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By JONATHAN GIBBS
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Several weeks after the hospital lets you take home your new-born baby, they send a nurse out to your house to see how things are going. Ostensibly it is to see if there’s any practical advice or needs the new parents might require. The motive behind that motive is to watch for signs of neglect, or worse.
Being a mature man of principled behavior, I prepared for their visit three years ago by doing what, for me at the time, felt like the right thing to do: I borrowed a baby doll from a neighbor, put some gauzy black material around it and waited for them to come down our street, watching from a perch by our upstairs bathroom window. It was not long after Michael Jackson had displayed his child rearing expertise in very public display from a Berlin balconey, and so I readied the window and held the doll by the feet for a quick presentation of my brand of conceptual humor. “Hey, lookit us!” I was prepared to shout, “We got our own Rockin’ Robin and it’s as simple as ABC!” In hindsight it’s probably just as well they never showed up.
Immature, attention-seeking, borderline humor aside, I take fatherhood seriously. From about high school age on I took on a role playing a parody of myself before I’d established any tangible selfhood, a sort of punchline in search of a joke. And so after a lifetime of living a sort of conceptual “How would a funny alien go about living as a funny humanoid playing a long-running practial joke on himself,” I grew up – really grew up – when I saw my son in the state of Grace we call being born. Everything stopped as if the Universe had sucked in a colossal breath that stopped every atom and particle in mid-spin and the hospital room became the back of some primitive cave filled with the roar of the absolute silence that is deep space. There was just this perfect creation seemingly grasped from nothingness who was suddenly everything. For that moment at least, the Oneness in which Everything is Everything focused its full attention on my son and paused long enough to fix its imutable location in SpaceTime before moving on. It caught my attention.
It got better from there. The wonderment I felt when I saw him smile in his sleep at six months. The first solo steps upright as he found his balance on a spinning planet. The recent stringing together of a feeling with an explanation of a degree of difficulty he’d have surmounting the bondage of the constricting emotion. “I am full of jealous. It is werry difficult for me.”
I see Nathan do a hop-step dance toward the kitchen bellowing a made-up song about “waffles from Frog and Toad-butter and syrup, too!” and I know while we gave this three-year-old the structure to make life a musical, he’s the song. I go in at night to check on him in his crib, fill my lungs with his scent and know Grace also has a smell. I want to legislate that no one pronounce ‘little’ with the ‘l’ noticeable around him because I love hearing him say “wittle.” I know he’ll grow up and some of the cute will slough off and get replaced by an emerging man. But how to get him there?
At first I thought children were dumped into our lives with no common sense or innate sense of caution. I figured I would have to devise a series of lessons accompanied by practical examples made as life-like as possible in order to get the points across. I planned on showing Nathan a hunk of raw pork roast and explaining that his flesh would react rimilarly to the pork flesh once presented directly to the burning flame of a stove top. I even considered drawing a smily face on the fatty outside of the pork that would hopefully melt into a frowny-face once it bagan to scorch and sizzle. Carrying on with the food-as-object-lesson, I planned on taking a scarecrow stuffed with socks and putting uncooked eggs still in their ovoid casings in the parts of the scarecrow’s body approximating the location of our vital organs. Then I was going to let it fall down the stairs so I could unfurl the yolky consequences of the Law of Humpty-Dumptiness that can result from not holding on to a bannister.
Well, it turned out we never had to sacrifice any dead animal tissue or unfertilized chicken zygotes. I didn’t have to sing “Roe, roe, roe your boat . . “ and cackle at the soggy yellow leakage on one of my old flannel shirts. He shied away from the heat blast of the oven the first time he approached it and he still backs down the stairs on hands and knees. We don’t all have to live as if we are fugitives from the Law of Averages.
Some fear is necessary. It keeps us from extinction, individually and as a species. He will encounter evil. It is our job to ready him to recognize it and neutralize it. He will need to know there are some people out there who would cut up members of your family and throw the pieces at your front door. And some fear comes naturally, without need for introduction by a parent. During his second year Nathan had an out-of-state encounter with an off-season “Santa Claus.” Being plopped into the ginormous presence of a gin-soaked, sweat-drenched man with a bad felt beard and the hands of a strangler filled him with a perfectly understandable case of the willies. (In fact, the Santa looked like a Willie – Nelson.) “I scare Santa,” he said, shaken enough to misappropriate his pronouns. I won’t need to tell him ‘Santa’ is an an anagram for ‘Satan,’ but we are still having trouble convincing him not every beard belongs to a bad man, and vice-versa.
And there’s the moral stuff. Why you don’t lie, cheat or throw things. You can’t start out going all Old-Testament – Seven Years of This and Eight Years of That – for rubbing Play Doh in the dog’s fur while she’s sleeping. That’s where I’ll pick up next time.
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