I Don't Like Children, Either.

(Good grief!  I announce my return and then proceed to blow off the blog for two months.  Sorry!  The longer I go, the more pressure I feel to make a truly spectacular blog entry, and it's kind of making me crazy, so I'm just dashing this off to get the ball rolling.)

The other day, we were listening to the weather report on the radio, and the weather guy was talking about storms in the midwest, and Andy asked Ben what the dude on the radio was talking about, and Ben said, "Vat dude talk 'bout soda."  Yep -- Minnesota.

It's pretty fascinating, seeing through the eyes of a two-and-half-year-old.  Also infuriating.  It truly boggles the mind how many times one person can be told NOT TO GRAB THE DOG'S EARS and yet still, about once an hour if not more, grab the god-damned dog's ears.  How is that so tough to grasp when other things are absorbed and incorporated into his worldview so fast I can't even work backwards to figure out where he learned them?  He started praising dinner recently by calling it a "(s)pecial meal."  This is not something Andy or I say, or have ever said probably, and so it took us some time to figure out where it came from.  A book about Thanksgiving, we finally figured out, which talks about people traveling to each other's homes for a special meal.

One of the things that continues to fascinate me is how fascinating Ben is compared to other children, who are all -- apologies to their parents, some of whom are my dear friends -- awfully dull.  This is part of why I haven't written lately: all the things it occurs to me to write about ("Vat dude talk 'bout soda") fall so distinctly into the category of It's Interesting When It's My Kid; I Don't Care When It's Yours.  It makes me think about a good friend of mine who explained his lack of desire for his own children by pointing out that he didn't particularly like children.  Even before I had a kid, I had a pretty good idea that that was some bogus reasoning.  I don't like children, either, as a rule.  They're ignorant and selfish and dishonest and rude and make extremely tedious conversation.

My own kid, though?  Total gem.

Themes Cornball and Otherwise

I remember being offended, before I had a kid, at the idea that I couldn't possibly know what it was like to have a kid. I'd been a kid. I'd been in love. I'd had vulnerable and beloved creatures in my care. And I had powers of empathy and imagination. So, sure, I couldn't know exactly what it was like, but surely I could imagine something close enough that my opinion wasn't totally discountable, right? The thing is, now that I am a parent, I really can't remember what I thought it was going to be like, so I have no idea how close my imagination got. My sense is: not very.

For one thing, loving my child is simply not like any other love I've felt before. It's not just a different flavor; it's a totally different food. Sure, it has things in common with loving a spouse, loving a parent, loving a pet -- it's still love. But it's profoundly different. Nobody else's suffering or delight could come close to affecting me the way his does. He belongs to me and I belong to him in a way that's nothing like the connection I feel to other people I love. (And that's not to disparage my other relationships. I have good, close connections to the important people in my life.)

I'm also responsible for him in a way that's unlike any other relationship. It's a responsibility that's hardwired, that I actually feel physically. The sound of him crying out in genuine anguish (as opposed to frustration, discomfort, boredom, or any of the other smaller unhappinesses that are immediately distinguishable from real trouble) isn't just a sound; it's like a klaxon in my spinal cord. But it's not just that. It's always being aware of him, even if we're not in the same town, even if I'm not actively thinking about him. It's like I have radar in the back of my mind, and the little blip that's Ben is always there, blinking.

Being a parent also connects me to the world in a new way, and more profoundly. Partly it's just having a bigger stake, I think, though you'd have thought being alive was a pretty big stake to start with. But it's really not -- not compared to being responsible for a small and completely precious person. For one thing, I don't think it would even have occurred to me to consider what my stake in the world was before I had a kid. So it's that, and it's sharing a deeply meaningful experience with the majority of humanity. In a very real way, I have something in common with parents in Khartoum, in Osaka, in Helsinki. For that matter, I have something in common with leopard mothers and chickadee mothers and coyote mothers. And I'm not talking about some goofball intellectual exercise; this is something I feel pretty deeply, something that's changed the way I exist in the world. And there's something else, harder to define: when it comes to passage-of-life stuff, there's a sweet in the sad and a sad in the sweet that I never felt before. German probably has a word for this mournful joy, but I don't. It's a bit like stepping back so far to see the forest that suddenly you see that joy and mourning are part of the same thing, a connectedness, an investment in the world, an expression of love.

It's tough to talk about any of this without sounding pretty colossally cornball. But I find that I don't care all that much about whether I sound cornball. And I really have no idea whether other parents feel the same way. I imagine there are as many different ways to experience parenthood as there are ways to experience romantic love, if not more. But we all hear about romantic love all the time. It's in every song, in every book, in every movie. People talk about falling in love and falling out of love, and we all have lots of words to describe the stages and problems and joys and minutiae of romantic love. And yes, we talk about parenting, one parent to another, and there are books of advice and instruction, and God knows there are blogs. But it's not the same.

My friend C., the domestic theologian, was looking for examples of literature about motherhood. Can you think of any? It's difficult to think of examples of mother characters, let alone examples where the mother is the protagonist and motherhood is a dominant theme. Kristin Lavransdatter was pretty much the only real example anyone could come up with. For a profound human experience, that's a pretty big gap in the market. I think talking about the big-picture, major-theme stuff of parenthood feels corny because it's been more or less exclusively the province of greeting cards and inspirational wall-hangings. Which I just so fundamentally don't understand. I look to literature to help explain my world, and it's like I just fell in love for the first time, and no one had ever written a book or made a movie about romantic love. And worse than that: that the very idea of taking romantic love seriously as a literary theme was kind of laughable and embarrassing.

So, a couple of things. First, everybody should immediately read Kristin Lavransdatter, which is a great (and I mean Great in the sense of Major Work of World Literature, as well as great in the sense of really wonderful) book, apart from being the only book I've ever read in which the protagonist's breast-feeding matters to the story. Second, and I mean this seriously: What the fuck? Why isn't there a canon of literature on the theme of parenthood to match the theme of romantic love? Is it as simple and stupid as the lack of female authors? And the fact that until pretty recently, women who wrote books tended to be women who didn't have children? I can sort of accept that explanation, except that fatherhood is pretty profound, too, so where are the themes of fatherhood in our glorious literature of the patriarchy?

It's a head-scratcher.

Drudgery: Not So Much

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's all delight, but there's very little drudgery these days. So little that I regret my choice of title -- I feel basically happy as a parent, and it bothers me a bit that the name of my blog suggests otherwise.

What drudgery there is comes more from being the at-home adult than from being a parent. It's dishes and laundry and vacuuming. And, to be fair, Andy as the working adult does a great deal of household drudgery, too -- it's not like he comes home from work and puts his feet up and demands bourbon and steak.

The delights lately are mostly about watching Ben develop skills. He's such a little dynamo of development, I feel sometimes like I'm watching him in time-lapse photography. My job is to strike the right balance of helping: helping enough, but not helping so much that my help prevents his work. And so sometimes my job is just to sit on the sofa and knit or read while he does his baby work on the floor, picking up toys one by one and examining them, testing their limits, or practicing getting from his hands and knees to hands and feet. He looks up at me every once in a while and we trade big grins -- we're both very pleased at his progress. And I love that doing my parenting work now involves entertaining myself, too.

He's also just a lot of fun to be around. He's gone from being a very fussy little baby to being a generally happy big baby. He grins and giggles and babbles and flirts and is just generally a joyful little person. I have to be in a very foul mood indeed for his delight in life not to rub off on me.

Which is not to say that we don't have rough patches. He's teething, and that means sometimes the very foul mood is his, and he refuses to nap and gets colossally cranky or has no patience and cries every ten minutes no matter where I put him or what I do. And these bad patches are made worse by the rotten weather we've been having, because generally, no matter how crappy a mood we're in, getting out into the fresh air of the park or even into the car to run some invented errands restores both our attitudes. But that doesn't work when we're getting ten inches of snow.

And sleep remains a recurrent source of discomfort and worry. We did a bit of a sleep-training refresher course a couple weeks ago, and though it was tough for a couple of nights, I think it made a significant improvement. A small outcropping of the sleep issue is the sad briefness of his naps. It's not a problem in terms of his getting the right amount of rest -- it's just that I would really enjoy having more than thirty or forty minutes twice a day to myself, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

But really, big picture: this is fun. I enjoy parenting, and feel generally competent. The delight far, far, far outweighs the drudgery.

How Is it?

My friend A, whom I hadn't seen since long before Ben was born, asked me this weekend, "So, how is it?" "It" being parenthood, life with a baby, the Brave New World. Perfectly rational, normal, polite question, right? But I don't think anyone had asked me before -- or if they had, it was back in the severely sleep-deprived first few months, and I don't remember.

I found myself flummoxed for a second. How is it? How do I even begin to evaluate? It's like asking me how I enjoy being an earthling, except of course I can remember a time when I wasn't a parent. But it's that level of all-encompassing experience, all but impossible to have the perspective to take a critical position. Which is pretty much what I said.

But I've been thinking about it. How is it? Big picture, broad strokes.

It's exhausting. Not nearly so much now as it was when the kid was around eight weeks, but still. Then, I hovered between functional and not, and the combination of the exhaustion and frustration brought me to tears several times a week at least. And I'm jinxing myself by saying so, but it's been some time now since I've felt anything but functional or parenting has made me cry. But I'm tired a lot, and I almost never wake up feeling fully rested.

It's full of joy. One of the things I've always loved about my dogs is how happy they are to see me. A beaming baby, half his face opened by a grin, puts all dog greetings to shame. And all his small accomplishments of development are sources of pride and wonder. He can pass an object from hand to hand! He can smack! He can blow raspberries! Every week there's a new tiny miracle that bowls me over not just with love and delight for him, but in the amazing and complicated process of becoming a person.

It's full of tedious work. I have to do laundry pretty much every day to keep up -- and that's with disposable diapers, which is why I'm not using cloth. (And I don't feel guilty because of this.) Changing diapers and dressing a squirmy little person and lugging him around and around the kitchen because he'll fuss if I don't -- these are not fun parenting tasks, and they occupy a big part of every day.

It connects me to the world in a new way. I have something in common with a staggering number of people, something really big and important in all our lives. This is both lovely and brutal. Lovely is the depth of fellow-feeling between me and random new parents at the grocery, the ease with which I can fall into meaningful conversation with other mothers of babies, the new richness of my relationships with friends who are or are about to be parents. Brutal is all the news stories that suddenly kneecap me, the starving and abused and lost and terrified children who are all Ben.

It is and is not what I expected. I think this is what my friend really wanted to know. He's only recently come around to the idea that maybe he wants to be a father after many years of believing strongly that he did not. You know it's going to change your life. You know it's going to be hard. But you can't really picture it, and no one can really describe it in a way that makes it real.