I remember when my son was born. I was the only man in the
room, and the overall tone from all those busy women—nurses, doctors (it was a
medically complicated and difficult birth), laboring mom—was, you can stay, but
you need to keep the hell out of our way. Completely useless, but I’m
comfortable with feeling that way. I looked into the new baby’s face when the
nurse handed him to me, and I thought, Oh My God—it’s my Aunt Lola! I had been
hoping he would be cute and all, but
I figured I’d get used to it. That changed in a day or two, and the bonding
happened, and then all that creative energy your first kid undams kept flowing.
This poem is a response to the news that B.’s wife, Kate, was pregnant. Why the
crazy sounds? Happiness, fear, nervousness, all of that, just flowing is what
I’m thinking. I get the attention to the clouds: Your happy makes you goofy, and
intense about it. Making cloud pictures is an act of creativity. But the thing
about this: His excitement takes him too far:
Wait
till that kid
comes out, I’ll fix her.
I’ll burp her till she bleeds, I’ll
take an ax
to her inability to focus, until in
one weird moment, I fall in love
with her too.
Now there’s an excited father to be! My first response was
to think, gosh that’s kind of sick in its extremity. Weird fantasies of
violence coupled with a manic possessiveness. But, no. Relax. It’s a joke. He’s
excited. When the child is born, he’ll look at her and think, I’m just the
father. I have no place here. Then he’ll fall in love, dude. Mothers have that nine-month physical bonding thing
that they’re always so damn smug about, but we fathers catch up pretty soon if
we care to. We start banging and burping the hell out of those bambinos—till
they bleed, baby!—and changing diapers so fast that crap and baby poop is spattering
all over the walls and dripping down the curtains, and we’re funneling milk and
formula down those gaping red maws, shaking rattles in their faces, building
skyscrapers with their blocks, taking a firehose to their little fat naked
asses in the tub and scrubbing with Brillo pads until they’re smooth and clean
like they’ve been sandpapered—it’s amazing what intensity of care love can accomplish when you’ve got a
vigorous and driven father doing the loving, man. Of course, then we zonk out
on the couch in front of a football game and let mom or grandma or the damn
babysitter clean up the mess. It’s all good, we earned it. Hey, babe, is there
any beer left in the frig?
And yet my reaction to this DS is still: ick.
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