Stop telling me how my life will change because I have a child
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Version 0 of 1. There are many horrible lies you tell yourself when you become a parent. The first, if you’re a writer, is: “I will not write about being a parent.” What a pathetic charade. The second is this: “I will never stop listening to advice.” Riiiiight. After a few months, some older parent starts talking, and almost instantaneously your head turns their noises turn into wordless notes, like Mozart’s mother-in-law in Amadeus chirping the Queen of the Night’s Aria. You won’t even do that out of arrogance. For me, it’s a form of protection against the urge to be rude. Because if there is one piece of advice everyone has felt it necessary to tell me over nine months of my wife’s pregnancy and five of my parenting, it is this: “It is going to change your life.” This truth is revealed to me on a tone scale from lecture to gloating, and it is almost impossible not to wonder if people think I’m too stupid to understand this, genetically incapable of doing so or if they’re just luxuriating in the thought that some part of my life is over. Finding an appropriate, polite response is almost impossible. First off, every time you hear that your life is going to change, it’s really hard not to wonder if the person you’re talking to thinks that you’re a colossal idiot. Of course it’s going to change; I just made a person who can’t do anything but scream and emit fluids. My wife and I are in our late 30s, and the only way that could be novel information is if we somehow spent over 60 combined years not understanding anything we saw on TV, movies or in real life and just skimmed all the portions of books that mentioned parenthood. “What was the lesson of Three Men and a Baby, Jeb?” “Uh, I think it’s pretty obviously that when you get three white guys in the same apartment, they have to sing doo-wop together before they can go to sleep.” My wife and I must also have missed the movie and both TV versions of Parenthood, as well as Paul Reiser’s work on the subject – from the book Babyhood to his seminal work on the series My Two Dads. We encountered no multi-generational novels or mini-series. We did not observe any changes in family around us as the womenfolk got larger, had children, then began behaving differently, and the menfolk went out and slew taller, slower automobiles and small portable chairs. And that’s just on a paying-attention-to-culture level. Somehow the fact that we were married for years of successfully not having a baby – through a Great Recession, layoffs and living apart for work – before deciding to have a baby doesn’t register to anyone as a signal of some awareness of the weight of our decision. The idea that you need to hear something of which you must already be immediately, physically and culturally aware is just perverse. Imagine a friend saying, “My wife has terminal cancer” and then replying, “Your life is going to change.” Granted, that’s grim news, and some people surely feel like merely reaffirming the significance of good news increases the good news. But, still, trust us, we get it. If I tell you I’m having a kid, and you tell me that’s very serious – well, to quote legendary parent John McClane: “No fucking shit, lady, does it sound like I’m ordering a pizza?” I mention a character from America’s finest film because it is an action film about dudes, and because I strongly suspect that I get more heavy-handed lectures about the life-changing consequences of choosing to parent because I am a man. It can’t be because anyone is listening to me about my life, because those lessons are inevitably imparted even after I explain that I work from home and will be the primary caregiver for my son until he moves out. They are proffered after I have assured people, to no avail, that I have already chosen to embrace a changed life and the responsibilities attendant to it. But here we are, after months of my hustling the boy to the doctor, figuring out that sweet spot after a feeding and diaper change but before his normal naptime when I can walk down to the store with him to buy stuff for dinner, spending twice as long to read any news article and three times as long to write my own – and, no, nope, sorry, I’m still going to hear: “You have to understand, this is going to change your life.” It’s doubly bizarre coming from friends who know that I’ve worked from home for years and am a pretty comfortable homebody. To paraphrase Marge Simpson: You can’t hide a baby from me in this house, I spend 23 hours a day here. Besides, what do they expect I’m going to say I plan to do now? “Well, I just had a kid ... And while my goof-off hours used to feature my drinking craft beer and reading on my front porch or barbecuing with friends, now I think I’m going to buy a motorcycle, go to loud clubs, pick up woo-girls, then bang them on the motorcycle while listening to house music on an iPod I stole from my dealer Tetris”? Christ, I bought a Toyota Highlander before I even knew I was going to be a dad. It’s like the Wagon Queen Family Truckster of SUVs. It can tow a boat, but it’s basically a Camry someone stretched upward. Dammit, I was boring before it was apt. I think people do expect irresponsibility from me. People often adopt an attitude toward the father in all these conversations that presumes he thinks he can be forever disconnected from his actions: he didn’t carry the baby to term; he doesn’t have to nurse; somehow, he’s gonna skate on this one. Which, if anything, explains the almost gloating, vindictively celebratory tone that many of the your-life-is-going-to-change lessons take on. These aren’t warnings; they’re punitive, even retributive. Experienced dads want to wish the sleepless nights and anxiety and confusion on someone else, to pay it backward. Joking about how you are going to age three years in the next one – your blotchy skin growing blotchier and the bags under the eyes swelling and darkening – seems less like teasing with repetition. Some people, both women and men, might as well be saying, Sorry, dad, but you won’t get away with it. Get away with what? I know I can’t respond to any of this directly; there is no winning reply. A quick thank-you only makes people repeat everything slowly, convinced that you must not understand the gravity of what they’ve just told you. Any pushback against their perceived presumptuousness only confirms how young and naïve you must be. Getting angry at their obstinacy only makes them double down on how misguided you must be. It’s best, then, merely to nod. Most people probably, very sincerely, mean to give kind, non-judgmental advice because, when I started to suspect that they must be saying something unkind, out would come another bizarre observation like, “Cherish this, because the days go by so fast.” There I was, about to get mad, and they revealed that they couldn’t differentiate between people who had kids at 21 and people like me and my wife who had kids after 35 – people who saw “GERIATRIC PREGNANCY” on every OB/GYN computer screen and who have three major surgeries, a shoulder with bursitis and a knee that’s been arthritic for 22 years between us. The rapid, unfair onrush of passing time is a lot easier to be mindful of when your body is getting mortal as hell a lot faster each day. But that’s not the lesson you learn from well-wishers about time and how a baby changes your life. You learn that these people are trying to pay backward the corrections they would have made in their own, and you are the least essential part of this equation (if you’re part of it at all). It’s sweet – and you can glean as much from its sadness as you can from what the speaker intended his or her words to say. But if you’ve already learned that lesson, too, you can close your eyes and hear Mozart’s mother-in-law singing like a bird, if you’d prefer. |