First Thoughts on Fatherhood

We're a little over a month in to this thing, so I thought I'd slap a few observations about fatherhood and the kid on this ol' non-baby blog.

The kid seems happy in a general sense.  Things do piss him off from time to time (Christmas music. Mitch McConnell), but overall his disposition is sunny.

He is like a woodpecker, the way he constantly pecks at my flat, barren chest.

My green fleece has become the uniform of fatherhood.  I wear it every day.  Every manner of baby-related crud is embedded in its fibers.

Humming phrases of Beethoven soothes the little beast in his most dyspeptic moods.  The morbid fellow favors the funeral marches of symphonies #3 and 7.

Cloth diapers ain't what they used to be.  The particularly high tech model we use, an amalgam of elastic, snaps and cotton inserts, is probably the MacBook of baby waste absorption systems.  Nothing gets through these suckers.  Except piss and shit.

The kid is an artist with his fecal matter.  He has decorated walls with a Pollockian mastery.  Must invest in canvas, take aim and get rich.

Breast-fed baby shit is tolerably innocuous.  Compared to its immediate antecedent, meconium, it is lovely, mustardy, wonderful stuff.  Meconium is surely what I will be scraping off the surfaces of hell when I am condemned.

The tit is his lodestar.  All else is intrigue.

The crying does not bother me, luckily.  Luckily, the kid doesn't cry much.  I'm not sure why I feel so calm about things.  Perhaps being a 36-year-old first-time father has me better prepared than the 26-year-old or 16-year-old McGraw would have been.  

The crusty, dried-out, raisin-like umbilical stump fell off early.  Not sorry to see the thing go.  Any parent feeling an urge to keep it for posterity needs to maybe dial down the sentimentalism, in my opinion.  My sometimes-popular wife sacrificed it to the fire gods, which seemed a noble and proper end for the defunct feeding tube.

His limbs flail in disharmony.  Each is governed by its own impulse.  None works with the other.  The orb mounted upon his neck flops and bobs in an particular display of gracelessness.  At times it crashes down with a force that seems bent on shattering my jaw.

Cars, once a mere nuisance on my way to and from work, have become baby-seeking missiles intent on one thing only: find and destroy William.

Breast milk tastes good.  Yes, I went there.  No, you cannot have some.*

His slate-colored eyes stare into vast distances.  At what he gazes, I know not.  Sometimes he simply appears to be marveling at the ceiling.  Like,  How the hell does that thing stay up?

Sleep has become the most precious resource, better than food, water and air combined.  The first time getting a solid 5-hour block was like being dipped into the purifying, crystalline waters of some sacred, mystic pool of the high Himalayas.

Fatigue has made me loopy.  Things I am not fully aware of at any given time:

The time of day
The day of week
Where I work
My full name
The login credentials for this blog.  Yes, this explains my long absence.

The kid likes being held.  I like holding him.  One adapts quickly.  I have become very adept at making martinis with one hand.

Nothing elicits more contrary opinions than child rearing.  My one bit of advice to new parents: keep your worries and concerns away from the internet.

Go ahead, read every book in the universe.  Nothing can prepare you.

What a clever trick, that such an amorphous, squishy, screaming, shitting, parasitic little thing can make us love it so much.  He has urinated on me enough that I have begun to suspect it is intentional, and yet **sappiness alert** I do love him, with an almost crippling desperation.  Going to work has become a daily torment.  Coming home redeems me five times weekly.

nwb

*Until FDA approved.