

A few parents turned. I was, after all, yelling at a baby. I softened my tone.

“I mean, hey,
Buckaroo.
What do you say you wait just a minute and then it'll be your turn on the swing.”

But, as you can imagine, Joe Pesci is not someone who backs down easily. His fat little mitt remained right on my son's swing. Every cell in my body pulsated with the instinct to protect my cub. But since I am, after all, a civilized man, not to mention being someone's father, someone for whom I want to set an example, I tried to handle this diplomatically. I politely and calmly explained to the precious toddler the rules of sharing and playing nicely, while knowing full well that if he went ahead and actually
touched
my son, I would grab him by his tiny jacket and fling him like a discus. It had taken me only several decades to find that confidence. (Yes, it was with someone whose head didn't come up to my knee—but nonetheless . . . )

Still, Tough Guy, Jr., didn't budge. My son, sensing the tension in the air, the musky aroma of battle on the horizon, started to make that drama-award face that precedes a cry. It was just then that the thug's daddy appeared.

“Son,” he said, “why don't you let the other little boy take his turn and then you can go?”

At which point, he smiled at me pleasantly and said, “Kids . . .”

I smiled back.

“Yeah, kids.” Thinking, “Especially
your
kids.”

Whether it was coincidence or genuine obedience, I don't know, but the hooligan retreated. He took his hands off the swing.

My son breathed a sigh of relief. Then the other kid said, “Push?” My son looked at me, and I looked at him, equally confused.

“He wants to push your son,” the father translated.

My jaw re-clenched.

“He wants to push my son?”

“On the swing, on the swing. He wants to push him on the
swing.
”

“Oh.”

I then realized that this standoff may very well have been for nothing. This kid just wanted to play.

“Do you want the little boy to push you?” I asked.

My son looked at me, looked at the kid, and then back to me, as if to say, “Yeah, why not.” And the kid proceeded to gently, playfully push my son's swing for him. The other father and I breathed a sigh of relief, fully aware that only moments earlier, we had all stood on the brink of some very unfortunate hostilities. We both put away our protective armor, disengaged our animal instincts and painful childhood histories, and attempted to talk about hockey.

O
nce you spend enough time in a playground, you'll notice this is definitely not a place where
single
people go. And with reason. For one thing, there are very few other single people for them to meet there. And even if a single person met another single person in a playground, there are very few dating amenities. There's no cappuccino counter, no cocktail area, no bookstore to aimlessly browse through. Unless you hope to make an impression with your monkey-bars agility, the playground is not a place for you.

No, the playground is where parents and children go. And in case you still have doubts about your new identity, there's nothing like pushing your own kid on a swing to make you realize you're no longer Not a Parent.

Because there was a time, after my son was born, when I still periodically considered myself Not a Parent. In my mind, “parents” were those other people. Older. More settled. I was simply a young guy with a young wife, and it so happens, I happened to have with me—very often—this cute little guy with the tiny Yankee hat. That didn't necessarily make me a “Parent.”

But one day, with my son ensconced in his favorite swing, I rhythmically pushed him back and forth across the clouds, and it started to sink in. I began to feel—and very happily so—a part of the vast continuous cycle of people who pushed their kids in swings just like this. I remembered the black-and-white photo I have of my parents pushing me in a swing, my head cupped firmly in a mandatory woolen hat with earflaps. And I realized that my mother and father must have been, more or less, what I am now: somebody who just got a kid. No longer kids themselves, not yet the softer, rounder people in the color pictures that came afterward. They were just making their way from Then to Later.

Now it
is
later, and I'm doing the pushing, and my son is the one wearing dopey hats and squealing with delight.

We all just change positions; we start as the Ones Who Get Pushed, and we become the Ones Who Push. The only thing that stays the same is the swing.

And as my little boy was flying through the air, screeching with joy, I felt satisfied that somehow he was making memories, too, and someday, he'd be pushing someone else in an equally small hat.

And in the End . . .

I
was in the middle of changing a diaper when the phone rang. I picked it right up.

An interesting shift had taken place in our phone habits, I noticed. Since becoming parents, we were almost always too busy or too tired to talk to anyone on the phone, but because we never wanted the ringing to wake up or disturb the boy, we invariably grabbed every call on the first ring. As a result, we not only spoke to many more people than we did when we let our answering machine do its job, but we also compiled a list of People-We-Spoke-to-Briefly-and-Told-Them-We'd-Call-Them-Right-Back that will take us at least fifteen years to contend with.

“Changing table, may I help you?”

“How's my little boy?”

“You know, Mom, I'm actually all grown up now, so—”

“Not you, your son. How's my little boy?”

“Oh . . . him. He's really good. Hold on, I'll put him on . . . Here, it's Grandma. Say hi to Grandma.”

Nothing.

Grandma coaxed.

“Hellooooooo . . . Hiya, sweetie pie . . . Hello . . . Helllooooooo . . . Hellloooow, sugarplum . . .”

My son stared at the receiver and then put the mouthpiece all the way into his mouth. (Hence the term “mouthpiece.”)

“Hi, sweetie, it's your Grandma. Don't you want to say hi to your Grandma?”

“Aaaarlrrrah.”

“Did you hear that, Mom?”

“Aaaarlrrrah aaarrrgah.”

“There, he said it again.”

“What?”

“That was him saying, ‘Grandma.' ”

“Really?”

“I swear. That's how he says, ‘Hi, Grandma, I'm looking forward not only to seeing you tomorrow but also taking my very first airplane ride and potentially catching one of seventeen thousand diseases from everybody on the plane because the airlines keep circulating the same old air and blowing germs right on your head.' ”

“I never should've sent you that article.”

“Yeah, well, it's too late now. Listen, I got to get off, the baby's hungry.”

Nobody argues with that excuse.

“Okay. Have a safe trip. And take a sweater.”

“Ma . . .”

“Not for you, for the boy.”

“I will.”

“See you tomorrow.”

When we got on the plane, I finally understood why they let people with small children get on board first. It's not because you need more time to put things away; it's because they want to spare you all those dirty looks. When we stepped onto the plane, my wife holding our son, me lugging three bags, a collapsible stroller, a car seat, a video camera, and a panda bear the size of Buddy Hackett, every person on the plane looked up with an expression that said, “Please, whatever you do, don't sit near us.”

There's a palpable discrimination you face when you travel with an infant. Like hotels that happily took our reservations until we mentioned we needed a crib.

“A crib? Why did you say ‘crib'?”

“Because we're circus people and we're traveling with a seal. Whadaya think—we have a baby.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, we don't accept babies.”

“What do you mean you don't ‘accept' babies? There's nothing to accept. This is not some crazy kid running around vandalizing your ice machine. This is an infant. And not just any infant—this is
our
infant. Perhaps the sweetest boy working the country today. What kind of sick people are you?”

Never mind the fact that less than a year ago I myself would call up hotel managers and ask them to relocate the people with the screaming kids to another side of town because my wife and I—“regular people”—were trying to get some rest.

Settling into her seat, my wife began to breast-feed our son to relieve his ear pressure during takeoff (which, I understand, hands-down beats the hell out of chewing gum).