You learn you’re a total idiot. You experience an epiphany of true and perfect ignorance the moment the scary nurses in the delivery room—masked like Yemeni harem wives—hand you your wet, red, screaming bundle of joy. You learn you don’t know a thing about life. Why, here is the most important of all things about life. Here is life itself. And—EEEEE, IT’S ALIVE!!!—you don’t even know how to hold it. One hand for the baby’s bottom, one hand under its back, and then, with your third hand, you …
The nurses quickly snatch the baby back. You don’t know a thing. Maybe you’ve been to graduate school. Maybe you’ve been around the world. Maybe you can hack into the company’s Human Resources Department files and find out which of the senior VPs is in the federal witness protection program. You’re able to pronounce the last names of every placekicker in the NFL. And you don’t know an effing thing. An effing thing, literally. You don’t know where babies come from. Oh, intellectually you know. But you don’t really know until someone near and dear to you has a baby and you are forced by the callous laws of modern male sensitivity to be there when it happens. Babies come from there?! Whole babies?! Head and everything?! Ouch.
You learn you’re a total idiot, and then you learn you’ve married a genius. You thought you and your wife had an equal amount of information about babies. After all, you attended the same birthing classes. (Although she, maybe, wasn’t hiding a beer under her sport coat.) As far as you could tell, your wife believed a baby was, mainly, a possible impediment to making partner at the law firm. Suddenly she understands exactly what to do when the baby cries, poops, screams, spits up—actions that babies are capable of performing all at the same time and continuously, if there’s an important baseball game on TV.
You’ve married a genius. In fact, you’ve married into an entire race of geniuses—women. Aunts, mothers-in-law, female cousins, your wife’s sorority sisters, random old ladies from the neighborhood descend upon your house to tell you you’re a total idiot. “That’s no way to hold a baby!” they say and quickly snatch the baby back. Should you be insulted by this? Or should you watch the Yankees get their bucket kicked by the Red Sox? Don’t be an idiot.
You probably thought you loved women before. Hah! That was mere admiration from afar—sort of paging through the Victoria’s Secret catalog of love, thinking swell thoughts without actually knowing women. As a father you learn what these adorable cupcakes are capable of. They’re capable of forgiving you for getting them pregnant. What would you do to a person who forced you to spend nine months shaped like a bowling pin? That’s a bowling pin that can’t have a cigarette or a martini and at the end of nine months has to, basically, pass a kidney stone the size of a cantaloupe. You’d murder him. And consider breast-feeding. Not the earth-mother Madonna-and-child scene of maternal bliss you thought, huh? Here’s a wonderful, beloved, helpless little creature depending for its very existence on biting my wife in a sensitive place. And for twenty hours a day.
Then there are diapers and burp cloths and belly button scabs and all the rest of the icky goo of life that women plunge right into, armed with nothing but a Handi-Wipe and a smile. Women can cope with dreadful messes and misbehaviors and turn around and excuse and exculpate the person who made them. This is a wonderful thing. Although, considering the recurrent dreadful messes and misbehaviors in American politics, it also explains why women weren’t allowed to vote until fairly recently.
Becoming a father also teaches you that you are, personally, a religious fundamentalist and antiabortion fanatic. This information comes as something of a surprise to those of us who hadn’t been to church since, um, my mother got married, kind of late, and who had always regarded abortion clinics as a sort of emergency date-night resource—where you take a really bad girlfriend on the very last date. But the first time your little inchoate blob pops up on the sonogram screen and you shout, “He looks like me!” it’s all over between you and NOW. Never mind that the baby comes out wet, red, screaming, crying, pooping, spitting up—he (actually, as it turned out, she) looks like me (which, mercifully, she doesn’t—except for, as my wife points out, the wet, red, screaming, crying, pooping, spitting-up part). What can abortion advocates be thinking? Babies are so soft, so tender, so sweet … Wait, I know, they want to eat my baby. Be gone, you imps of Satan! Which brings us to the religious stuff.
A lot of praying goes into becoming a dad, and it’s not just praying for the Viagra to kick in. “Please, God, let my wife be all right. Please, God, let the baby be all right. Please, God, don’t forget—ten fingers, ten toes. And, oh, yeah, just one head. And, God, don’t let me blow chunks and pass out in the delivery room.” By the time it’s over, you owe the Big Guy. Not to mention what you owe the hospital and the doctor, plus college tuition is coming up fast—further reasons for prayer.
However, don’t be frightened that fatherhood will make you vote the Christian fundamentalist ticket. Fatherhood also turns you into a big mush of a liberal. I am a Cro-Magnon Republican of long standing. Yet I can now be reduced to a puddle of compassionate tears by It Takes a Village. Perhaps I exaggerate. But I did used to think welfare mothers were irresponsible jerks for trying to raise kids without a job, without an income, without a good home, without a husband to blow chunks and pass out in the delivery room. Now I think welfare mothers are irresponsible jerks who should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor. And I am enraged by any government policy that might … What do you mean the Reagan administration declared that ketchup counts as a vegetable in school lunches? Don’t tell me the guy has Alzheimer’s, I’ll go out to California and knock some sense into his head. These days, I believe the Department of Transportation should require bicycle helmets for children going to bed.
And that is what you learn just in the first two days of being a father. This is nothing compared to what you learn later. For instance, when Muffin got old enough to watch children’s television, I learned what my hobby is going to be when the kids are grown up and out of the house. I’m spending my retirement years tracking down all the people involved in children’s television programming and shoving the Teletubbie with the sexual-diversity issues in their ear. Except Maria on Sesame Street. She’s still a babe. I’ve had a crush on her since the show started thirty years ago and my artsy-fartsy MFA friends and I would get together every afternoon and smoke dope and goof hysterically on the Cookie Monster. Which tells you everything about the intellectual level of children’s television, not to mention the intellectual level of children.
A child has the same amount of brains as a pot-fumed graduate student. In fact, a child has the same amount of brains as every other member of the nitwit human race. This is why I get There was a farmer had a dog/And Bingo was his name-o stuck in my head for a week just the way Muffin does. Except I don’t feel obliged to sing B-I-N-G-O out loud all day, although the clapping part is rather compelling: B-I-N-clap-clap, B-I-N-clap-clap—.
Anyway, all mankind’s ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.
Speaking of whom, no one who is a parent was able to bear watching the Bush/Gore debates.
“You did!”
“Did too!”
“Did not either, you big booger!”
There are plenty of politicians—and business executives and other VIPs—who wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they proudly announced to the media, I made BM! and then expected to get a Tootsie-Pop for their efforts.
Think of the actors, musicians, athletes, models, gossip-column nuisances, people with body piercings, and moron climbers of Mount Everest whose whole lives consist of being a brat on a swing set: “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! No hands!” Or, in case of the Everest climbers, no fingers.
And then there are all the adults who won’t go to sleep at night and then wind up in other people’s beds, where they don’t belong.
When Saint Augustine was formulating his doctrine of Original Sin, all he had to do was look at people as they are originally. Originally, they’re children. Saint Augustine may have had a previous job—unmentioned in his Confessions—as a preschool day-care provider. But it’s wrong to use infantile as a pejorative. It’s the other way around. What children display is adultishness. Children are, for example, perfectly adultish in their self-absorption. Tiny tots look so wise, staring at their stuffed animals. You wonder what they’re thinking. Then they learn to talk. What they’re thinking is, My Beanie Baby!
I was trying to point out the glories of a sunset to Muffin the other day. “Look at all the colors,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
Because they’re so beautiful, I said.
“Why?” she asked.
Because the sun is going down, I said.
“For me?”
But children are cute when they do these things, an indication of the enormous amount of detailed thought that God put into the creation of the universe. He made children cute so we wouldn’t kill them.
Fatherhood teaches you to hate humanity—except your kids, because they’re so darn cute, and except everybody else who has kids. You bond with these people immediately no matter who they are and no matter how much you would detest them under other circumstances. This parent-to-parent pact is a powerful force. It caused World War II. Roosevelt had kids. Stalin had kids. Hitler didn’t have kids. Hey, what’s Adolf doing sneaking into the Safeway express line with eleven items while Uncle Joe has Svetlana wrapped around his neck screaming for M&Ms? “Screw that,” said Franklin, “I’m invading Normandy.”
It’s parent solidarity that keeps my wife from leaving me when I spend all day watching the Red Sox instead of spooning strained peas, wrangling diapers, fumbling with jammie buttons, and reading The House at Pooh Corner over and over and over …
“Again!” says Muffin.
… until I snap. “And then it was hunting season and Christopher Robin shot the stupid bear and skinned him and cooked him and ate him.”
“Waaaaaaah!!! Poooooh!!!”
And I am heartbroken. I’ve just learned one more thing. I’m in love. One pout puts my emotions into a theater full of junior high school girls watching ‘N Sync. One smile and I feel like Elvis in a Percodan factory. I knew nothing about being in love before. I thought it had to do with Elizabeth Hurley in a garter belt, maybe. No. True love is feeling absolute, genuine bliss at hearing the words, “I made BM! Can I have a Tootsie-Pop?”
Kids love, too. And here is another example of God’s attention to detail. He makes children just stupid enough that what they love is you. They love you with an unalloyed, complete, and trusting love. Even if you did kill Pooh.
Of course the kind of love I knew about when I knew nothing about love is still around. This led to me becoming a father for a second time. And then you really start to learn things.
Anybody can have one kid. Having one kid is like owning a dog—albeit a dog that stays a puppy for twenty-two years and never learns to fetch anything but credit card bills and nose colds. But going from one kid to two kids is like going from owning a dog to running a zoo.
It takes about two hours per meal to feed Muffin and Poppet, three hours to get them dressed, with an additional hour for finding lost shoes. It takes two hours to get them undressed, two more hours for bathtub, bath tantrums, and bathroom mop-up, an hour to get them into their Dr. Dentons, and three hours of reading The House at Pooh Corner to put them to sleep. By this point it’s one in the morning. And yet, in most American families, both parents work. When? And why does America’s economy do all right in spite of this?
Don’t ask me. I already get enough questions at home from Muffin. Most notably, upon the arrival of Poppet, “Why did you bring home a baby?”
Because I’m opposed to materialism. And having a family cures it. When a one-year-old careens across the living room, knocks over a Waterford crystal vase, smashes an antique Chinese ginger jar lamp, and pukes on the embroidered silk upholstery of the Chippendale settee, what is the reaction of a family man? “Get the video camera! She’s walking!”
Having kids defines fun down—just in time for middle age when having fun isn’t much fun anymore anyway. I used to think booze and sex would bring me joy. Now it’s a nap. Or a business trip to a Motel 6 in Dayton. Where I can go to the john in peace. Wow, a dry towel. And twenty-six channels to myself.
It’s important to have somebody around the house who’s in trouble besides me. I rarely miss the toilet bowl. Actually—I’m informed by a reliable source that I’m married to—that’s a fib. But I rarely miss with No. 2. There’s the absolute and unconditional affection I receive—from the makers of Pampers, Play-Doh, Legos, Froot Loops, et cetera. I get an excuse to indulge in a longtime private fantasy and build a major Barbie collection. No, scratch that.
The noblest calling in life is to shape and form a worthy human character. Mrs. O says that’s why she wanted to get married, but so far it hasn’t worked on me. And there’s the matter of ensuring a kind of immortality. Everyone wants to live forever, and a couple of bored kids can make one rainy Saturday afternoon seem like eternity. Plus I felt I owed it to the world to become a total idiot. Smart people cause so much trouble. I’ll bet the folks who invented the atomic bomb weren’t taking care of the kids that day. If they had been, the residents of Hiroshima would have been pelted with Pampers, Play-Doh, Legos, and Froot Loops, instead of radiation and a shock wave.
Actually, by becoming a father I’ve learned that I’m too much of a total idiot to explain anything, let alone why people have kids. In fact, I’m such a total idiot that I’m trying to talk Mrs. O into starting on a third.