Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (2 page)

EARLIER

M
y wife was pregnant for the first time, and I made extra sure to spend those nine months of gestation celebrating what I presumed would be the end of my freedom. When you’re married without children, you’re essentially still a single person. You can live cheaply. You can do drugs. You’re mobile, with no goddamn kids anchoring you to one location. You can even get divorced with a minimum of fuss. If you’re married and you don’t have kids, you can drive to the beach on a whim. No living parent does that kind of thing. That’s suicide. That shit requires ten months of intense planning.

So I took full advantage of the time I had left. My wife couldn’t drink. She couldn’t have caffeine. She wasn’t allowed to have cold cuts because the bacteria on the deli slicer blade can get into the fetus and infect it with nine different strains of botulinum. She couldn’t do much of anything. On the other hand, I could do as I pleased, and I did. I drank. I smoked all the weed I had left so that there wouldn’t be any weed leftover in the house when the baby arrived because that was me being ethical. If this angered my wife, she was too busy retching into a mop bucket to show it.

Also, I bought concert tickets. Shit yeah, I bought concert tickets.

There was gonna be a big Oasis concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion, an outdoor venue located near Baltimore, forty minutes north of our house. Jet and Kasabian were the opening acts. This was back when listening to Jet was something people did. I bought two tickets because I assumed that once the baby arrived, I would be locked away from the world for two decades (NOTE: Not all the way true). I wanted to get drunk and go listen to Oasis because IS OASIS NOT THE GREATEST BAND IN THE WHOLE OF BRITAIN?

“I got these concert tickets,” I told my wife.

“Oh, really?”

“Yep. Two tickets.”

“Do you want to bring a friend?” she asked. I did.

“Well, I mean, I’d like to bring YOU. But if you think,
Whoa hey, this rock’s too a-rockin’ for me
, I totally understand.”

This is a common and blatantly obvious trick men pull to kick their wives out of certain activities.
I’m gonna go to this thing, but totally feel free to not come. I leave that option to you because I am sweet and kind.

“I’ll go,” she said.

“Okay. You sure?”

“Sure. Sounds fun.”

“Double sure?”

“Yeah. Why? Do you wanna go with someone else?”

“What? No. That’s crazy. Who better to share an evening of music with than my one true love?”

“Oh, please. Invite a friend.”

So I did. Turned out none of my friends could go. But my wife still could, so off we went.

The seating at Merriweather Post Pavilion was broken in two. There were actual seats at the front, which were protected from the rain and which I could not afford. Behind those seats was a wide swath of grass where general admission folks could lay down a blanket, crack open an Igloo cooler filled with gin-and-tonics, and dance around like dirty hippies. We got to the lawn and virtually every available blade of grass was already covered. What’s more, the two of us represented the smallest party going. Around me, there were groups of ten, twenty, even thirty people, already shitfaced and overly enjoying themselves as if they had been ripped right out of a Bacardi Silver commercial. I didn’t know it was even possible to
have
that many friends, let alone so many friends orbiting you all at once. My wife and I found a tiny space to wedge ourselves into and we quickly realized that, even when you’re a couple, you can feel a terrible collective loneliness. It’s a kind of shared loneliness that grows even more pronounced once you’ve isolated yourselves with live children.

I’d like to take a moment here to let you know that first-time parents are fucking idiots. Part of the joy of being a veteran parent is watching new and prospective parents monkeyfart their way through the process for the first time. They’re stupid. Understandably stupid, but stupid all the same. We were no different back then. We bought all the wrong shit for the nursery (an electronic paisley swing? SOUNDS ESSENTIAL). We felt compelled to take every hospital class even though hospital classes are useless and often feature disgusting video displays of colostrum leaking out of a decidedly nonphotogenic breast.

And we were far more overprotective of the fetus than we needed to be. My wife knew so many people who had experienced miscarriages—real, true, awful tragedies—that she was terrified of having one herself. I acquired that terror in turn. Hit a speed bump too fast? MISCARRIAGE. Divulge potential names to your mother too soon? MISCARRIAGE. Get in an airplane? YOU BETTER BELIEVE THAT’S A MISCARRIAGE. So when we arrived at this concert, we both were still on High Miscarriage Alert. But we managed to calm ourselves down and get excited about the show. I was into my fourth tall boy and very pleased that I had a designated driver for the evening.

Then Jet took the stage and set their amplifiers real, real loud. This was fine by me because ear pain lets me know the music is working. I started nodding my head like a good white person and then I looked over at my wife. She was traumatized.

“Oh my God! This is loud!” she said. I think she said it. All I saw were the lips moving.

“I KNOW! SO GREAT!”

“No! It’s too loud!” She looked down at her belly, terrified that the guitars would somehow rawk the fetus right out of her. I rolled my eyes.

“Oh, come on. Really?”

She gave me the stink-eye. I immediately regretted the eye roll.

“What I meant to say is, you’re totally right!” I said. We left the blanket and fled to the concession area, where the music couldn’t get to us. “What do you wanna do?” I asked.

“I’m just . . . I’m a little scared.”

“Well, do you wanna, like, leave? You don’t wanna leave, do you?”

“Maybe I could call my doctor,” she said.

“That’s a great idea. You should call her. That would set your mind at ease and then we could enjoy the concert . . . TOGETHER.”

“She might get pissed at me for calling.”

“Screw that,” I said. Doctors go to great lengths to guilt-trip every patient into not calling them outside of office hours. They have the whole trap set. They have that voicemail message that tells you to call 911 first. Then it says, “Well, if you
really
have to talk to the doctor, leave a message on our answering service.” They give you every opportunity to feel like shit for bothering the poor doctor during dinner. It’s a process designed to weed out the faint of heart. I refused to be cowed. “Don’t feel bad about calling her,” I said. “You pay those people hundreds of dollars every visit. Call the shit out of them.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then
you
call her.”

“What? Me? Are you nuts? You’re the patient. What would I say? I think you’re the best person to handle this sort of thing. I believe in you.” I was terrible at confronting people. Whenever I had an item to return to the store, I always asked my wife to do it because I was afraid the cashier would have me arrested for not having a proper receipt.

Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. She went to call the doctor’s messaging service while I bought a beer, chugged the beer, and then bought another beer. I had planned on chugging
that
beer and then ordering another, but my wife came back, so I reverted to sipping.

“Is that a new beer?” she asked.

“No.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“It is. Did you get the service?”

“Yeah, but now we have to wait here until she calls back.”

“Maybe I should head back to our spot,” I said. “You know, so no one takes it.”

“You can wait five goddamn seconds, Drew. It’s not even the main act.”

At that moment, a particularly loud power chord rained down on us. My wife gripped her belly as if there were a bombing raid going on. Such was the power of Jet’s secondhand riffs. I could see real fear in her eyes.

“I gotta get out of here,” she said.

“You’re overreacting.”

“I don’t feel safe.”

“You could hang in the car while I stay here. The car’s nice.”

“Seriously?”

“Was that a poor suggestion?”

“YES!”

Another power chord. I caressed my wife’s belly, shielding her from the musical onslaught, as if my back fat would somehow repel the sound waves. Now she was sick with worry. Her cell phone finally rang. I watched as she took the call.

“Hello? . . . Oh, hi, Doctor! So sorry to bother you at this hour! . . . Yes, yes, I think everything is okay! . . . Well, it’s just that I’m at a concert, and the music is particularly loud. And I was wondering, you know, if extremely loud music could be detrimental to the fetus? Like, in any way?”

I saw her nod a few times and then hang up.

“What’d she say?” I asked.

“She said never to call her with something like this again.”

“So you’re okay?”

“Yes.” She sounded disappointed. And frankly, I think I was too. I’d like to live in a world where rock and roll has the ability to cause spontaneous fetal ejections.

“So we’re cool to go back to the concert?”

“I don’t feel great about it.”

“The doctor just said it was fine. You could fire a goddamn cannon next to your uterus if you wanted to.”

“Well, I don’t like it. I don’t feel comfortable here. Is seeing some stupid band worth it, Drew?” She gave me a look that told me that I would have to choose between her and the music. And I didn’t want to choose. I wanted both. I mustered up the very little courage I had and bravely stood up to an angry pregnant woman.

“Worth what? Worth you not magically aborting? YES. Totally worth it.” I gestured to the crowd. “Come on,” I said. “We’re never gonna get to do this again. Let’s have fun. I’m only being selfish so I can show you how much fun you can still have.”

“Yeah, but you’re also being straight-up selfish.”

“That I am.”

She looked back at me. “Gimme a sip of that beer.” I couldn’t give it to her fast enough. She took the tiniest of sips. Barely a vapor. A totally responsible sip of beer for a pregnant lady. “God, that’s good.”

“You see?” I said.

“Am I a crazy person for calling that doctor? I am, aren’t I?”

“Not at all.”

“Maybe a little.”

“Maybe a little, yes.”

“But she was kind of bitchy to me. And that’s not right.”

“Yeah! Who the hell is she to criticize you like that?”

“Jesus. I don’t wanna be a crazy person.”

I extended my hand. “Come on. This all goes away soon.”

She took my hand and off we went merrily back to our spot. And we made it nearly halfway through Oasis’s set before she got spooked again and dragged my ass out of there.

T
he monitor was about to go off. It hadn’t erupted just yet, but as I lay in bed I knew it was only a matter of time. You can tell when a baby monitor is about to blow up because the baby makes a series of pre-cry sounds that clue you in. Little hacks and scratches and cries—
oooooehhhhh, durrrrrr, ewwooohhhh
. Through the static of the monitor, it sounds like a mouse caught in a glue trap.

I didn’t move a muscle. My strategy was twofold. For one thing, I thought to myself:
If I just stay still, then the baby will forget I exist and realize she has no one to cry to, and then she will stop crying
(NOTE: Babies do not fall for this). For another, I thought if I lay still long enough, my wife would get up and go feed the baby instead of me. I was awake, but I didn’t want to be awake any longer. So I played dead. I tried to ignore the monitor and began thinking of purple unicorns and flying ninjas and any other random shit that would lead me to a dreamful slumber. Then I heard another
oooooehhhhh
and my brain zeroed right back in on the monitor.
The child is waking. The child is hungry. Fuckity fuck fuck
. My wife was lying next to me in bed. She was perfectly still, an expert in not giving herself away.

Our first kid was now two months old. Before she was born, we prepared a bassinet for her. It was the same bassinet my mother-in-law had used for my wife when she was a baby and their family lived in Munich. My wife labored over successive weekends to restore it, sanding it down and repainting it clean white. The main basket had come loose from its wheeled base, so I lovingly repaired it, drilling new holes and driving in shiny new screws to make the bassinet secure, so that the girl could sleep peacefully next to our bed for as long as she liked. It was beautiful. I imagined night after night of her sleeping next to us, one little happy family tucked inside the little master bedroom of our little home.

The first night we put her in it, she screamed bloody murder for hours. Turned out she loathed it. We threw her in a crib in the nursery next door a few days later, and the bassinet became worthless. Babies don’t give a shit how hard you worked on something. They’re the harshest critics on earth.

We made a rule that we would take turns every night feeding her. Someone got the first feeding. Then, once the baby was back asleep, that person went to sleep and the other person handled the child the next time she woke up. That was a fair way of going about things. But on this particular night, we had forgotten to agree on who was gonna get the first feeding. We both knew that whoever got the first feeding was boned because the parent working the first shift had to wake up around midnight, the time of night when deep sleep takes root. And then, that same parent might have to get up again for a
third
shift, around 4:00 or 5:00
A.M.

I didn’t want the first shift. My wife didn’t want the first shift. Someone was gonna lose.

A baby monitor is an inherently flawed product. You don’t really need one, but every family has one because every mom is terrified that she’ll sleep through her baby’s cries and then the baby will starve to death in the middle of the night and she’ll wake up in the morning to find a stiff baby corpse in the crib. This has never happened in recorded history, ever. A baby is capable of crying loud enough to wake a car accident victim hooked on fentanyl. All the monitor does is
amplify
that crying, really driving those cries through your eardrum so that they eat into your brain and make you want to fucking die. Soon, the monitor enslaves you, sending you running any time the baby so much as smacks her lips.

We bought a cheap First Years baby monitor at the Buy Buy Baby. It was the only audio monitor they had left. The rest of the shelf was stocked with video monitors, which are expensive and pointless and scared the shit out of me because I imagined looking at the baby video monitor in the middle of the night and seeing a ghost on the screen. The forty-dollar audio one we bought had a series of lights on top displayed in an arc. When the baby made a teeny tiny bit of noise, the green lights on the left would light up. When the baby cried a bit more, the yellow lights in the center would join in. And when the baby was crying like someone was stabbing her to death, the red lights on the right would engage. Right now, the lights were green. They would not remain that way for long.

Oooooehhhhh.

I remained motionless. My wife did likewise. Suddenly, I realized that I had to scratch my face. I’m one of those people who has to scratch himself in random places (including the scrotum) constantly, particularly right before bed. It’s like sleeping next to a meth head. If I didn’t scratch my face, I was gonna have a seizure. But I didn’t want to give myself away so I quickly clawed at my own eyes and then went back to lying still, hoping my wife wouldn’t notice. Then she turned on her side. She had clearly taken my face scratch and interpreted it as a sign that she had free rein to execute a move of her own and then go back to pretending she was asleep. But she wasn’t asleep at all. She was faking it, which outraged me despite the fact that I was also faking it.

Durrrrrr.

I could see the monitor firing up through my eyelids, like flashes of lightning. Still, I said nothing. You could argue that lying in a bed listening to a baby monitor go nuts is far more torturous than actually getting up and feeding a child, but I wasn’t having any of it.

Ewwooohhhh.

I scratched my face again and my wife turned again and now everything was out in the open. One of us was gonna have to back down, preferably before the real screaming began.

Wahhhhhhhh!!!!

“Honey, can you get her?” my wife asked.

“No way,” I said. “I had first shift last night.”

“But you weren’t with her all day like I was.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Please. I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

WAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

“I just can’t,” she said.

“Like, you’re gonna literally die if you have to get up?”

“Will you please?”

“Oh, this is some bullshit.”

I got up, turned off the monitor, and staggered out of the bedroom to the nursery. I cursed myself for trying to win a “Who’s more tired?” argument with a woman. You’re never more tired or more put-upon than she is. She did way more than you. And if you did more than her, well then she had to push that baby out of her vagina, which more than evens the score. It’s a rigged game. I wished I could have carried the fetus to term myself just so I could have had that card to play for the rest of time. The pain would have been totally worth it.

The nursery had a changing table and a little caddy next to it that contained all of the bottles we would need for the night. There was also a small container that had three-ounce portions of formula powder in three separate chambers. We did this so that we wouldn’t have to trudge downstairs in the middle of the night to make a bottle. It took us two months to figure out we should do this. Like I said, new parents are idiots.

I had to bring the bottle out to the bathroom to fill it with precisely three ounces of water. On the can of formula, there were harsh warnings about mixing it properly, so I was vigilant about getting the proportions right. I got a cheap thrill from being able to turn the tap off at the precise moment that three ounces of fluid had filled the bottle. It was like shutting off a gas pump right on a whole dollar amount. So, so exciting.

I turned on the water and waited for it to warm up. I could hear the baby’s cries growing louder, even louder than when I first got out of bed. Babies have this incredible ability to throw you off your game with their cries. It’s like being tongue-tied when you’re talking to a beautiful woman. The harder they cry, the more of a fumbling mess you become.

“I’m coming! I’m coming!”

I hit the three ounces on the money, did a white boy fist pump, added the formula powder, capped the bottle, shook the thing like I was shooting craps at a casino, and then ran into the nursery. By now, the baby had turned deep red and was exhibiting homicidal tendencies. I grabbed her, plopped down into the glider with her, and jammed the nipple into her mouth. She began to slurp it down quickly. Too quickly. In the dead of night, I had to weigh my desire to go right back to sleep against my desire to not be coated in a gallon of curdled barf. I pulled the bottle away from my kid and she started going all berserker on me.

“Easy, girl. Easy.”

I gave her the bottle back and let her get an ounce down before the ceremonial burping began. You have to burp a new baby after every ounce or so, or else they end up painting the walls with their insides. I tucked the bottle under my armpit to keep the formula warm (mmmm . . . armpit milk) and then put her on my shoulder. She instantly brought her knees to her chest, screaming with gas pain. I kissed her ever so gently on her face to calm her down, and for a brief moment I succeeded. She settled down and let out one of those beautiful little coos that only a newborn child can make. Then I nuzzled against her and stared into her big whale eyes and whispered to her that I loved her dearly, and that pissed her right off. I tried singing to her, in my most delicate singing voice, to calm her back down. I thought it could be a really beautiful moment between us.

“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word . . .”

“WAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

“Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingb—”

“WAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

“All right! All right! I’ll stop.”

She kept on crying and jerking her head around. Eventually, she gave me a full-on head butt and I recoiled in anger. I remember being furious with her, which is insane because how can you get mad at a baby? Oh, but you can. Late at night, when no one is watching, you can get obscenely angry at a baby.
You stupid fucking baby.
Sometimes you read about babies dying from shaken baby syndrome and you wonder,
Why would anyone want to shake a baby? How is this such a widespread problem?
And then your child head-butts you in the dead of night and suddenly there’s a little voice in your head whispering to you,
Go ahead, shake that baby. Maybe shaking it gets all the tears out!
You just want the child to snap out of it and calm down, and you’re willing to consider anything, even the stupidest idea. You feel like a monster merely for having the thought. It’s almost as if the baby is testing you—putting you in the most pressure-packed situation possible to see if you make the right choices under duress.

I alternated between massaging the girl’s belly and patting her back until she let forth a majestic belch that echoed through the nursery like a bell rung in a ballroom. It was a perfectly executed, adult-level burp. I had never been more proud. She was now asleep in my arms and I jammed the bottle back into her mouth so that she would unconsciously take the rest. I propped her head up with my left hand so that she would stay upright, and I could feel my arm begin to ache under the strain of the baby’s giant head. It was like her skull was made of cast iron. I stared daggers at the bottle, watching the fluid drain down further and further, the fontanel on top of her head pulsing along with each sip.
Almost there. So, so close.
I was so excited to go back to sleep, I could hardly stand it. When a baby finishes a bottle, you can hear the nipple squeak like a dog’s chew toy because all the formula is gone. It’s the sweetest sound in the world because it means that you can finally get up and get on with your life. I was angling for that sound. I burped the girl again at the one-ounce mark and now it was only a matter of time. The formula kept going down, and then, just as I was about to hear that gorgeous squeak . . .

Thpppppppppppppp . . .

A shit. A big ol’ shit. It was almost as if she had been holding it in until just now on purpose. I was at the end. I could have been in bed within three minutes. Instead, this.

Before you have children, you look upon changing diapers as some kind of disgusting task, one you do with your hand to your nose. But actual parents don’t care about that. The poop is beside the point. You get alarmingly used to wet feces showing up in random places.
Oh, it’s on the stove. That’s curious.
It’s the disruption that changing a diaper causes that makes every parent hate it. I knew that changing the kid’s diaper would fully awaken her and leave me stuck rocking her back to sleep for the next seventy minutes. I was screwed. I had to change the thing.

Or did I?
After all, the baby was still sound asleep. Why disturb her? Wouldn’t that be cruel? And hey, poop is warm. Everyone likes being warm! Maybe it would be okay to leave that puddle of shit in her pants. Maybe she liked it that way. And if she liked it that way, who was I to argue? You should do everything in your power to keep your child happy, right?

I put her back in the crib with a shit in her pants.

I sneaked back into the bedroom and turned the monitor back on. I sat on the bed ever so gently, so as not to disturb my lovely wife. My aim was to shut my eyes tight so that I could fall back asleep as quickly as possible. If I managed to fall back asleep, I would win. And the second I hit the pillow, the exact second my head touched linen . . .

Durrrrrr.

Was that her? Maybe that wasn’t her. Maybe that was some other ambient sound
, I thought to myself. This is always wishful thinking. If you suspect the baby is making noise, it’s making noise.

Hack
.

Maybe she’s just settling back in
, I thought to myself. She was quiet for a moment after that, and I lulled myself into believing my work was done. I was in the clear now.

Hack hack hack.

“Shit.”

I got back up and trudged out of the bedroom. I made sure to sound extra huffy so that my wife would wake up and have sympathy and take over for me, but no. She was down like a gunshot victim. I was on my own. I grabbed the baby and tried to quickly change her diaper, only it took me ten minutes to align the snaps on her footies properly. Every time I thought I had it right, there was a stray unbuttoned snap right around her crotch. She began to fuss louder. There was a bottle of infant gas drops right by the changing table and I squirted an unknown amount into her mouth. I did this often. I don’t think the gas drops had any medicinal value at all. They were probably just powdered sugar mixed with water. But at least it was something. She spit out the drops and kept on crying. I grabbed a swaddling blanket and wrapped her up extra tight, as if I were putting her in a straitjacket.
MWAHAHAHA. You’ll never escape from the clutches of this fluffy giraffe blanket now
, I thought. She broke free in half a second.