Transmissions From Baby-Town: “Turning Corners”

Let me be your birth control, those without kids: the first six weeks of raising a Tiny Human provide a lesson in small miseries. You have not slept. The pieces of your life — the schedule that holds your sanity together — has been hammered apart like so much peanut brittle and, for added measure, is then thrown into Cookie Monster’s crushing maw to finish the job. You feel like a tooth cracked apart, the raw nerve exposed. Everything feels like the blood test from THE THING: a hot wire stuck in a petri dish of blood, then pop, then monsters, then something has to die screeching in fire.

That thing that’s dying in a fire is your old life.

The old ways are gone.

The old roads are shut.

It is the dawn of a new day.

These are the poo-dimmed tides.

* * *

Raising a baby might as well qualify you for credits in a class called FECAL MANAGEMENT 101. That’s what you’re doing a lot of the time: just managing poop, both literally and figuratively. Very early the poo is nasty. You could shingle a roof or fill potholes with the black tarry meconium. Then it gets a little better. Poop from pure breast-milk is nutty, popcorny, not entirely unpleasant. (I won’t lie. It made me hungry.) But soon as a drop of formula touches that kid’s lips it’s like his gut flora turn into teenagers — the innocence of his bowels is lost, and now his intestinal bacteria are all a bunch of hooligans hanging out under lampposts, smoking noxious cigarettes.

Give the kid formula to supplement and his shit starts smelling like shit.

And the wee one blows ass like a champion. You could push a sailboat with the wind that comes out of his bediapered hindquarters. And kill flowers with the smell.

* * *

Everything was going fine down below, but then suddenly: the specter of constipation.

B-Dub hadn’t gone for… I think it was four days? I know how I feel if I don’t, ahem, take out the biological garbage once a day, so there we are, starting to worry. We think, ye gods, he’s probably swelling up with poop. One day he’ll be like Violet Beauregarde in the Wonka Factory, blowing up like a blimp — except instead of purple, he’ll be the color of caramel sauce. Then he’ll rupture. Pbbt.

So we call the doctor and the nurse says, “Give him an infant suppository,” except she doesn’t tell us that you don’t buy infant suppositories, you buy larger suppositories then cut them up into quarter sticks. And nobody else tells us this either, so we run around like assholes for the evening until finally we come upon the truth and my Mother-in-Law thankfully shows up with what we need.

Giving a suppository to a wiggly infant is like trying to punch a moon bounce — your intended attack always returns. It calls to mind giving a pill to our terrier: the medicine ever comes back into your hand.

Finally it worked. The child purged. And what came out was almost disappointing: no epic flush, no apocalyptic explosion, no crap tsunami. It was just… a normal baby bowel movement. And it wasn’t even constipation, technically. Not like he was pooping little ball bearings or anything.

* * *

Four more days, same problem.

No poop.

Moderate discomfort.

Awesome.

You look online — i.e. gaze into the doom-eye of the mad oracle — and you find that, as it turns out, Every Baby Is A Different Baby. Some kids poop five times a day. Some kids poop once every five days. Some are efficient little processors and don’t need to go all that often — after all, it’s not like they’re eating cheesesteaks and bran cereal every couple hours. They’re on a liquid diet. Most of that can be peed out.

Even still, everybody wants to make you feel like a shitheel because your baby isn’t pooping. Like it’s our fault. “Oh, am I not supposed to store my wine cork collection in his butthole? Oops! Mea culpa.”

The other problem is, apparently you can, Pavlov-style, train your child to poop only with suppositories accidentally. Instead of a dinner bell ringing meaning food, it’s the rectal plunging of a glycerin tab to signal unconsciously that, hey, it’s totally time to take a crap now, thanks.

It’s times like this you suddenly realize, oh my god, this is our lives. We can barely make the time to go to the bathroom ourselves but here we are, obsessing over the effluence of our child.

* * *

For the record, it was just the formula. We cut back and moved him from Enfamil Gentlease to Similac and, ta-da, no more constipation. Stupid razzafrazza formula. Oh, and thank you, doctor, for not recommending this course of action and making sure we figured it out all by our lonesome.

Did I mention we need a new doctor?

* * *

I was eating cottage cheese the other day, holding B-Dub, when he spit up. And I looked at what came out of his mouth, and I looked down at the cottage cheese I was eating, and I was struck by the notion that the cottage cheese companies (aka “Big Dairy”) were probably just repackaging Baby Puke and selling it to us as a snack. I mean, I kept eating it. Whaddya gonna do?

* * *

Our standards for cleanliness have dropped. We’re basically something out of a National Geographic special these days, like, we’re people from one of those tribes only recently discovered. The constant nursing. The origami boulders of spit-up paper towels everywhere. The fact that when I put on a shirt, I examine it not to see if there are any stains but rather, how bad the stains happen to be before I throw it on.

And I inevitably wear it. Because, who’s got time for laundry?

We’ve gone back to some primal state.

* * *

I wear earplugs now when we bathe him. His cries don’t really bother me, but there’s this special horrific alignment when we get him in the echo chamber of the bathroom — his shrieks of horror turn into this pandemonious cacophony, a sound not unlike all of the souls of the damned being thrust into a cauldron of bubbling pitch. For some reason, this sound doesn’t bother my wife as much.

But me? It raises my blood pressure, makes my ears ring, tenses my shoulders into hard bundles.

Only then. Only during bathing.

You’d think he’d like it.

“Oh, hey, I’m being dipped in a gently warm bath and being softly sponged by a beautiful woman whose boobs I see frequently. I think I’ll take a special moment to scream as if I’m being covered by a thousand papercuts and washed in a tub full of Sea Breeze and rattlesnake venom. Everybody good with that? Super.”

* * *

The other day, two fawns played on our lawn while the mother stood off to the side, chewing on some leaves. I wanted to ask her, “Do your babies explosively poop up their backs?”

Nobody talks about that milestone, do they?

First smile.

First word.

First breach of the fecal containment unit.

I almost wish I could attain the “up the back blow-out.” Just to see if I could.

* * *

He won’t sleep in his bassinet anymore. Only sleeps on his mother. Which means she has to rig up this whole thing so he stays laying across the Boppy at night. Which means she basically is developing some kind of Mommy-fed scoliosis, some joint-cracking arthritis at a young age, some mad calcification of her bones. All to support the Little Pink Dictator that rules our life.

Once, I was ruled by an entirely different Little Pink Dictator.

But he’s staying quiet these days. As well he should be. I won’t tolerate any nonsense from him because it’s his fault we’re in this mess. Don’t think I’m not savvy to your games, you little cock-waffle.

* * *

You start to have serious conversations. Conversations that can only happen when you haven’t slept and the baby is inconsolable and the air smells of baby powder and burned nerves.

You start to say, “Maybe we just run away. Hawaii, right? Still in the country. No need for a passport. We live on the beach. Leave the baby here with a note. Our parents will handle it. Or the neighbors. Or whatever homeless person moves into our domicile when we vacate. Is there a rescue shelter for babies? Maybe we can just take him there. I mean, pssh, pfft, we’ll leave some money. For… toys and… baby things. It’ll be fine. Let’s just go. It’s the dark of night. We can just go. We can just leave. Hurry before he notices!”

But he always notices. Because he’s good like that.

* * *

Thing is, it all sounds horrible.

And anybody gazing in from the outside as you are now, anybody who doesn’t have kids, probably thinks, man, that sounds awful. And at times, it is. Even still, you get your moments.

Better yet, around the six week mark we turned a corner. He stopped being Herr Doktor Pissypants all day. He’s alert, now. He smiles when we smile. He babbles at us. He says A-Goo and Ook and he yips like a coyote and howls like a wolf and he laughs when you mess with him. Moreover, not only is he changing, but we’re changing, too. We’re figuring stuff out. We know about gripe water. I know about the Magical Daddy Football Hold. I know that if you take him outside he becomes rapt by all that he sees.

We know to just listen.

The other night we had him laying (not sleeping) next to the bed and he was just… yammering away at whatever ghosts and bugs live in our house. Laughing and yelling and oohing and aahing. And it’s sweet.

We think he’s advanced, of course. Every parent thinks their kid is advanced. They’re like, “OMG LOOK AT THE WAY HE SPIT UP ARE THOSE THE FIBONACCI NUMBERS.” But the way he tracks objects and smiles and says consonants and kicks his legs and tries to push off and stand up and memorizes the stories of Mark Twain (okay, I might be lying about that last part) makes us sure he’s going to be a smart kid. Which is probably more trouble than we’re prepared for, but oh well, so it goes.

We think he’s cute, too. Every parent thinks they’re kid is cute.

But look at that face.

Look at it.

I SAID LOOK AT IT GODDAMNIT — see this gun? Yeah.

Like I said. Cute. Objectively. Shut up.

Point being —

There it goes, that corner we just turned.

We smile and he smiles. I ask him to tell me a story and he burbles and coos. And it all starts to make a weird kind of sense. It all comes together and says, this is why you’re here, this is why you do things, this is why I write and why my wife gets scoliosis and why we work and love and live, and it’s all for him, all for the ever-adorable and totally-advanced Wriggly Napoleon who governs our lives.

Every day, it seems, is a new corner to turn.

Which is terrifying and beautiful in one weird bundle.

* * *

(Required continued reading: “Sailing Over A Year,” and “Dinosaur Vs. Parents,” both by Lauren Beukes, both about her experiences as a parent during the first two years. In short: awesome.)