It's different when they're yours

Okay, so the twitter thing isn’t really working for me. First of all, I’m too damn long winded for the 144 character limit (or whatever it is). Second, I can’t stand all the garbage on there. It seems to only exist to link your crappy under-viewed opinions to the crappy under-viewed opinions of others. Sort of like “well no one cares what you say, but LOOK AT LADY GAGA’s PAGE!!”. So I’ve decided to raise the old blog from the dead. The main topic for today is babies. When I was in early high school, one of my main sources of money during the summers was babysitting. Yea, doesn’t seem right does it. Anyway, my sister and I would watch the children of a lady my mother worked with. I suspect the motivation was twofold, as it gave the older kids (my sister and I) something to keep us busy and out of trouble, while giving the smaller kids competent supervision at a cheap rate. Although it was a decent arrangement (lasting about 2 years), this experience made me realize that I don’t care for children. The older I got, the more I disliked them. I didn’t want to actively cause harm to them, quite the contrary. I didn’t want anything to do with them. It seems easy to speculate that some traumatic incident caused me to dislike them, but that’s not the case. The children were averagely (is that a word) behaved, it was more just the general idea and implementation that I didn’t like. I hated the noise, the mess, the stickiness, the temperament, the smell, the constant vigilance required, the occasionally combative attitudes, the restrictions, and the overall sense of “I can’t do what I want because of them”. Sounds like I’ll make a great father, huh? Fast forward a few years, and I’m now graduated from high school, working and married. Consensus was that we’d wait a while before seriously considering children, though they were sort of an “expected” product of the stage of life we were entering (young married adulthood). After about 5 years like this, the discussions of children became more frequent, the poking and prodding from potential grandparents became impossible to ignore, and the timing was bearing down on us. Basically, we wanted to play in our early marriage without the restrictions of children, and yet we wanted them to be out of the house before we turned 50. That pretty much means we need to be done having children by 30 or so. The number of children had remained sort of nebulous, wandering from 1 to as many as 4 (at least I think I remember talking about that many at one point). As we discussed it more and more, 4 became too many and 1 was too few based on readings on social interactions of single children. So the number kind of dwelled at 2 or 3. So rather than get all obsessive about it, when the time came to start “trying” we just sort of stopped preventing and figured we’d see what happened. Now, the history of these things in my family is one of “If there is any possible way… it’ll happen”. Essentially, the men in my family seem to carry super sperm which WILL accomplish their mission if even remotely possible. True to form, the first ovulation resulted in pregnancy. So here we go. It’s officially too late to change our minds (without raising other murky ethical questions anyway) and we’re going to have a child. Interestingly, my wife and I discovered this on Father’s day 2007. We disclosed this to the now soon-to-be grandparents and they could hardly contain themselves. Meanwhile, I’m quietly concerned about these feelings I harbor about children in general. I have read a great deal about being a father and the general consensus seems to be that “it’s different when they’re yours”. Although this may be a trend, it’s not a rule, so I remain reserved. Fast forward about 8.5 months and I’m having a bit of a freak out. My wife, who was going in for a normal ultrasound for some minor thing I can’t even recall, calls me and informs me that she’s being admitted to the hospital and labor will be induced. Excited, nervous and genuinely scared to death, I head to the hospital for what would turn into a very long, sleepless and uneventful night. However, as morning approaches things begin to unfold rapidly. 16 hours into labor, and things are primed for the main event. Epidural in place, full dilation, doctor in office, we’re at the moment of truth. I’ve read many stories about fathers creating this incredible bond right at the moment of birth. I’ve seen a fair number of animal births, and frankly this scene is far too familiar. I am naturally concerned that something will happen, and that the child or mommy will be injured. With all of the hospital staff there commanding in their respective realms, I am all but absent in the proceedings. Basically what I’m trying to say is with various animals there is a chance you may be required to step in and provide material assistance with the birthing process should something go wrong, whereas here I get yelled at if I so much as watch the epidural insertion. I feel useless and unappreciated, but I’m there for morale support I guess. Well the moment arrives, and the baby comes sliding out (again, looking all too familiar) and I’m waiting to see if it’s alive and well or if we’ll be dragged through a neonatal intensive care situation. After some suctioning and toweling, baby’s chest swells with a jolt and the screams begin. All the checks and balances are being performed and I’m trying to stay out of the way, satisfy my curiosity, and of course sensitively capture the moment on digital “film”. The rest of the morning is a haze. I recall being told not to touch anything and yet pay exquisite attention to every detail of the nursing staff. There are a lot of pictures and trying to look happy (although inside I just want baby to sleep, wife to sleep, family to go home so that I can sleep). In the days following, a whole series of new patterns emerge in terms of feeding, rest, cleaning, sleeping, working, etc. This turns out to be my worst semester in college (grades wise anyway), and in general life feels pretty disrupted. Troubling me slightly is the fact that this new family addition seems to just be a “thing” that we need to take care of. It doesn’t yet feel like “mine” or like anything I am or should be emotionally invested in. Yet intellectually I realize that this is something society says I should be willing to give my life for. This disconnect between what I think I SHOULD feel and what I ACTUALLY feel keeps me concerned for months to come. As the child grows, she becomes louder, more needy, begins interacting with her environment, starts crawling and walking and my interactions with her become more complex and varied. Finally, as she begins to speak I recognize that I care for her a bit. It’s not the life completing, all encompassing, unconditional and eternal love I hear other people describe. It’s something though, and it has me feeling a little more at ease. As she grows, these feelings do too. She shows an early aptitude for things in general and I try to stimulate her curiosity and feed it as much as I can without overwhelming her. As these feelings grow, I am also aware of how much this little girl has complicated our lives. Basically a complete restructuring of priorities, some of which can’t be changed (school for instance). Although I do find myself somewhat emotionally invested, I am seriously rethinking the whole “single-children-have-social-problems” idea I’d read about years before. I figure if one is this disruptive, a second will likely be twice as much or even more. More reading and discussion pushes me in the direction of having a second child but the possibility of 3 is no longer an option and I begin to make plans to prevent it from happening accidentally. Once again, we decide that we should just go off the birth control and see what happens, and once again my little Super Swimmers get the job done in an all too quick and efficient manner (though the fact that we’re both healthy likely has something to do with it). A few weeks in and we discover it’s going to be a boy, which is perfect because now my decision to stop at 2 will have less resistance from the grandparents and possibly the wife. As the due date gets closer, I am almost dreading the birth. Fortunately, I don’t have a whole lot of time to dwell on it because this is my final semester in college and there is some concern over whether baby will wait until after finals to make an appearance. In the end, baby did end up waiting just long enough for me to graduate. A few days later and Nikki’s had a rough night with some significant discomfort in the “baby region”. So we head to the hospital as things are getting pretty painful and more frequent. She gets settled in and I head to forage for some food. No 16 hour labor here, I get a call while grabbing some breakfast informing me that I need to be somewhere else and quickly. The ball starts rolling and I find myself about to go through the whole baby thing again. Once more I feel useless, like a piece of fake furniture in a home that’s for sale (I’m just there to make other people feel better, but serve no function at all). Two or three quick pushes, slosh, suction, towels, screeeeaaaaaaaming, scale, pictures and then off again to have the nursing staff talk to me as though I’m incompetent (which I HATE!). Once again, life gets thrown into the industrial strength blender of childbirth but we have a better idea of what’s happening and things settle a bit faster. And once again I find myself not particularly emotionally invested in this new noisy thing, although by this time I have become really quite attached to its predecessor. The days start turning into weeks, which in turn morph into months. I find there are just enough distractions to keep me sane, though far fewer than I’d prefer and they’re somewhat spoiled by feelings of guilt over Nikki not getting sufficient reprieve from all the same crap I’m going through. Much frustration is had by all, tongues get bit, walls get punched, babysitters get hired when possible, events get passed over or canceled when babysitters can’t be hired, and the family cart generally trundles on through life. As the time goes by this little boy starts crawling, interacting, walking, and generally being an inquisitive little human. Slowly, with more patience than I thought I was capable of, feelings begin to grow again. So here we are now, the middle of 2012. My little girl is a feisty little 4 year old fire cracker of intelligent attitude and my little boy is an arm’s out almost running stair conquering melon loving 1 year old ball of sticky smiles. “When they’re yours, it’s different”. Yea, because you can’t walk away. You stay there and put up with it, pushing yourself to new limits of patience, anger suppression and delayed/canceled aspirations. The alternatives (namely deadbeat dad syndrome and infanticide) are worse. Things are better now than they have been in a long while, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. I look forward to being able to DO stuff with the kids, instead of just providing for them. I look forward to rekindling some of my more time consuming hobbies, which have been on hiatus for about 5 years now. And I look forward to renewing connections with people I shouldn’t have let myself drift from. Ugh, listen to me. You’d think I was becoming an optimist…