Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART IV

Fatherhood

A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?

—Stephen Colbert

16

Fatherhood Is Not Something to Be Avoided

We’re big on protecting endangered species in this country. We’ll deny water to farmers so that the tiny delta smelt can live on a little longer in the wild. We’ll protest the hunting of wolves, but won’t shed a tear for the livestock they eat. Similarly, we’d freak out if birthrates started plummeting among animals in our national parks, but we don’t even blink when it happens to the birthrates for humans across the nation. Starting in the 1960s the birthrate in the United States dropped dramatically, and we’ve never really recovered. Now we’re starting to see record-low levels in our total fertility rate, particularly among women in their twenties. As of 2012, the TFR was just 1.88 births per woman, down from 3.8 in the 1950s. We’ve gone through periods of low birthrates before, notably in the 1920s through the early 1940s, but never has the rate been so low for so long.

What’s going on? Part of the answer can be found in the smaller number of people in their twenties getting married, but there are also fewer births to single mothers as well. The usual suspects tend to get the blame for our declining birthrate: economic uncertainty because of the Great Recession, greater student loan debt, an extended adolescence compared to previous generations; these are among the more common theories floated by academics and the purveyors of conventional wisdom. It may also be, or so we’re told, that those men and women who aren’t struggling financially in our moribund economy are too busy leading fabulous lives to want to be tied down with a kid.

Mostly, then, the theories seem to focus on being too afraid to have kids (or too risk-averse if you want to sound nicer). This is perfectly reasonable. I was terrified at the thought of having a baby, and that was after I’d been called “Dad” for three years by my oldest daughter and son.^* I kind of felt like I had lucked out and missed all the really hard stuff like midnight feedings, diaper changing, and what I assumed would be hours and hours of crying for no reason at all. Plus, having a baby is expensive! All the diapers, wipes, baby clothes, strollers, high chairs, cribs, and other baby necessities I wasn’t even aware I’d be purchasing would be more than our budget could handle. No way, I told my wife when she first brought up having another child. Let’s wait a few years.

This gets confusing, I know. I refer to all of my kids as “my kids,” even though I’m technically the stepfather to my two oldest kids. I’m Dad, they’re my kids, and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem.

Well, we didn’t wait a couple of years. My son was born about ten months after we had that conversation, actually. My wife told me, with the authority of having had two kids already, that there really wasn’t ever a “good” time to have a child, if that meant we were waiting for a big enough balance in our savings account or that perfect moment in our professional lives to introduce a baby into the mix. We were never going to have another child if we waited for the stars to align perfectly. Meanwhile, she was already in her mid-thirties and didn’t want to wait too much longer to get pregnant. So, despite some lingering hesitation on my end, we decided to have a kid. I know many parents out there struggle to conceive, and I feel for them, but that wasn’t an issue for us. In fact, it happened the first weekend we tried to make a baby. I was actually kind of hoping it would take a little longer, both because it’s fun to try and make a baby and the fact that we were still “trying” meant that having a baby was still a theoretical thing. That didn’t work out so well, but as it turned out, when I found out we were really going to have a baby I didn’t panic. Well, not outwardly, anyway.

Being one of those obnoxious first-time fathers, I documented my wife’s pregnancy through my job. At the time, I was still working as a reporter for the local news/talk radio station in Oklahoma City, and I put together a weekly series called “The Daddy Diaries.” Each week covered a different aspect of preparing to have a baby, from telling the kids to going to parenting class. I even brought the microphone and recorder into the hospital room, though one look from my wife during her contractions and I smartly put both away until after my son was born.

In a way, putting this out there for the world to hear made me a little braver than I might have been otherwise. I talked myself into thinking that I had put away my fears and uncertainties about becoming a father to an infant, when in reality I still had plenty of insecurities about how I was doing as Dad to my son and daughter. I was twenty-six years old and I was getting ready to be a father of three. The future seemed vaguely terrifying to me. I wasn’t sure I was up for this, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell my ever-expanding wife that I was worried I was going to fall flat on my face as a father at some point in the not-so-distant future.

If I couldn’t talk to the mother of my kids, I could talk to my own mom, and that’s exactly what I did. My mom had warmed up to our marriage by then, thankfully. Actually, every one of our parents had come around by that point. They could tell that, as inexplicable as it was for us to have gotten married so quickly, we were in it for the long haul. She was thrilled at the prospect of having another grandchild, so I did take that into account when she told me that I would be a great father. What I wasn’t expecting was her confession that she still had doubts about her own ability as a parent.

I know my mom wasn’t perfect, just like every other parent out there. My wife thinks that my mom was nuts to give me as much freedom as she did starting from age eleven or twelve, but I think (A) she knew I was pretty responsible for my age, and (B) even if it was kinda bonkers to let a twelve-year-old go to a Journey concert by himself, it really helped me become a more responsible and mature adult. I wasn’t interested in drinking or doing drugs at these concerts. I was there to hear the music: Whitesnake, Stryper (yeah … ), Bon Jovi, Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” tour with Tesla opening. My mom appreciated that I loved music and trusted that I wouldn’t take advantage of her not wanting to go to a metal concert.

After I became an adult I realized that my mom had an ulterior motive beyond trying to foster my ability to take care of myself. When I was at a concert, she and her boyfriend could have some alone time. As it turns out, she actually felt a little guilty about dropping me off so she could have a Friday night with her fella. Talking with my mom made me realize that it was okay not to be an expert at parenting. Maybe we never are. Maybe we always second-guess something we said or did, because we’re constantly learning how to be a better parent, even if we’ll never be flawless. As Jim Gaffigan says, “Most of the time I feel entirely unqualified to be a parent. I call these times being awake.”

And so came the big day. My wife’s due date was around our anniversary, but that day came and went, and so did my birthday the following day. By the fifth day past her due date we were trying all of the standard folk remedies to induce labor: walking up and down the street (in triple-digit temperatures. This was Oklahoma in August, after all), warm baths, awkward and uncomfortable sex. The folk tales don’t specify that it has to be awkward and uncomfortable, but it inevitably will be. Everything is awkward and uncomfortable when you’re nine months pregnant. Nothing worked, so we made an appointment to induce labor.

We showed up at the hospital bright and early. The doctor explained that my wife would be put on an IV drip of a medicine that would induce contractions; within a few hours, she should be in full blown labor; and given that she’d gone through this a couple of times before, the labor should be quick. I noted that she didn’t mention painless, but my wife asked about the possibility of having something for the pain when it was appropriate. The doctor agreed, and left us in the hands of the nurses.

Within a few hours my wife was having regular contractions, but she wasn’t dilating and our son’s arrival seemed no more imminent than it did when we arrived. Throughout the day my wife lay on the bed in her birthing suite, miserable with every contraction and a uterus that was clamped shut like a bear trap. In mid-afternoon the nurses conferred and told us that they were likely going to send us home at 5 p.m. We’d have to come back again in the morning.

My wife swears our son must have heard this, for not two minutes later he did an enormous flip-kick in her womb, breaking her water and jump-starting the labor process. After hours of inaction, all of a sudden all hell was breaking loose in the birthing suite. My wife’s uterus had gone from “not really dilated” to “Is the doctor going to make it to the room in time?” in what seemed like an instant. Nurses were flying in and out of the room bringing in all the items necessary to deliver a baby. My wife, meanwhile, was trying to get the attention of one of them long enough to remind them about the anesthesia she’d requested. One of them must have alerted the anesthesiologist, because he walked in shortly afterward and told my wife that he was going to gently jab a big honking needle in her spine in order to pump the painkilling drugs into her body. I might be rephrasing a little. There was a slight risk of paralysis if he didn’t do it right, but whatever.

The good news is he did it right. The bad news is it didn’t work, as he also warned us might be the case. My wife’s right leg became completely numb, but that was about it. She could still feel everything else. And when you give birth to a ten pound five ounce baby with a head circumference of fifteen inches, there’s a lot to feel. I did what I could, letting her crush the bones in my hand while she rode out each contraction. She held on until the doctor arrived, but literally no sooner had she positioned herself than she ended up grabbing my son as he popped out kind of like a watermelon seed flicked between two fingers. Oklahoma’s produced some pretty good catchers, including Johnny Bench, but he had nothing on our OB-GYN that day.

The nurses whisked my son away to a corner of the room, and I stayed by my wife’s side while they administered the APGAR test, weighed him, and cleaned him up. Soon enough they told me I could come over, and I approached my little boy for the first time. I had no fear. None. I was full of wonder and amazement and every synapse of my brain felt like it was firing at once, but I wasn’t afraid at all. I looked down at this little tiny Winston Churchill lookalike, and I felt the tears well up in my eyes.

“What does he look like?” my wife asked from the bed.

“He’s funny looking, like his dad,” I replied with a laugh as I snuffled back my tears. “He’s incredible,” I added. “He’s got blue eyes, and no hair whatsoever. He looks happy. He looks really alert.”

The nurses told me it was okay to pick him up, and I reached down and took him in my hands, cradling him gently against my arms. I felt weak in the knees, yet so incredibly strong. I carried him over to his mother, and she beamed when she saw him for the first time. She reached out her arms and nestled him close, and he snuggled in and stared up at her with his deep blue eyes. I left the two of them and ran to pick up our kids from our home, where a friend had been watching them.

The three of us hurried back to the hospital after a quick stop at Sonic at my wife’s request (a double cheeseburger and a lime slush can work wonders on the body’s ability to recover after giving birth). Our kids were excited to meet their baby brother, but I think they both worried about how their lives would be changing as a result. Having a kid is a big deal for everyone involved, including your other kids (more on that later), and I understood that once again, they were being asked to make another big adjustment in their lives. They both gathered close to their mom, one on either side, and she held them tight until they wriggled away with smiles on their faces.

Because my wife had given birth so late, she was able to stay an extra day, but soon she was being wheeled out to the front door of the hospital, our family a little larger than it was when we’d arrived. The new car seat (a gift from her dad) was installed in the back of my wife’s Pontiac Grand Prix, and I handled my son like he was made of glass as I placed him in the seat and buckled him in, checking three or four times to make sure he wasn’t being pinched anywhere. I settled in behind the wheel, my wife by my side, and we drove off toward the start of a new chapter in our life.

Fourteen years later that tiny little baby had turned into a handsome young man nearly six feet tall. He leaned against the counter in our kitchen, munching on some blueberries from our bushes, and asked me a question about this book. “Why would you want to have a kid?” he asked. “It just seems like they’re a lot of money and aggravation.”

I don’t know that you can understand when you’re fourteen. I don’t know that you’re supposed to understand why you’d want a child if you’re a fourteen-year-old boy. So I wasn’t quite sure how to explain it. I wasn’t even sure I had the words to explain it to an adult.

I took him to the front staircase in our old farmhouse. The wall leading to the second floor is covered with photos of our kids. I pointed one photo out to my son. In it, he and I are walking down the sidewalk in front of our house. He is just learning to walk, and both of his arms are up in the air for balance. I’m right by his side, my hand extended out where he can grab hold if necessary, but giving him the space he needs to try to figure out this walking stuff on his own.

“This is why you have kids. Moments like that one on the wall, and even moments like this one right now. That picture is better because you’re in it. My life is better because you’re in it. And maybe one day you’ll feel the same way about a child of your own,” I told him. He didn’t look convinced.

“There is another reason to have a kid,” I mused.

“What’s that?”

“Free labor! Come help me mow the yard.”

He rolled his eyes and smiled, and the two of us headed outside into the sunshine, walking together down the path to the shed where we store our lawnmowers. The sight would have made for a great picture to complement the one on the wall, but I’ve got the memory instead, along with a million other moments with all five of my kids that make me so grateful and thankful that I’m their dad.

So You Are Having a Baby: Pregnancy

Congratulations! Your wife has peed on a stick, and it turned blue.

You’re probably eager to tell the world. There are some who say you shouldn’t announce a pregnancy for the first three months; the risk of miscarriage drops after that first trimester. It’s completely understandable that couples who are thrilled at the news share it a bit early. And it’s completely understandable that you, as a man, are itching to share this good news. “We’re expecting” has that wonderful “I am a virile, fertile man” subtext. Like Walt Whitman, you contain multitudes.

The problem with waiting for three months is that you have to act “normal” for about twelve weeks. And your life, quite quickly, will become anything but normal. Your wife, who previously ate like a bird, will begin out-eating you. She will cry during Meineke commercials. And obviously, she won’t be able to drink. Now, you may be thinking, “Wonderful, no more bickering over who’s the designated driver for the next few months,” but your wife’s social circle knows her. They’ll notice if she’s having a juice or soda instead of her usual Cosmopolitan or red wine. Maybe ordering tonic water instead of a gin and tonic will fool them for a while, but a lot of women turn into Sherlock Holmes when it comes to each others’ possible pregnancies. They’ll notice any faint signs of weight gain. They know what your wife’s normal appetite is, and—wait, I’d swear there was a whole pizza JUST HERE. She could not have eaten it that fast.

Your lives have been turned topsy-turvy, with all kinds of unexpected twists. Remember all of that deliberately scheduled, fervently procreative sex you were having during ovulation periods? It’s not like you ever didn’t like it—sex, like pizza, is still pretty good even when it’s bad—but you thought pregnancy would slow things down a little. Ha-ha, surprise, without warning your wife’s sex drive has been turned up to eleven! And then, just when you think it can’t get any better, your wife will be hit by morning sickness.

Yes, your wife will be aglow during this time. Maybe it’s radiation.

The snow globe of your life has been picked up and vigorously shaken, and you’re expected to hide all of this from everyone except your family and closest friends. When you do finally end the charade, you’ll learn your female friends will have suspected from early on. Your male friends will have been completely oblivious.

Your male hormones will go haywire as well. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, she noticed that one weekend afternoon I was getting choked up—verklempt, as they say in Yiddish. She asked what it was and the only answer I would give was, “I just want to see him so much!” It was half-magical, half-irritating that my entire life was turning upside down, and I was assembling cribs and changing tables and our house was filling up with unbelievably tiny onesies and diaper genies and yet my only glimpse of him was a profile shot from the ultrasound.

Our second pregnancy—yes, I know there’s some debate as to whether that’s the appropriate pronoun—had some challenging moments, although thankfully everything turned out fine. Mere moments after being informed we would have another boy, the doctor expressed some concern about one of his measurements, and said that it indicated a higher risk of serious complications, particularly when coupled with what my wife’s age would be at the delivery date. Apparently on one side of the birthday, the formula indicates everything will be fine; on the other side of the birthday, the formula indicates that there’s a 50-50 chance my wife will give birth to an alien lizard baby from V. (It didn’t help that the doctor looked like Frank Gorshin playing the Riddler on the old Batman television series. “Riddle me this, Mr. Geraghty! What has three hands, currently swims, but someday will fly with bat wings? Your next offspring, bwha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”)

Ever the optimist—and a pundit on television, meaning I’m convinced I know everything—I pointed out that he was rounding up my wife’s age, which meant that the odds couldn’t quite be so dire. He stood his ground in a manner I’m sure he meant to be reassuring but was again, Riddler-esque, walking me through the factors in the risk formula. Nightmare upon nightmare: I’m getting the worst news imaginable, and now I have to do math, too.

She and I stumbled when we told our families, and I’ll never forget how I nearly choked on the words every time I had to say them: “We don’t know if he’s going to be okay.” I could go through the biological details, but the bottom line was the same. Life had given us a glimpse of a second son through another beautifully ghostly ultrasound profile shot—and then put a metaphorical gun to his head.

For a short while, my beloved and I lived with an uncertainty about our child, and in public tried to act as if everything was normal. As usual, she handled it all better than I did. Suddenly I was the one crying during car repair commercials. I’d be watching a football game at a bar, getting a bit of recommended downtime, and not really focusing on anything because I was paralyzed by the open question of whether my new little guy was going to be okay. WOOMP—out come the tears. I’m sure some patrons thought that I was really exceptionally distressed by the Jets’ woeful defense that year.

A few weeks later, we did an additional series of tests; the new tests indicated everything was going fine. F. J. Raymond once said, “Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund.” That second pregnancy was my near-miss with an event that, had it gone differently, would have broken me. The Man Upstairs has been better to me than I ever deserved.

But life’s worst moments are good for something; they put everything else in perspective. Bad day at work? Big fight with my wife? Traffic? Psshht. Nothing. Man, you can bring the Hell’s Angels, IRS auditors, ISIS, the Bloods and the Crips, a herd of velociraptors, and the Black Hole Oakland Raider fans to my door and I’ll rumble with the whole crowd, because it’s still easier than hearing the words, “We don’t know if your child is going to make it.”

Pregnancy Step Two: Lamaze

Go to Lamaze class if your OB-GYN recommends it. It can’t hurt.

This is not to say you’ll find it to be the most edifying class you’ll ever take. Lamaze classes are mostly useful for encountering other couples that you are glad you will never see again. Really, there’s nothing like watching another man’s wife, who appears to be shoplifting a basketball, who’s overheated and irritated, and who’s decided to take out all of her frustration upon him, lamenting loudly how the air-conditioning in his car isn’t working right, and she’s been telling him to take it in to fix it, and why didn’t he take it in knowing that the hottest summer months were coming, and can we turn the air-conditioning up in this room, and—and basically, everyone else in the class is convinced she’s carrying Damien. It only took one look at that woman for me to turn to my wife and tell her how much I love her … and I really love that she’s not that woman.

I’d like to think my wife was equally appreciative that she wasn’t married to the guy in Lamaze class who was extremely eager to participate in the birthing process, and kept joking that he was his wife’s “coach.” Sure, pal. When your wife is going through contractions that can be measured on the Richter Scale, I’m sure she’ll feel endlessly reassured that you’ve decreed yourself to be her Mike Ditka.

The class was fine, if a little lengthy, and it felt a little silly to be sitting on the mats on the floor pretending to breathe rhythmically, knowing in the back of our heads that the real thing would feel nothing like this. It’s a bit like those instructions from the flight attendant right before takeoff. Sure, it all sounds good, proceeding from step to step in the abstract, but when it hits the fan and the plane is in a nosedive, how many of us are really going to remember to fix our own oxygen masks before assisting those around us?

Our Lamaze teacher really seemed to think everyone in the class would all bond over this, like we would all become Lamaze drinking buddies … getting together for day trips to other hospitals … maybe joining the National Lamaze League and getting together to watch the Lamaze Bowl. Ma’am, I’m sorry, but the only thing we have in common is that we all had phenomenal intimate times around last Christmas.

During the inevitable “does anyone have any questions?” segment, one couple in our Lamaze class asked a question about circumcision with the very clear subtext, “WE HAVE BEEN FIGHTING ABOUT THE TOPIC OF CIRCUMCISION CONSTANTLY. PLEASE TELL MY SPOUSE THAT HIS/HER OPINION IS WRONG.”

Pregnancy Step Three: Delivery

We’ve all heard Bill Cosby’s stand-up routine about his wife enduring contractions in the delivery room, standing up in the stirrups, and grabbing him and demanding morphine and bellowing with rage, “YOU DID THIS TO ME!” With that, and every other beleaguered-husband horror story floating through my head, I was braced for the worst. As Jack Davenport declares on the BBC comedy Coupling, “There are just some places you don’t expect to see a face.”

Some people who meet my wife get the wrong impression of her at first. I assure them that underneath her exterior of relentlessly driven, unremittingly determined, cold, steely willpower, she has a hidden core of even more relentlessly driven, unremittingly determined, cold, steely willpower. I used to be jealous when other men would flirt with her. Now I chuckle knowingly and conclude, “Oh, she would break him.”

Nonetheless, after hearing all the stories of moms-to-be appearing to be demonically possessed during the birthing process, I was ready for her to cry, to scream, to say nasty things about me, and/or to declare she wasn’t going to push him out any further; our son could live there inside of her for the rest of his life. Just build a little womb condo up in there.

Nope. My wife is friggin’ bulletproof. The pain of childbirth looked my wife in the eye … and flinched.

Oh, sure, it hurt, but when the doctor said, “Push!” she pushed. She bit down and just dealt with what I am sure is the sort of pain that would probably cause my body to not just break but molecularly disassemble. I felt a little better about all the times I had lost an argument to her in that moment, because if childbirth had run up against her and turned tail in defeat, like a giant, neurological Persian army from 300, then there was no shame in my losing an argument or two.

Sometimes, you’ll see newborn babies with coneheads. This is not because they are secretly the offspring of Dan Aykroyd; it is because the baby shifts position inside the womb early, and their head is pointing down, and their head grows in the shape of the bottom of the womb. Babies’ skulls are more flexible and aren’t like ours, so there’s no need to worry, although it looks a little odd. My older son, an unbelievably adorable child, had one of these coneheads when he was born.

The conehead also generated this awkward exchange during those first moments of our son’s life:

Her: [grimacing] Can you see it?

Me: I can see the top of the head! You’re doing great!

[Pushing]

Her: How about now?

Me: I can see the head! Keep it up! You’re doing great!

[More pushing]

Her: How about now?

Me: Uh … still the head! Keep going!

[More groaning and pushing]

Me: Um … still more head!

[Even more pushing]

Her: Now?

Me: You’re almost done with the head!

The good news is that once you get those shoulders out, it’s like a piñata down there—everything else spills out at once.

And then my wife and I got to see perhaps the most joyful sight of our lives, our baby boy. Of course, throughout this happy moment, I kept thinking of the planet Remulak and the need to “consume mass quantities” and “parental units.”

What Would Ward Cleaver Do?

Ward was all about being a dad, so he would have no qualms about the natural consequence of marriage: fatherhood.

The Fertility Goddess Belly Rub

We really need a national dialogue on touching pregnant strangers. When did this become okay? When did this become expected? She’s a mom-to-be, not a petting zoo. Look, all-too-curious person, I don’t know where that hand has been. Under what other circumstances does half our society feel the need to touch strangers’ bodies? “Man, that’s a heck of a surgical scar, can I feel it?” “Wow, those are some spectacular implants, mind if I take a grope? Ooh, I can feel the silicone kicking!”

If you find yourself with this compulsion, at the very least have the common decency to ask permission first. In a perfect example of Americans’ current drive to apply the law to everything, in 2013, a Pennsylvania man was charged with harassment for allegedly hugging a pregnant woman and rubbing her stomach without her consent.^*

If your wife gets a little more clingy during the pregnancy, it may be because her midsection has suddenly become the Golden Idol of Fertility for a society full of Hovitos. Some women report that they get fewer requests for the impromptu public belly button shiatsu when their husbands are around.

And on the flip side, once in a great while you’ll encounter a pregnant woman who wants other people to feel her stomach. No, that’s okay, ma’am, I take you at your word that you’re pregnant. I don’t need tactile confirmation. No, thank you, I’m sure your child in there is wonderful, and I’m sure his kicking indicates he’ll lead Team USA to the World Cup in about twenty years.

Daniella Silva, “Pennsylvania Man Charged with Harassment for Rubbing Pregnant Woman’s Stomach: Cops,” NBC News, October 28, 2013.