Fathers Day

 

My son turned one month old today, on Fathers’ Day. At home there’s been a lot of noise and figuring out who is doing what. Often my wife and I are trying to do the same task while another, more pressing one, goes unaddressed. We’re in the kitchen, say, and a pot starts to boil over, but a diaper needs changing. While Gina is taking off the diaper, I’ll start looking around frantically for wipes. Of course, the pot, meanwhile is overflowing copiously, snuffing out the flame. Unlit gas is spraying into the apartment. Either that, or we’re both going for the diaper or the burner at the same time and, for some reason when I get to it, I find I’m reluctant to relinquish the task I’ve chosen for myself. Stubbornly, I continue reaching for the burner knob even after I’ve seen that Gina’s going to get to it first. Meanwhile baby wails are filling the house. It’s always something.

So, I go to the library. It seems easier to leave the house, to thoroughly divide the household tasks which result entirely from our children. If I take my daughter to the library, for a moment I only have one responsibility and, alone, there’s no risk that I’ll run into anyone when attending to this responsibility. I won’t have to share it. That’s not to say we don’t get into trouble at the library. I’ve got to order another copy of Chicka Chicka 123 because my daughter tore half a page out of it. She’s also doing this thing where she loves to rub the pages excessively between her thumb and forefinger as she turns them. Not only is the resulting rubbing noise annoying—especially on the heavy, glossy paper they print kids’ books on—but it crumples the paper something awful. I have to smooth everything back out before we return the books and some of them still look like something that’s been relegated to the back of a fifth-grader’s desk for an entire school year.

The best course of action is to get the books and get out; then we go read them in a neutral zone: a place with nothing else to rip or crumple. We live next to a plaza with grass and benches which affords a pretty nice place to read. Sure, there’s usually someone swearing very loudly to themselves lying prone on the grass nearby and there’s all kinds of gnarly things to be found among the stalks of the ornamental plants, but I figure exposure to that sort of thing is just part of growing up and learning about the lousier aspects of existence. So, we sit there, on the decrepit bench, reading our haul from the library book-by-book, my daughter picking out the ones she wants to read first. As I read, I imagine my wife at home happily feeding our infant son and perhaps reading a New Yorker (I brought back a few throw-away copies the last time I was at the library). The reality may be quite different, but it’s got to be easier for her without the two extra toddlers banging around the place: my daughter and me.

I find that when I get into the plaza to read with my daughter, I’m inclined to read the whole pile. Eight, nine, ten books. I’m happy to sit and read with her as long as I can because the primary thing I miss as the parent of two young children is being able to do one thing at a time. Every morning, I wake up at 5 so I can try to focus on one task, namely preparing for the coming semester, before everyone else wakes up and the crying, feeding, changing, meal preparing, deciding what to do, packing up the car, remembering to bring the 300 things we need to leave the house, making sure everyone is changed/used the bathroom, etc. etc. routine can begin. You can’t call that routine; it’s just treading water. The issue is that I’ve defined work my entire life as something done with dedication. A project with a start and finish with maybe a little flow between. From the first book over 200 pages I read as a kid, to the papers I wrote for graduate school and hiking the Appalachian Trail, all of these things required that I focus on them and tune out distraction. I got pretty good at that and the result seems to be that I can sit—without moving anything but my fingers—in front of a computer and work for hours on end, or, at least, I could. With one kid, I was still able to sneak out the back and go to work for the day. When my daughter was an infant, there wasn’t much I could do to feed her, so I assumed the ‘breadwinner’ role, coming home late from night classes and basically rolling into bed after looking in on her sleeping form. For weeks, I barely saw her awake. And when I went to work? You guessed it, I sat down and plowed through the tasks without interruption. But now with two kids—God, how would a single mother do this? You’ve got one who doesn’t sit still for more than a few minutes at a time and when she gets up, if unsupervised, some kind of substantial mess is going to result. The other one, needs not only constant attention, but constant holding, comforting, rocking, swaddling, changing and nursing. When he does go to sleep, it’s for 20 minutes, and that’s usually only when you’ve got him strapped to you, so you have to move in this very awkward way to keep him steady—yeah, there’s that, too, his neck doesn’t actually support his head, so you’ve even got to constantly provide the support. Again, that’s fine on its own, but with a two-year-old it becomes a totally different ask.

I can’t sneak away from this. I’d be terrified of what I’d come home to. It’s summer vacation. I couldn’t have planned it better to be in a position to help as much as possible. A few hours to work every morning will eventually see the completion of the three classes I’ve got to plan, but, what’s beginning to happen with never being able to commit to a single activity and stay with it is a sort of erosion of interest and, even, of personality. I find that I’m having to reconsider who I am in a way I haven’t had to do since I first left home.

I know that sounds dramatic, but think about it, we base who we are on the things we’ve done, the things we want to do and the way we react to what’s happening in between—also known as the present. When you’re constantly switching from one short task to another (there is something Sisyphean in changing a diaper that, before being completed is soiled and, thus, needs to be changed again) you don’t have time to remember the past—not 10 years ago, but that morning— and you don’t have time to contemplate the future. For example, I think about what I used to do when preparing to travel to a new country. I’d buy the guidebook, maybe the most well-known national writer in translation and get reading, annotating and anticipating. Before visiting Romania, I must’ve read three or four books about the place. Now, if it were possible to go somewhere, as soon as I opened the Wikitravel page, I’d have to leave it to go attend to something, by the time I got back to it at night, I’d be too tired to care. Which brings me to the present. I know that important things are probably still happening in the world right now, but nothing seems relevant to me—none of it even seems to concern me. It’s like it’s all just going over my head. My reality is these two kids. Their demands are what I need to do, all day, every day.  

I like sitting in the park and reading kids’ books because that’s attending to what is needed of me. Listening to the news so I can offer my commentary on Armenia’s recent election is something I do to please myself. It’s not required of me, therefore, I don’t have the time for it. The only thing I’m able to react to is the crying at my ear, the picked up band aid that is approaching a mouth, the overflowing trash (mostly dirty diapers) and the sink that’s always full of dirty dishes.

Of course, dirty dishes give you nothing to talk about with anyone—hell, even other parents don’t want to hear about this stuff; they’ve either lived it or they’re living it and no one wants a reminder. Meanwhile, I’m not cultivating any new interests. I’m not learning anything new. I’m forgetting things I did know because my brain has been reduced to a state of distraction, constantly anticipating the next interruption as it is. At the end of the day, when there’s a rare moment with both kids are asleep and I try to talk to my wife, I find I have nothing more to say other than “uuuugggh”—which doesn’t make for scintillating conversation, so I close my eyes, finish my beer and try to remember something about what it was like before. It’s difficult to settle on any particular memory, but I remember that I used to be able to think about what I was going to do with a Saturday afternoon—I mean, I really used to be able to entertain ideas. Quite incredible really. Given that know, just to have the time to remember these things is almost more than I can muster.

I didn’t see how far removed I’d become from my early thirties persona until my daughter picked up a comic book my wife and I had been gifted about a young couple in love (I think perhaps the young couple was supposed to be something like us, but I can’t recognize either of us in their naïve simplicity). In the comic, the whippersnappers are going through their daily routines and, in doing so, express their love for each other in simple, indirect ways. Reading the book now, I don’t pay any attention to this, but rather to the fact that these people are able to do so many elective things with a single day. On some pages, they read, go out to eat and watch a movie all in the same day. Being able to do even one of those things would feel like I’d entered the twilight zone.

Right after I’d had this realization, I started to look for more profound meaning in other quotidian things I find myself reading—since I’m now limited to the quotidian medium, lacking the brain power to read anything else in 3-minute spurts (I’ve been reading a history of Byzantium for about six months now). Invariably, this should come full-circle and find something quite relevant and earth-shaking from my daily forays in the library with my daughter. The book was in the Arthur series. In it, Arthur, an unidentified and somewhat androgenous animal (a rodent, maybe?), finishes a school year and goes on vacation with his family. It rains the whole time the family is on vacation, but they manage to have fun despite this. Or rather I should say, Arthur and his sister DW have fun because… his parents? They don’t matter at all. They’re not even stock characters with predictable “parental” lines and dad jokes. They’re only there to make the business of going on vacation believable for a ten-year-old audience. They’re a requirement. They’re only there because other kids have parents that are also always heaving in and out of the fog of domesticity like something so staid and predictable it’s ceased to have any meaning independent of what you’re willing to grant it. The parents in this book were horrifying because, in a dramatic way, they had no agency. Arthur and DW had more interaction with the scenery than with these parents. The parents were more like the car that took them on vacation, necessary to mention, but nothing more. The teacher who appears only on the first page of the story has a name. The parents are never more than “mom” and “dad”: archetypes hollowed out by time. Reading this, I saw that I, too was fading into this level of existence that is far too concerned with just being and cares very little for becoming, in fact has no capacity for such concerns. There is no time to become anything other than what I’ve already committed to—the parent of these children and I can see how, in the future, to them I will take on the same inevitable and furniture-like qualities I guess all parents eventually take on.        

Is there a way to prevent this? Is there a way to imbue myself with a more profound personality? One that can withstand the onslaught of raising children? Maybe, but I have to ask myself if it’s worth pursuing at this point. It would be like so many other projects I’ve nearly taken on since my daughter was born and, in the end, had to ditch because I realized (as I always do) that my role is no longer at the center of the stage. The most noble thing I can do, is to step back and focus on equipping my kids with what they need to grow up to make their own impact on the world and, hopefully, have their own kids so that they can realize one day just how profoundly they took their parents—especially me— for granted. Indeed, I think the only way I ever would’ve understood what my parents did for me was to have kids of my own and read them Arthur books. But that’s the wrong view, anyway. I should be thinking about it from my daughter’s perspective and all I can tell you is that she loves that Arthur book and I don’t think it’s because of the parents’ diminished roles. She likes it because she likes Arthur, because the story arc has some tension and because I read it to her. I’m the one that makes that book stand up and talk and, maybe that’s better than all the other things I could be committing myself to. Scattered as raising two kids may be, it certainly feels more important than any other project I’ve ever embarked on.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to write this, and that’s something a two-dimensional, static book character probably couldn’t manage. Although, all the credit goes to my wife who nursed the baby, did the dishes, folded the laundry, bathed and got the baby to bed in the span of time it took me to write this—and dammit I wrote fast! 

Dream Reading

 

I wade into the white noise blaring from the computer in the evening. The room has an infant scent that’s like Halloween candy—sweet, waxy, new. Even though I make no noise, there’s a mewling coming from the cradle. My son, two weeks old, is on the verge of waking up in there and I tiptoe over to my side of the bed and wince each time undressing makes the slightest sound. I make it into bed without waking him. My wife’s asleep. My son’s asleep and, the next room over, my daughter’s asleep. I close my eyes and stare at the back of my eyelids in the dark and listen to everyone’s breathing as best as I can through the white noise.

When an hour has gone by and I still haven’t gone to sleep, I try to copy my wife’s breathing. At first, it’s lulling to know that I’m breathing as one would who is in such a deep state of sleep as she appears to be, then I remember that our bodies are different and that her breathing is matched to her, not me. I stop and my thoughts go back to the approaching fall semester and all I have to do to prepare. Great ideas occur to me on the improvements of my classes, but I don’t write them down; I don’t even get up because to do so would break the spell of this strange anesthesia I’m under, like the original twilight sleep. This is not the darkness of unconsciousness, but neither am I fully awake.

Sometimes, when I’m very tired and I try to read, I fall asleep knowing I’m holding the book, but, asleep, I know I’m holding the book and I have reading dreams. That is, the content of my dreams comes to me as strange things I’m reading. These dreams have no visual element other than text, but the text somehow creates pictureless ideas.

The sleep I’m having now feels like one of those reading dreams, but I’m reading the room, hearing the sounds of it, even looking at it as I remember it when I closed my eyes. The computer screen shows a waterfall. This accompanies the roaring sound I’m hearing. The computer light is periwinkle and electric, like static popping under a blanket. The corners of the room lie in shadow. I feel the weight of the blanket on me. My legs are warm; I move them apart from each other. I begin to hear strange things in the repeating white noise. The falling water has begun to sonically blur. It sounds like the rush of wind heard when biking down a steep hill and then it turns into a hiss, sort of like static but without seamlessness of static. I hear it stop and start. It’s a sound I’ve seen before when watching falling water. If you focus on one part of a waterfall, the whole thing looks like it’s falling in jerky stop motion. The sound is like that and, if I could look up at the screen, I bet I’d see that now, too. But even dream reading the screen feels like too much work and I continue not to focus on anything in particular until gradually, a sound shapes itself from the distance: an opening, a throat clearing, an “ahem”. It clarifies. The first few hiccupping sounds of my daughter’s crying. Am I dream reading this, too? I strain my ears for it. A loud car growls by outside. When it’s passed, I can clearly discern the cries that are punctuated by a taking in of air and sound, mostly, like letting it out through the glottis, like a swallow in reverse.

I realize that I’m completely awake and I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Getting up after just lying there for hours comes as something of a relief. As least now, I have something to do. I wade out of one white noise soundscape and into another. When I open my daughter’s door, the sound of pouring rain runs out and bifurcates with the waterfall sound in my bedroom everyone else is asleep in. There’s a lambent night light, like a small church candle in a monastery niche, more revealing the darkness than relieving it. Another hiccupping cry. I shut the door after me and close myself into the sound of crying rain.

“What’s wrong?” I ask my daughter, standing at the railing of the crib, her hands tightly wrapped around it. She doesn’t answer, but when I reach down, she releases the railing and allows herself to be carried upward. I bring her to my shoulder and her thirty pounds rests squarely against me, like a backpack swung around to the front.

I lean back into the rocking chair, but I’m too tired to sing, really too tired to hum, so I just rock and feel drowsy. I rock and after a while I’m dream reading again and it’s like my daughter is the one rocking me, she’s just doing it backwards. This is a strange feeling and it makes me feel like I’m not holding her tightly enough, so I force myself a little more awake. I open my eyes and see that she’s wide awake. Her eyes are taking in everything, although she’s perfectly still. It’s strange that she doesn’t talk to me. She just stares, like she’s trying hard to remember something.

I try a few songs. Eventually, they become half-hearted humming and when, after 20 minutes her eyelids haven’t even begun to close, I tell her I’ll lie down next to her. She tenses, but lets me put her back in the crib. Lying down, she keeps her eyes open. I pull over a beanbag to rest my head on and, from the small foam pad by her bed, I push my arm through the slats of the crib and gently pat her on the back. My arm is somewhat cinched in, but it’s not completely uncomfortable: I’m still lying down; I’m not holding her anymore, I can even pat without too much discomfort. I close my eyes and the sound and the dull golden light of the nightlight seem to wash over me—only they are much more soporific this time. The room has a close humidity, that isn’t dampness—it’s the kind of summer night I remember from June in Michigan when the air is totally still and the stars and fireflies are all hung together in the motionless air and there’s a kind of sublimination that seems to happen between the body and the air. It’s not sweating but the gradual turning into the same languid night air the surrounds one.

I realize I’m falling asleep. I open my eyes and see that my daughter is still awake. I wonder if she’s forming the kind of memories that I’m tapping into right now. I wonder if in the future when she’s unable to sleep, if she’ll lean into this memory, into this room and, thinking of what she’ll think of in the future for a sleep mnemonic, I fall asleep.

I wake up with the dust motes rising from the carpet into the morning light. I feel better rested, having slept on the floor than I would’ve if I’d slept alone in a comfortable bed and I find myself looking forward to the day as I once did when I was young and it was summer. My daughter is still asleep and the white noise is still going in each room, though now this hiss of the falling water sounds a bit primitive in the daylight.