Confessions of a New Father Part Four

Countdown to Armageddon

February 8- the date loomed before me ominously on the calendar. My wife, Jen, needed to travel to Washington, D.C. for a meeting, and I was to be left nominally in charge of my four month old son, Leo, for an intimidating fifteen consecutive hours. I say nominally, because, in fairness, he is always more in control of the situation than I am- he has the power to make life very pleasant or quite miserable, depending on his whims and fancies. The longest I’d ever been in sole custody of my son prior to the dooms-date was about 3-4 hours, so I was fairly worried about how we’d both make it through the day.

My fears intensified in the days leading up to the dooms-date as we practiced bottle-feeding Leo in preparation for the big day. As I’ve noted before, Leo is a big fan of breast-feeding, and will only deign to bottle-feed if he is desperately hungry, and even then, he makes it abundantly clear that he views the whole bottle thing as an affront- an assault, in fact, on his good name. As soon as you pull the damn bottle out, you get a look that says, you expect me to lower myself to this indignity? And our prep feedings in the lead up to dooms-day were worse than ever. Leo would grudgingly allow his mom to bottle-feed him, but wanted nothing to do with me when I’d try to assume the position. Every time I’d get the bottle near his face, he’d swat it away, with a shockingly powerful thrust, almost like Shacquille O’Neil stuffing an opponent in the paint- get that shit outta here!

So I took to employing unusual, coercive tactics on him, as though I were some unethical government operative dealing with an uncooperative detainee at Guantanomo Bay. It was relatively easy to smother one of his arms up against my body and hold it there, but subduing the second arm, in order to prevent him from swatting away his bottle like a meddlesome fly, proved somewhat more difficult. The problem is, that when he’s dealing with me, he’ll only consider eating from the bottle when I’m standing up, and preferably when I’m upright and walking. Please don’t ask me why, but I have the feeling it has something to do with him making sure that I’m as uncomfortable as possible- I guess he figures that if he’s losing the breast, that he’s at least going to make sure I’m not happy either. So one of my arms is occupied holding him, and the other arm is holding the bottle- so subduing Leo’s second arm is something of a challenge. I’ve tried placing something interesting in his hand for him to grasp- but that usually only works momentarily- until he decides he wants to swat the bottle. I can try to reach around and physically restrain his second arm, but that makes him angry and it’s hard to hold him that way anyways. The last thing that entered my mind was handcuffs- but I soon thought better of it, remembering that in this country, you could probably lose custody for employing such a tactic.

A Crisis Averted

Jen left us around 5.30AM on March 8, and even before she was out the door, Leo was crying. Only 15 more hours of this, I told myself, fully expecting the boy to be inconsolable for the entire time his mom was away. At four months, he was already a moma’s boy, and this was going to be his first time without Jen for an extended period. I was certain that we were going to have a miserable time together. I put my head right up against my son- with my forehead flush up against his, and said something to the effect of, “Its just you and me today, tough guy, like or not, I’m all you’ve got.” A couple minutes later he stopped crying and we drifted off back to sleep together. I woke up some time later and was reassured to see the boy lying perpendicular to me on the bed, still asleep. I looked at my watch and was stunned, and frankly thrilled to see that it was 8.15! How on earth had we slept in so late?

Leo woke up a few minutes later, and I brought him on a little tour of our apartment, poking him in and out of every room, pointedly showing him that his mom was nowhere to be found. Everywhere we went, he was sort of craning his neck, looking to see where his mom was. Again, I worried that he’d melt down. But a remarkable thing happened- the boy rolled with it, and we ended up having a great day together. He still wasn’t happy about the whole bottle-feeding arrangement- but he did it with some coaxing- and he behaved like a gentleman for nearly the whole day. Normally, I’m accustomed to being second fiddle around the house- and I’ve come to grips with the fact that Leo would rather usually be with his mom- but on this day, he seemed to understand that I was the only game in town, and he adjusted his behavior to me accordingly, treating me to dozens of smiles and laughs the whole day.

Later in the afternoon, Jen’s mom, Kathy relieved me for a few hours and I was able to run some errands, and Jen ended up coming home on an earlier flight that evening. Leo and I had managed to make it though the day together- he tired me out but was a really good kid-but I was happy to hand him over to Jen when she got home, but part of me was already missing the good times Leo and I had together. “Someone’s happy to see his mom,” I told Leo as I handed him over to his beaming mother. For some reason, we often refer to Leo by the word “someone” instead of Leo, as in, “someone filled up his diaper,” or “someone woke up on the wrong side of his Moses basket today.” Somehow in our weird parental parlance, someone=Leo. “He doesn’t’ seem that happy to see me!” Jen complained as Leo sat content, but not ecstatic in her arms. “Jen, he’s not like a dog that’s going to attack you at the door, and its not like he didn’t have fun with me today,” I told her. The sheriff was back in town, and I knew I was again going to be relegated to deputy, but, as I lay down on the sofa and unfurled my newspaper, I felt pretty good about it.