Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood (6 page)

I went with the baby. I bathed him and changed him and swaddled him under a warm light in the nursery. Eventually, he fell asleep and the nurse encouraged me to go to the postpartum recovery room to do likewise.

I staggered out into the hallway. It was later in the morning now. My son happened to be born the day the president was being inaugurated. I dragged my body through the maternity ward as nurses and doctors and patients in wheelchairs gathered around every available TV set to watch the ceremony. I walked past all of it oblivious to the moment, like a caveman who had just woken up after being frozen in ice.

Inside the room, there was a little loveseat that pulled out for fathers to sleep on, and for thirty minutes I sank into a sleep so dark and black, I felt as if I could never be pulled out of it. There are many memorable things about watching a child being born, but what sticks with you the most is the exhaustion—the toll of the process, for both you and your wife (your wife more so), from conception all the way to delivery. It’s the sense that you will never find yourself more physically or emotionally drained. It’s almost as if God planned it that way. It’s almost as if He designed it so that you won’t be surprised when you find yourself running on empty for the next two decades.

T
he hardest part of giving a kid a bath is getting the kid
into
the bath. When my daughter was a baby, we could just throw her in the sink against her will and wash her like she was a saucepan. But as she learned to walk and talk and developed working muscles, getting her in the bath became more and more difficult. I had to find a way to get her to
want
to take a bath, which meant offering bribes or threatening punishment, often in tandem.
You’ll get candy, or you’ll never get candy again.

Then, one night, I figured out a third technique. I went up to her while she was playing downstairs and told her the exciting news.

“Mommy bought you something at Target today!”

“She did?”

“Uh-huh. But it’s upstairs. Let’s go upstairs to see it!”

She flew up the stairs and I quickly closed the baby gate at the top of the steps behind her so that she couldn’t get back down. The girl was three years old now, but the nuances of opening a baby gate were still a mystery to her. You had to push down on the tab while simultaneously lifting the gate up, and I deliberately used my body to shield my hand every time I opened it so that she wouldn’t learn the technique. It was the only thing I still had over her.

“You closed the gate!” she wailed.

“I know. That’s because it’s . . . BATHTIME! BATHTIME BATHTIME BATHTIME!”

“Noooooo! I don’t wanna take a bath! You tricked me!”

She grabbed the bars on the gate and rattled them like a caged prisoner.

“Sweetheart, I tricked you because I love you,” I said, “and because there’s yogurt in your hair.”

“Did Mom get me anything?”

“Oh, yeah, she got you some underwear.”

“I DON’T LIKE UNDERWEAR!”

“Well,
I
thought the underwear was exciting. My mistake. Let’s hop in the bath now.”

“NO!”

“Umm . . . please?”

“NO!”

Then I had an idea.

“We could tell jokes,” I said.

“Jokes?”

“Mmm-hmm. Remember that joke about the interrupting cow that you li—”

“MOO!”

“Yes, that one. You’re very clever. Want to hear more?”

“Okay!”

“I’ll tell you more, but only if you shake a tail feather and get in the tub.”

She stripped down naked and bounded into the warm water. I soaped her up and told her the same tired knock-knock jokes a few times over.
Orange you glad I didn’t say banana
, etc. But the material was wearing thin on her, and I had yet to wash her hair. You can take a child swimming and she won’t complain for a second about getting water on her face. But get water on her face in the tub and she’ll react like you just threw acid into her eyes.

“I have to wash your hair,” I told her.

“I don’t wanna wash my hair.”

“I know you don’t. But all you have to do is look up and the water won’t get in your eyes. I swear this works and you never listen to me.”

“No.”

“How about this: Why don’t
you
tell
me
a joke?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Why should I have all the fun? You try one on me.”

“Okay. Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Hairy.”

“Hairy who?”

“Hairy eyeball.”

Then she laughed so hard that her head naturally tilted upward and I was able to wet her hair without any kind of fuss. I even managed to penetrate the dreaded outside shell of the hair. For some reason, the surface of a child’s hair is virtually waterproof. One time, I poured water on the girl’s hair and it all slid clean off, as if she had dunked her head in Thompson’s WaterSeal. This time, I achieved full saturation down to the scalp.

“Oh, this is great!” I told her. “Tell another.”

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Hairy.”

“Hairy who?”

“Hairy eyeball in your butt.”

More laughter. I snuck in a quick lather.

“You tell one, Daddy.”

“Okay,” I said. “Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Peanut.”

“Peanut who?”

“A gallon of rotten peanut butter up your butt.”

That was the killer. I could feel her laughter reverberating off the bathroom tile and now she was completely distracted. Jokes about butts WORKED. I could have washed her hair a dozen more times and not gotten a rise out of her.

“More!” she demanded.

Just like that, I had a meme. I scrambled to find more elaborate things to stick up another person’s butt: toy ponies, a pint of vanilla ice cream, six corncobs, a milk truck. Eventually, I dropped the whole knock-knock formula and segued directly into singing Eddie Murphy’s “Boogie in Your Butt” to her. She went nuts with laughter, throwing her head so far back I thought it might roll off her body. Right on cue, she started inventing her own lyrics.

“Put some gum in your butt!” she cried out.

I reacted with phony disgust and that made her laugh even harder.

“Put some ants in your butt!” I countered.

“Put a guitar in your butt.”

“Put an astronaut in your butt.”

“Put candy in your butt.”

“Put Germany in your butt.”

“What’s Germany?”

“Well, whatever it is, it’s in your butt now.”

On and on we went. Everything we said was filthy and vile and horrible, but the bath itself was perfectly executed. She didn’t splash water outside the tub once. She didn’t bitch when I put the bath toys away or when I threw out the rubber duck that had black mildew leaking out of it. And when I opened the tub drain without her looking, she didn’t immediately close it back up so that she could hang around in the bath for another eight hours, the way she usually did. The last of the bathwater swirled down the drain and she stepped out to receive her toweling like a civilized lady.

“That was excellent,” I told her. “I’ve never had so much fun, and thank you for taking your bath without a fuss.”

“Do one more!” she said.

So I found one more thing to stick up your butt and she slipped into her jammies without a fight.

“Let’s go tell Mom!”

“No, no, no,” I said. “She wouldn’t get any of these jokes. Far too sophisticated for her. Let’s just keep this between us for now. No butt talk outside the tub, all right?”

“All right.”

And for the next six weeks, bathtime was the greatest time ever. I had found the key to bonding with my child in the tub, and all it required was me reciting a laundry list of terrifying rectal fillings: ham sandwiches, rice pudding, an eyeball coated in diarrhea, rabbit feet soaked in pee-pee, and such and such. Oh, we had a ball. I felt like I was holding court at the Comedy Cellar every night, bringing the house down with every set. It was magic.

Until . . .

“I overheard you in the bath,” my wife said. “Why are you guys talking about putting stuff up butts?”

“It’s just our special time.”

“Drew.”

“I didn’t teach her any swearwords. Except for ‘butt,’ I guess. Does that count?”

“‘Put some barf salad up your butt’?”

“It’s completely innocent.”

“No more.”

“I’ll never have an audience like this again! Free speech, woman!”

“No more.”

I relented. I knew I’d get caught eventually and I knew it was a cheap way of gaining my daughter’s affections. I began to wonder how much damage all those butt jokes had done to her psyche. Now she was gonna head off to school and tell her teacher to stick a doodie fish pie up her butt and it would be all my fault. There was no going back now. The floodgates had been opened.

I brought her upstairs the next night and she jumped in the tub excitedly.

“Put some snowmen up your butt!”

“Right. About that . . . ,” I began. “Listen, we can’t make poopy jokes anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s just not right. I can’t have you talking poopy talk once you get to school and all that. I’m sorry, girl. We can still tell jokes, but they gotta be clean.”

“Hairy eyeballs?”

“I think that’s allowable.”

“Hairy cow eyeballs.”

“Fish gut sandwich.”

“Bucket filled with cow poop!”

“Let’s make it cow tongues,” I said. “No poop. We need to expand the repertoire.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Can I wash your hair?”

“Sure, Daddy.”

“Thank you.”

“And thank
you
, dead monkey ice cream sundae with monkey eyeballs on top.”

D
r. Ferris was unavailable for my son’s six month appointment, which was too bad because Dr. Ferris was a master of his craft. He would walk into the office and it was like being greeted by a rock star.
He’s here! At long last! Those two nurses who opened for him were okay, but now we’ve got the headliner!
The boy would stop crying and Dr. Ferris would grab his feet and play with him and call him all kinds of crazy nicknames and, in three seconds, develop a bond with him far stronger than the bond I had with the child. If I grabbed the boy’s feet, he’d try to kick me in the nose. But when Dr. Ferris did it? MAGIC. Then he’d grab the shiny light thing doctors use and flash it in my son’s ear and ask, “Is there a little birdie in this ear? I think there is! Chirp chirp!” and the boy would whoop and wail and the scene in the room would look like the cover of an AstraZeneca quarterly prospectus. Secretly, I was kind of jealous of Dr. Ferris. I didn’t think I’d ever learn to be that good with children, not even my own. He also had fabulous hair. Dr. Ferris was good. Too good.

He was so good that his practice grew by the month, and getting appointments with him instead of one of his perfectly capable subordinates became more difficult. No one wants the B-lister at the doctor’s office. They want the star attraction. They want to be special enough to have Dr. Ferris be the one checking on little Sally’s vaginitis. But the man was unavailable one week when the boy needed a checkup, and so we had to settle for Dr. Dergan instead.

Dr. Dergan examined our son from head to toe, and we asked her all the usual questions.
Do you have some kind of magic way we can get him to sleep better? His shit looks like it has pearls in it. Is that okay? Where does he rank on the height and weight chart? Is he taller and heavier and therefore better than all the other kids?
Dr. Dergan answered our questions dutifully and then examined the boy’s head.

“Hmm. Looks a little flat in the back.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Nothing alarming,” she said. Doctors will never tell you any symptom is alarming unless there’s an arrow sticking out of your chest. “Just a little bit flat. You might consider sending him to a specialist at Children’s just to make sure.”

She left, and my wife and I grabbed the boy’s head, scrutinizing it obsessively.

“I guess it’s kinda flat,” I said. I took my hand and slid it up from the back of his neck to the top of his cranium. “See how it doesn’t stick out after the neck? Maybe that’s what she’s talking about.”

“I don’t know. He looks fine to me,” my wife said.

“Yeah. I mean, he has HAIR. The hair sticks out the back. You wouldn’t even notice the back of his head.”

“You don’t think he has flat head syndrome, do you?”

We had heard about flat head syndrome, or plagiocephaly. Apparently, your baby can get a flat head if he lies down on his back for too long, which seems unfair since all babies lie down on their backs for hours and hours every day. Even worse, if you turn your baby’s head to one side to prevent a flat head and you keep it on that one side for too long, his facial features are in danger of growing
into
that side, giving him a sideways face and making him look like a goddamn mutant. This was supposedly a real threat, even though I had never seen a grown adult with his face growing out of the side of his head like Man-E-Faces from the old
He-Man
cartoons.

We arrived home from the doctor’s office with our son and I began freaking out that his head was misshapen and that I had no good method of preventing it, short of rotating him every five minutes like a chicken cooking on a spit. The doctor advised us to alternate between feeding him with our left hand and our right so that his muscles would grow in balance and he would be symmetrical. Ever try feeding a child with your nondominant hand? It feels like you’re feeding him with a cadaver’s hand.

I stared at my son and I thought back to the time when I was waiting in line at a deli. The man in front of me was an attractive black man who happened to have the flattest head I had ever seen. It was stick straight in the back, and the crown of his head sloped up to it and formed a ridge at the back of his skull. He looked like a ski jump. I kept worrying that my son would grow up to be a ski jump.

“I still think he looks fine,” my wife said.

“Maybe his head is deceiving us,” I said. “Maybe it looks great to us because we’re his parents and our brains have warped the image. Maybe to everyone else he looks like, you know, a griddle.”

“I’m sure the neurologist will say he’s okay and that’ll be the end of it.”

I kept running my hands along the boy’s head, checking for imperfections as if I were a Third Reich phrenologist. I wanted to make sure there was adequate room for a fine brain that could perform math problems and come up with quick comebacks to dickish eighth graders. I put him down in the bouncy seat in the living room and my wife immediately chastised me.

“You can’t put him down.”

“I can’t?”

“The doc says you should try to hold him a lot. It keeps the pressure off his head.”

“But he’s heavy.”

“Just do it.”

I took him out of the bouncy seat and held him, and held him, and held him. It’s a fact that for every minute you hold a child, it triples in mass. By the tenth minute, I felt like I was holding up a truck. I had him against my body and the front of his onesie was soaked in my filthy chest sweat. I think he might have swallowed a chest hair.

“I can’t hold this thing any longer,” I told my wife.

“I’ll take him.”

“You’ll have to hold him all day, because I have a bad back.”

“Oh, that is so weak.”

“What? It’s true! I am medically endangering myself by holding that child aloft. And if I hold him for fifteen minutes and my spine breaks and you’re left without Mr. Handsome Helper . . . Why, you’re up shit creek, you are!”

My daughter walked into the room. “Can I hold him?”

“Oh, honey. That’s very sweet of you,” I said. “But, no, you’ll drop him on his face.”

“I looked up flat head syndrome online,” my wife said to me. “Do you know how they fix it?”

“No.”

“A helmet.”

“Oh, no. Not a helmet.”

“And they have to keep the helmet on for twenty-three hours a day.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Jesus.”

When your child is in danger of having a flat head, you quickly learn that the money-grubbing executives at Big Helmet have gone to great lengths to make baby helmets seem like a normal, even fashionable thing. The helmets we looked up online were all designed to look like skateboarding equipment, decorated with skulls and guitars and diamonds, all kinds of KEWL and XTREEEM shit that will help a parent think,
This is cool and hip!
rather than,
GET THAT FUCKING HELMET OFF MY BABY.

I looked at my son and thought about what a helmet would look like on him. I thought about all the looks he’d get. We live in an age of remarkable sensitivity, where other parents go to great lengths to appear tolerant and accepting of ALL children, not merely their own. But deep down, we’re just as judgmental and catty a species as we were decades ago. The patina of niceness almost makes it worse. I thought about other parents looking at the boy—and he was such a beautiful, sensitive little boy—saying something nice about his race car helmet, and then going home and spitting out their real feelings.
That poor Magary boy, crawling around with a helmet on. I wonder if they’ll have to tether him to a post in the yard.

We drove the boy downtown to the big children’s hospital and the lobby was filled with kids in wheelchairs, kids balding from chemo, and numerous other pale kids with sickly eyes. It was like being inside every public service announcement ever created. I wanted to cry my eyes out after taking three steps inside. The hospital itself was a masterpiece of health care industry bureaucracy. They had a main reception desk that sent you to another reception desk that sent you to a
third
reception desk. The elevator had a button for the third-and-a-half floor. I wanted to push it just to see if floor 3.5 contained a secret tunnel into the brain of John Malkovich.

After spending ages navigating the labyrinth, we arrived at the neurologist’s office. He ran his fingers over my son’s skull—just like a Third Reich phrenologist would!—and performed a series of mental tests on him. He snapped his fingers to one side of the boy’s face and the boy’s eyes followed. Ditto the opposite side. He checked the boy’s ears. He pulled on the boy’s arms. Then he turned to us.

“Well, his head
is
a bit flat in the back. But the good news is that his mental faculties seem just fine. He’s not retarded or anything.”

I swear, he used the word “retarded.” I didn’t even know retardation was on the table before he mentioned it.

“You might want to think about outfitting him in a helmet,” he said.

“Does he really need one?” I asked.

“He’s borderline. But you have to decide quickly because after a certain number of weeks, the bones set and the skull’s shape is irreversible.”

“But he wouldn’t have to wear it for very long, right?”

“Actually, the general guideline is three to six months.”

“Oh Jesus.”

We left the doctor’s office.

“Can you believe he actually said ‘retarded’?” my wife asked me.

“I know! I wonder if he meant it medically. He seemed so casual about retardation.”

“Do you think we should get the helmet?”

I had no idea. I looked at my son and his head looked fine to me. Two ears. Two eyes. A mouth. A chin. It was a perfectly acceptable head. I thought about what an incredible pain in the ass the helmet would be if we chose to buy one. Twenty-three hours a day. Several months. God knows if the boy would be able to sleep with that thing on. I pictured nights of endless screaming, with my wife reduced to tears, trying to soothe the baby while it was dressed like a linebacker. And the cost! Baby helmets cost hundreds of dollars. I didn’t want the helmet because I didn’t want to deal with all that bullshit, which is an awfully selfish thing to consider when deciding on the future shape of your progeny’s skull. I imagined the boy turning thirty and having a ski jump head, all because I was too lazy and cheap and afraid of pitiful looks to strap a helmet on him for a few lousy months of his life, months that he wouldn’t even end up remembering.

“I don’t want to get him a helmet,” I said.

“Neither do I,” my wife said.

“He’s got a nice head.”

“He’s got a
great
head.”

“Yeah. What do doctors know about heads anyway?”

“I think we should check with Dr. Ferris, just to make sure.”

So we did. We got an audience with the big man himself a week or so later. We plopped our son down in front of him and he proceeded to make the boy laugh louder than I had ever made him laugh. That stupid awesome Dr. Ferris.

“Does he need a helmet?” I asked.

He looked shocked by the idea. “What? A helmet? Nah,” he said. “I almost never recommend the helmet. For the child to require a helmet, they have to be really . . .”

“Deformed?”

“The flatness has to be severe. I’m not sure a helmet’s all that helpful anyway.” He turned to my son. “Now who’s a big bruiser? IS IT YOU?!”

The boy squealed with joy, and over the weeks and months his head grew. It grew up and down and out and to the side, in perfect proportion. Soon it was a perfect little sphere smothered in blond hair. No helmet necessary. I look at that head now, and all I think about is getting my co-pay from those first two appointments back. Baby helmets are a rotten lie.