Two Years of Parenthood: A Review
Part I: The Birth
Nobody told me that newborns are purple.
I read a few books about babies while my wife was pregnant. Okay, it was really just half a book. Plus half a book's worth of blog posts. But in not a single one of those pages or posts did I come across the following sentence: "Newborns can be purple; this is normal—don't freak out." I didn't freak out, exactly. But I suspect that the smile I gave my wife after looking at the violet screaming mass, which seemed impossibly large to have come from her body—which, indeed, the midwife seemed to have just lifted from a secret compartment hidden under the birthing bed, was not totally devoid of the slightest hint of a freak out.
My wife seemed to be thinking along similar lines. "She's purple!" she exclaimed. These were her first words following her awe-inspiring ordeal. The first post-birth words our baby ever heard.
There were a lot of people in the room. I found it very hard to keep track of who was supposed to be doing what. But in response to my wife's remark, a guy with a ponytail, standing next to some chest-high machine covered in buttons, leaned in, nodded and made the OK sign. This was all the reassurance we needed.
Guided by gestures, I soon found myself escorted to a different room. The purple baby was being inspected. "Ten fingers," said a woman in scrubs, "and, let's see..." I held my breath. "Ten toes!" Thank God.
The purple baby was wrapped in a tiny white bathrobe (adorable!), and I was told to sit in a chair. At that point the wriggling package was deposited in my anxious arms.
I suspect this is a powerful experience for everyone. But it had an extra significance for me. It wasn’t only my first time holding my own baby. As far as I could recall, it was my first time holding any baby ever. Out of all my siblings, I was the first to have a child. Out of all my close friends, I was the first to have a child. Out of all my cousins and second cousins, etc. etc. Indeed, barring a select few long-haul flights, I could not remember being in the company of any baby for any significant length of time.
And I had just turned thirty-three years old.
I suppose this is what people talk about when they talk about the fertility crisis. Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my experience (or lack thereof) signaled some historical inflection point, passed largely without comment, carrying us toward an empty future.
I could hear my wife conversing with a doctor in the adjoining room. There were beeps and hums and scrub-clad figures walking to and fro. But my world shrank to the size of two thin black slits staring up at me from an impassive face.
"Welcome to earth, baby girl," I said, fighting a quaver in my voice. "We will love you, always."
And then the small purple face began to cry.
Excursus 1: On Scrotum Ropes and Other Compensatory Mechanisms
Before moving on, I must dwell briefly on one other point. The point in question being a person, namely: my wife.
My understanding is that for most of history men were not present at delivery. Not permitted in the room, even. In America, it wasn’t until the1970s that a majority of fathers began attending births.
Having experienced one firsthand, I can understand why most men have opted out for most of history. No man likes to feel useless.
According toStrabo, the ancient Celtiberians had a custom where the women would put their husbands to bed and minister to them as if they were the ones about to give birth. The women themselves delivered their babies while working in the fields, out of earshot of their snug husbands. Diodorus Siculustells of a similar custom among the ancient Corsicans. The nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward B. Tylordocumented similar practices all around the world—men play-acting illness while their wives suffered real labor pains.
These rituals strike us as quite silly, but they seem preferable to a story (of dubious provenance) told about the Huichol people of Mexico. Their practice reportedly involves a man sequestering himself in the rafters of his home and tying a long rope around his scrotum. When his wife experiences contractions, she pulls vigorously on the rope so that her husband above her might share in the pains of childbirth.
Bedrest and scrotum-pulling both seem like elaborate ways men have designed to distract themselves from their inadequacy. No event is more central to life than birth, and at that event men are condemned to be mere spectators. In the delivery room there is no “man in the arena”—only the man doing his best to remember the breathing exercises he Googled frantically somewhere between his home and the hospital.
I thought of the Huichol people as I stupidly repeated the doctor’s instructions, watching my wife with thinly concealed amazement, feeling a gratitude so crushing I didn't think I could bear it.
I tried to fix that feeling in my head, to pin it down like some rare tropical butterfly: this is the woman you love; this is her trial; you must not forget this, no matter what.
In the months that followed, I would often (too often) forget that feeling. But occasionally some echo of it would reel its way across my baby-warped brain, and I would look at her green eyes and remember that I was gazing at something divine. A creator of Actual General Intelligence.
Part II: The Aftermath
It is telling that the expert psychologistshired by the CIA during the height of the War on Terror to devise new techniques of psychological torture had difficulty improving on the Golden Oldie of extended sleep deprivation.
For weeks I felt the columns of my being bend. Happily, they did not break.
There was, nevertheless—and I feel wracked with shame as I write this—one single moment where I held my head in my hands and wondered if I had made a terrible mistake.
The crying was endless. It numbed me. I floated above my body and saw myself being cried at (loudly, so loudly) by a baby who was no longer purple.
Sometimes I tried singing. Sometimes that helped. Often it didn't. The crying burrowed its way into my brain. I felt the decibels chiseling away at something deep and soft and hidden, never meant to be touched by sound.
I’d wake with a start. "Is she breathing?"
The poo was endless. There were fountains of pee, always just before the diaper was on.
Strip the bed. Grab a towel.
So many rookie mistakes.
Of course, there were also upsides. I’ll focus on just a few here.
The first had to do with how I saw people. Suddenly every person I encountered resembled a walking, talking monument to human compassion. Someone had kept them alive. Fed them, clothed them. Saved them from every lethal hazard (there are so many lethal hazards!). The entire human race, stretching back three tenths of a million years, assumed the form of an endless procession of scream-filled nights soothed with suckling and lullabies. Where others saw mute faces sitting on a bus or a standing at a streetcorner, I saw precious capsules of care—living legacies of immense self-sacrifice, compressed into tiny human form.
The other upside concerned my own parents. For I realized that I too was a precious capsule. A monument to their devoted selflessness. And I grieved the pain that I had ever caused them—the worry, the anger, and the stress. Countless memories came to my mind of moments when I had made things needlessly difficult for them as a child, or, less forgivably, as a teenager. I became aware of an impossible debt fastened to my life with an ineradicable seal. And it bore their names. "Thank you" didn't seem to cut it. So I said nothing. But my heart glowed when they smiled at their granddaughter. It seemed like a start. A first payment on a lifelong installment plan.
The largest upside, of course, was the baby herself. She cried, as I have already mentioned. But she also laughed. There was the sweet, light laughter when she saw my wife pick up a frying pan for the first time. Was it something in the shape of the pan? The color? Who knows... But somewhere in that pan was a source of utter delight invisible to me.
Then there was the somewhat sinister giggle she unleashed when a laundry rack collapsed under the weight of her clothes. One evening she pooped in her bathtub, and in the rush to remove her I inadvertently knocked all our soaps and shampoo bottles into the murky water. The laughter was loud, chronic, and contagious.
When you haven’t been around for long, it’s easy to find the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.
Part III: The Milestones
When should a baby learn to roll? According toGerber, Wilks, and Erdie-Lalena (2010), it’s four to five months. For infants in Hong Kong,apparently, its five to six months. Emily Osterinsists it’s between three and five months, and that you should start to worry if they haven’t rolled by nine months. Judging from various Redditresponses, some babies roll as early as two weeks, other babies skip rolling entirely and go on to do yoga at the age of four.
The more you read about babies, the more they appear like some cryptozoological sea creature seen by sailors in a storm.
Sailor #1: “It had tusks, by Jove, sharp as needle-sleet. And five hundred eyes, all black as Satan’s bowels!”
Sailor #2: “Say ye so? I saw it in the shrouds. Like an eel it was, five leagues long and full of phlegm!”
Sailor #3:“Peace, thou crazy loons... ‘Twas but the forked white fire of the squall. Now, man the capstan!”
As it happened, my baby rolled at seven months.
At five months it looked like she was going to roll. It really did. I cheered her on, eager to celebrate another milestone. She got about 75% of the way there. All she needed was a little more momentum to clear the final hurdle of her own shoulder. But it was not to be. The rocking motions caused a certain strain, and with something like a sigh she settled on her back and had a poo.
And for the next two months, nothing.
Nothing in the literature that I could find said anything about three-quarters of a roll counting as a milestone. After her first attempt, she seemed to lose interest in the idea of rolling entirely. It was like an adventurer getting within sight of unmapped lands and deciding they weren’t worth the extra hassle of actually reaching.
The following two months witnessed a steady rise in the ambient anxiety that had pervaded my entire post-baby life. I reviewed the events of the gestion period. During her first two trimesters, my pregnant wife had occasionally consumed tuna. Then I’d readthis article claiming that the risks far outweighed the benefits. In the sixth roll-free month of my daughter’s life, I found myself cursing all the tuna. Had we messed up?
I never hear it mentioned as a reason for low birth rates, but having a child makes you a hostage to fate like nothing else. Much of twenty-first-century reality feels increasingly programmable. We watch TV shows when we want. We carry on desynchronized text conversations at our convenience. But babies are little bundles of disruption. No one agrees on how to raise them. And no one can promise you that they won’t cause you infinite heartache. In having a child, you expose yourself to the risk of having your whole world destroyed.
When you welcome a baby into your home, it doesn’t come alone. It’s always shadowed by the specter of unthinkable grief.
It was a hot summer day when my daughter finally rolled over. I clapped and hollered, annoyed I hadn’t caught it on video. Within days she was rolling all the time, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Part IV: The Verdict
Occasionally, when I look at my daughter, I see a fragment of someone else’s face—sometimes it’s the mischievous curve of one of her grandmother’s smiles or the glint of her other grandmother’s eyes. Sometimes I see glimpses of faces that once stared at me from black-and-white photographs. At those moments, I don’t see my daughter as an individual at all. She is a giggling mosaic. A little montage of people I have loved.
My wife tells me that as a child her sister was obsessed with a question. She would ask her parents repeatedly: “Why did you bring me into this world?”
I don’t know if that kind of curiosity is heritable. But just in case it seems prudent to have a decent answer prepared. So here goes:
“Daughter, there are many answers to your question. I’ll start with the least trite. You are here because we have work to do. Humans are the means by which the cosmos comes to know itself, and every emotion you have ever had—and every emotion you will ever have—is the universe’s attempt to figure something out. Your mind is an instrument crafted over billions of years. But nature is like a brilliant inventor who also suffers from amnesia. You can use your senses to help nature remember how it works. You can use your thoughts and actions to surprise nature, showing it what it can do.
“But there’s something else too. Your great-grandfather survived near misses with rifle fire in the Burmese jungle, thinking only of his Violet. Your grandfather survived near misses with rifle fire in Chad, thinking only of his Ellen. At several points in history, several millimeters separated you and I from sheer oblivion. Think about that. You are the product of an unthinkably vast sum of improbable events. I met your mother because we both decided to attend the same seminar at the same conference. The conference was held 4,900 miles from where your mother was born, and 4,700 miles from where I was born. What is the likelihood of that happening? It could be the outcome of blind chance. It could be that the universe conspired to bring you about for reasons only it knows. In either case, your very existence is such a stunningly bizarre thing that in any other corner of the cosmos you would be regarded as a miracle. But you were born on Earth, where such miracles are so commonplace that they don’t register as miracles as all. Pending confirmation of some recent discoveries, Earth appears to be the only planet to harbor life. But, more importantly, it is also the only planet to harbor love. Life is very interesting, don’t get me wrong. Metabolism, it’s incredible! But love is something else. Ask onescholar, and he’ll date love’s emergence to the Late Triassic. Askanother, and she’ll date it to the late twelfth century. Whenever it got started, the common depiction of love as a naked infant reveals something important: it is babies who teach us what love really is. It is in the production of innocent little bodies—requiring the all-consuming attention that only love can reliably produce—that we grasp what love is really capable of. We are humbled before love’s power. It controls us, guides us. Toward what destination? I don’t know. No more than the tides know where the moon pulls them. But your very existence is of love’s obscure machinations. You see, love wanted you here. Who was I to say no?”
As I write this review, I am sneaking glances at my second daughter, snug in her crib. She was born just a few days ago. I feel like the highest praise I could give anything is that I would gladly do it all again.