After nearly a year of fatherhood, I’ve reached a strange season in the eyes of others. When any conversation leads me to reveal the age of our little guy it brings about a universal response.
“Oh, that’s such a great age….”
This declaration brings me to one of two possibilities; the person speaking either has no recollection of a child this age, or they are being factious.
Life is a frustrating series of boundaries. I’ve always hated the things I can’t do, lack the talent to accomplish, or won’t find the access to attempt. And now, as a father, I will be forced into the role of “them”. I’m now part of the big, dark, unsupportive mass of people setting up the “don’t go near there” boundaries. So this has me thinking about how much the fences vary.
I read the news and it feels like the late 1980s all over again. The US and Russia are signing arms reduction treaties, Iranian leaders are pledging to destroy the world, and in places we can barely name or find on a map men are trying to kill each other.
The cycle of life continues. Or death, as the case may be.
And I seem to have accidentally discovered a perfect solve. A weapon so unrelenting in its assault, so diabolical in its execution, and so far beyond conventional means that it would clear the world’s battlefields and make us all obsessed with our own survival instead of ending someone else.
Into the hotspots of the world we drop one thing.
My television keeps showing me events of awards and accomplishment, causing me to reflect on the state of my life. The Olympics just ended, and the Academy Awards were this evening, both offering celebrations of personal achievement and success against the odds. And I’m here to say that nothing puts a finer point on what I haven’t accomplished than getting shit on during the Oscars.
Now, I don’t mean chewed up by the Hollywood system and left unappreciated while someone stands and accepts a coveted statue.
I mean actually shit on. By a person. While trying to watch the awards.
People have begun to ask me: “So, how do you like Fatherhood?”. And I don’t, frankly, but this isn’t a surprise to me. It’s unfathomable to most people, but it’s what I’ve always felt and what I expected at this stage. I have, however, figured out a way to explain the feeling.
It’s like commuting home on a Friday night through stop and go traffic-
You want nothing more than for the journey to be over. You can’t stop thinking about how much happier you’d be doing anything but your current task. And yet, you don’t get out of the car, or park and wait til traffic is done, or decide to not leave work at all. Instead, you suffer through it… cause this will be the low-point of the days to come. That’s where I am.
And the hardest part for me is the special relationship I have with my son.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now postpartum. The Baby has landed. The Stork has delivered. Whatever way you’d like me to say that we have gone from pregnancy to parenthood.
So you might be wondering how I can write another entry about pregnancy. Well, I’ve decided I’m the town crier of pregnancy truth – “Hear ye, Hear ye….” Because it’s become quite clear that a few months of holding a newborn gives women amnesia. I suspect that something in the smell of fresh skin actually wipes out bad memories.
Well, Bodie, you’re here. And I spent yesterday, your birthday, in a strange time machine, concerned about three generations of people at once.
My parents, who told me stories of my birth with tears in their eyes.
Your mother, who endured the odd sensations of C-Section, pain, and fear.
And you… who got forced into a world you didn’t know and asked to breathe.
Leaving me mostly groundless and unaware of my own age or generation in this march of time. But now I remember, and we should talk about what it means.
Well, here we are the night before my wife and I become parents. One of my friends named it “Bodie-eve”. Very appropriate. And as I’ve talked to friends and relatives today the same question has been asked by everyone.
Are You Ready?
And there’s really only one answer.
Los Angeles doesn’t just have an obsession with youth, it actually pro-longs youth. I see pictures of people in their early thirties from somewhere in the Midwest and always marvel that they look older than people around me in their early forties.
Elsewhere is seems that couples in their twenties are dealing with their second house and second child, and out here men in their forties rent apartments on Sunset and date mid-twenties models.
I find myself influenced by both. I’ve never been the nightlife kind of guy, and I’ve been happily married for more than a decade. But we still rent our home (not for lack of home ownership interest, but for lack of affordable options) and the majority of our friends are childless dream-chasers like ourselves.
Yet in the last year… things have changed.
The last time I shared the joy that is my wife’s march through pregnancy, it got passed around to many people and supposedly created some laughs. This taught me that there is an opposite of the “you had to be there” joke. The lesser known “Funny if you’re not there” joke. An experience that you know, while in the midst of it, is a mother lode of comic absurdity and yet you are so involved that the laughs will have to come later.
That’s why I write it down. Click to continue »
