I'll Mature When I'm Dead (4 page)

S
o you’re about to become a dad! That is wonderful news. As the poet Wordsworth once said, “Fatherhood is truly the most . . . HEY! You kids put down those hatchets RIGHT NOW!”

The poet Wordsworth’s point was that, although fatherhood is a rewarding experience, it’s an experience that you will sometimes wish was rewarding somebody else. Nevertheless, if you ask any dad if fatherhood is worth it, he will immediately answer yes. Why? Because his wife might be listening.

No, seriously, he will answer yes because fatherhood is a great thing, for reasons I will attempt without success to explain later. But you need to be prepared for some big changes in your lifestyle.

To begin with, for a while after the birth of your child you will have the same sex life as a waffle iron. This is understandable, considering the physics of childbirth. Imagine that you have spent seventeen straight hours trying to push a mature grapefruit the entire length of your urinary tract, and you have a rough idea of what your wife goes through when she has a baby. You will be as welcome in her private region as German troops are in Paris. She may sleep with a Taser. But rest assured that, in time, she will come around. And by “in time” I mean, “in a really long time.”

The other side of that coin is that for a while you might not feel quite as attracted to your wife as you used to. For one thing, she’ll have gained some weight, and she’ll tend to dress in “post-maternity” fashions purchased from The House of Tarps. For another thing, milk will be squirting out of her breasts. This is perfectly natural; when you think about it, this is the actual reason why your wife has breasts in the first place. But it’s still going to seem weird to you, because like most men, you have always viewed breasts as fun recreational items existing purely for your personal enjoyment. Now all of a sudden they’re producing dairy products! It’s as if a tennis racket suddenly started dispensing ketchup.

Very Important:
During this sensitive postpartum time, you must be very careful not to say anything negative about your wife’s appearance. On the other hand, you must not say anything
positive
about your wife’s appearance, because she’ll know you’re lying. And whatever you do, do NOT give her the impression that you’re deliberately
avoiding
talking about her appearance. This might be a good time to enlist in the navy.

I’m just kidding, of course.
³
You’ll want to stick around so that you can experience the first amazing weeks of parenthood, a magical adventure during which you will discover many wonderful things, such as what is on TV at 3:46 A.M. You’ve probably heard that newborn babies sleep an average of sixteen hours per day. What you may not have heard is that, rather than do all of their sleeping in one big chunk, babies divide the day into roughly two hundred seven-minute naps. This means they wake up roughly two hundred times a day, and they always wake up cranky.

So as new parents, you will spend the first few months, day and night—especially night—doing virtually nothing except trying to de-crankify your baby. This is where it is critically important that you and your wife function as a team. Your role on the team, when the baby cries, is to say to your wife, in a loving and supportive team-player tone: “I would get up and feed the baby myself, but unfortunately I do not have milk squirting from my nipples.” Try not to resume openly snoring until your wife has left the bedroom.

If feeding doesn’t work, or if your wife, needing a little personal time, has burst out of the house and is sprinting off down the street in her nightgown, screaming, it’s your turn to try to quiet the baby. Here’s what you do:

This lullaby will help relieve some of the tension you’re feeling as you—only recently a normal person, now a sleep-deprived zombie staggering around in circles while a tiny human barfs on you—begin to truly understand how much your lifestyle is going to change.

I distinctly remember when this really sunk in for me. It was 1980, and I, a brand-new father, was at some friends’ house during a New Year’s Eve party. The party was going on downstairs; I was upstairs with my two-month-old son, Robert, who was lying in the exact center of our hosts’ bed, taking one of his two hundred daily naps. I was watching him, in case he woke up crying, or suddenly figured out how to play with matches.

From downstairs I could hear the roar of the party. It was a major party, the kind of party where some of the guests could very well wake up naked in a foreign country. A little before midnight I took a quick peek downstairs, and I saw that the party had reached Gator Stage. This is the point a party reaches when certain guys, having consumed perhaps eight or nine more shots of tequila than they really need, find that two things are true:

The solution is for these guys to dance in a style known as “the gator,” which is when you lie on the dance floor and writhe around to the music in what you believe to be a rhythmical manner. You run the risk that the vertical dancers will step on you, but if you’re truly in gator mode, you wouldn’t notice if a UPS truck parked on your head.

So there I was, peeking down at my friends having crazy fun—fun that, the previous New Year’s Eve, I had been part of. I went back and sat on the bed with Robert, and it hit me: Not only was I not going to be gatoring this New Year’s Eve, but
I was never going to gator again
. Dads don’t gator. Oh, you might attend a party where gatoring has commenced, and you might even consider joining in. But as you start to get down on the floor, some part of your brain—the Dad Lobe—will kick in and remind you that you need to relieve the babysitter. And you will step over your friends (or on them; it doesn’t matter) and head for the door.

So you will not be partying as hard. Here are some other things that will change:

Am I saying that, once you become a dad, you’re never going to have fun again? Yes.

Wait, I mean no. You can still have fun; you will just have to make some adjustments. For example: One Thanksgiving I was at a gathering of families at the home of Gene Weingarten and Arlene Reidy. It was traditional at this gathering for the men to help the women prepare the food. We did this by leaving them alone and going outside to play a game of touch football in the backyard, from which Gene, the thoughtful host, had removed approximately 60 percent of the dog turds.

One of the regulars in this game was a guy I’ll call Bob.
⁵
This particular year, Bob had a problem: His wife, whom I will call Mary,
⁶
had asked him to watch their infant daughter, which meant he was stuck on the sideline holding the baby in one hand and a beer in the other.

And then, at what is known in sports as a Critical Juncture, one of the players on my team had to leave the game. We looked at Joel.
⁷
Now, as a dad, he had to make a decision, weighing various factors. On one hand, he was responsible for his infant child, a precious, irreplaceable human life, utterly helpless and totally dependent on him. On the other hand,
it was third down
.

“You can
not
tell Mary,” he said, setting his daughter down on the lawn. (He also—and this is a measure of how seriously a man takes a third-down situation—set down his beer.) We huddled and came up with a play, diagramming it so that none of the pass routes went too close to the baby, because that is the kind of responsible adults we are. I don’t remember what actually happened in the play. All I remember is that it was crucial.

The point is that Joel was able to fulfill his parental responsibilities
and
have carefree guy fun for a stretch of nearly forty seconds. I realize this doesn’t sound like much compared with, say, a weekend in Vegas. But as a dad, you will learn to take what fun you can get.

What’s more, in time you’ll discover—and here we are getting to the Message—that the fun you’re missing out on is more than made up for by something new—something you’ve never known before; something wonderful.

It will happen when your baby is around three months old. He or she will be lying on his or her back, making random baby movements and sounds, as though communicating with invisible space aliens. Suddenly you and your baby will make eye contact, and something will pass between you. Then you will lean over, and—as millions of fathers have before you—you will place your mouth on your baby’s belly and blow in such a manner as to make a sound like a musk ox breaking wind. This will have a profound effect on your baby. This will strike your baby as the funniest thing that he or she has experienced in his or her entire life. Your baby will laugh, and it will be the purest and best laugh you ever heard. You will laugh, too, and you will have no choice but to re-flatulate the baby’s belly, and your baby will think it’s even funnier the second time. So you’ll do it again, and again, and again, and it will get funnier
every time
. You and your baby will be laughing and drooling like a pair of morons. Which you are, but in a good way.

You will then begin to understand something that is at the very heart of Dadness: Although your wife is probably a better natural parent than you are when it comes to things like remembering to feed and clothe and provide medical care for the baby, you also bring some important items to the parental table, with Exhibit A being fart jokes. As a guy of the male gender, you are genetically programmed to have superior skills in this area. You will find that you’re also better at, among other things, animal noises, peekaboo, scary stories, hide-and-seek, blocks, water balloons, and anything that involves batteries. Your child will gradually discover your talents in these areas, and he or she will become your biggest fan. In those magical early years, you will be, to your child, the coolest person on the planet, with the possible exception of the Wiggles.
⁸
The two of you will form a bond—a permanent, unbreakable bond that will connect the two of you, powerfully and forever, until your child reaches age eleven and realizes that you’re a dork.

But you’ll get through that when the time comes. The point is, something is going to happen between you and your baby, and it will be like nothing that ever happened to you before, which is why nobody, least of all me, can even begin to explain to you why it’s so great. But it is; just wait. The longer you live, the more clearly you’ll see that no matter what else you’ve accomplished in life, the best thing you ever did, simple as it sounds, was be a dad.