Poor, sweet baby

“Before Sam got pregnant I couldn’t imagine loving another baby as much as I love Aaron,” Jonah said, “but now, it’s like, I don’t know, a skyscraper of love. I love that baby so much, especially when it kicks, and it’s gonna be even more when it’s born.”

I’d smiled, nodded, finished my second glass of wine. At the time I didn’t have kids, didn’t think I wanted kids, and was about ten years younger than Jonah. Kids was a sticking point between my girlfriend and me at that point.

I’ve got two kids now. Their births felt miraculous. I mean, they were crazy. Screaming, crying, exhaustion, stress, thunder, lightning, winds tearing at trees and dropping biting flies and frogs from the sky, biblical kinda shit, and then movie ray of sunlight parts storm clouds angels singing when I got to see the baby’s perfect little head emerge for the first time. Honestly, the one kid was frowning deeply - “WHAT the FUCK?!” etched across the crevasses of her eyebrows and she was deeply purple in color - and the other was under the water for a moment (special birthing tub) which looked, I dunno, weird, fish-like, amphibian - but for real it was amazing. The most amazing. Spiderman amazing. A radioactive arachnid bit my heart and it instantly became super buff, loving strong enough to flip over cars. When the nurse handed me my baby, both times, I said something deep like “hi!” and nuzzled my nose up to her perfect little face and just felt incredible. I’m grinning so wide and for so long as I type this that it makes my mouth muscles sore. When I remember this s part of my brain squirts out whatever chemicals it squirted out at my kids’ births, though the does then was massive. I was seriously, literally stoned on love. Right now I’m getting a mild warmth, like from one sip of good hard liquor, as opposed to euphoric ‘this is my BAY BEE!’ rush like many, many drinks downed fast and hitting together. I like to remember these moments periodically, when I remember to remind myself. There are other moments, of course, after their births, like when my littler one climbs into my lap and nuzzles my chest and stretches her tiny arms to try to grab both shoulders, or when my bigger one says out of nowhere “I love you!”

Those moments are always there somewhere in my mental files but they’re rarely in action, in my cranial inbox, so to speak, because, along with my heart gaining an ability to love that is as strong as a spider’s proportional strength, I also gained a spider’s sense of danger, which means I am constantly paranoi- uh, aware of the great fragility of my children, my children who have somehow ended up pretty daring and physical. (My older kid walked early, and was a climber. I said to my dad “you wouldn’t have thought we’d be a couple to raise an athletic kid.” He said “sometimes that stuff skips a generation.”) So they race across the wreckage of our living room - hardwood floor strewn with wood blocks, die-cast wheeled toy trains, hard plastic dolls, board books, paperbacks, pillows, a blanket, for some reason goddamn acorn husks, and silk scarves, which, if you don’t know, are as slippery on a wood floor as stepping in olive oil - daring the obstacles and gravity and their young still learning how to operate bodies to even try to down them. They win that game of chicken with clutter and physics most of the time, but only most of the time. Sometimes they faceplant, or wipe out sideways landing on an elbow, or feet shoot out and they fall backward, and every single time I am sure a bone is broken which will cause internal bleeding and death. I’m only sure for a second, but it’s a long motherfucking second.

When the older daughter was the only daughter, around 18 months, we walked to an ice cream place and on the way home ran back, playing soccer with pine cones while the sun set to the soundtrack of her perfect bell-like giggles. Then she fell, on the asphalt jogging path, straight onto her little angel’s face. I expected hamburger, rare, gashes out of her skin. I sprinted to her, she’d already gotten up, howling, but no blood, thankfully. My wife picked her up to nurse her just as the howls choked off and her eyes rolled up into her head and she passed out. We shouted her name and called 911 and cried and said oh god oh no and I thought about friends whose children have died and was sure my time with the love of my life was over (and she is the love of my life, they both are; I love my wife, but my kids, it’s a whole nother order of magnitude, it shouldn’t even be the same word). Turns out she was fine. She had what’s called a white breathholding spell, which is when a small kid gets hurt then forgets to breathe from the pain, passes out from not breathing, resumes breathing once unconscious because the autonomic nervous system steps back in, and wakes back up maybe a bit groggy but fine. The pediatrician at the ER at the children’s hospital explained it all very patiently and with good humor, “it’s good you brought her in, and good you brought her here, sometimes this gets misdiagnosed as a seizure.” We walked back out through the waiting room and hugged each other and our kid harder as we passed by the people whose kids were sobbing, one with an arm at the wrong angle, another with a hand wrapped in a lot of gauze, another asleep but too pale. Everything was fine, is fine, will be fine. Though who knows for how long. (I still check the big one’s breathing when she’s sleeping. Not all the time, not like before we passed the milestone - six months? I forget, which is weird because it was such a huge relief then - when the risk of sudden infant death syndrome drops astronomically, and not as often as I check the little one’s breathing, but I still check. When she’s asleep and still and I can’t see her chest or back move it scares the shit out of me.)

My little one’s talking more. She makes up stories, mostly in one word sentences. “Lady. Baby. Stroller. Push. Crying. Pee. Diaper. Lady. Change. Diaper.” She’s small for her age. She looks like a very precocious version of a much smaller baby, like an almost one year old with amazing mutant athletic and verbal ability, instead of what she is, an almost two year old on the small side with amazing mutant charm. She dances like I do, the move your feet and knees and arms but not hips because you spent too much time at a formative age listening to nothing but punk and also had hangups about your body and sexuality kind of dancing. It’s a weird ugly awkward dance on the part of weird ugly awkward middle aged men in dark basement shows, but it’s so fucking cute from my little darling in our sunlit living room. She tries to clap on the beat and is always early or late, and she smiles so big, a smile that lights her eyes and lifts her eyebrows practically to her hairline and brings out a dimple by her chin.

Over the weekend my second sweetheart, the cute dancer, turned her perfect face and cocked her head to one side and puked chunks of what looked like three full cans of chicken noodle soup and smelled like vinegar and curdled milk all over the floor. (She’d eaten one bowl of tomato soup and a bit of tofu.) It was gross and it was a lot, all over the blanket where my wife had been reading bedtime stories, and all over my wife’s dress and my daughter’s pajamas. My older daughter ran screaming and crying from the room, laid in a ball in bed sobbing loud. Fair enough. My wife got herself and the little one stripped down and into the bath tub. I mopped up the grode and put the towels and clothes and blanket in the washer. Bath ended, I held the little one while my wife finished bedtime stories for the big one. The little one draped her arms around my neck, pushed her forehead into my clavicle, said “Daddy. Dance.” and fell asleep thirty seconds after I hit play on of the soothing nightime numbers we always dance to together as part of the bedtime ritual. I kissed her wispy baby hair, enjoyed the sleepy snuggles, and felt smug about how, whatever the shortcomings of my life and person, this was awesome and hey let’s be honest a lot of dudes just aren’t as good of a dad as I am and that’s fucked up but also their loss really because parenting’s hard but it’s so rewarding too and she turned her head to push her nose into my sternum, opened her mouth, said something like “bleaah” and spilled another, I don’t know, gallon of stinking chunky liquid down my entire torso. It felt extra gross that the stuff felt hot, like when I accidentally wear my coffee on my walk back from the kitchen at work. I said something calm like “oh god I need your help like right now immediately come quick stop whatever you’re doing oh god hurry hurry hurry” and my wife ran into the room, took the baby again. I eased my shirt off over my head, trying not to get any bits of this gunk, which until a moment ago been inside my perfect angel’s apparently revoltingly stinky stomach, in my hair or, worse yet, my eyes or on my face, turned the shirt inside out, folded it, then used that to wipe up the floor again. I took a shower, felt much better. We all went to bed, slept badly because of little sicky’s crying in her sleep because she was in pain or whatever, in total disregard of my work and jobhunting deadlines and need for beauty sleep to prevent or at least slow the age-induced putrification of my entire body. Selfish, isn’t she? I don’t know where she gets it from. I felt like shit at work all day, came home early to take the big kid to her evening dance class, and felt mad at my kid for making me feel like a jerk for having emotional responses other than just wanting her to be well and fearing that she might die from whatever illness she has. In my defense I figured she’d be fine because perked up in the morning, and also I was really tired and am a terrible narcissist who doesn’t know how to end blog posts.