surprise

What surprises me most about fatherhood?

1. How little sleep I really need. I’m not saying I don’t bump into walls or lose my keys or accidentally diaper a dog. I’m saying day by day, so far, I manage to keep everyone alive (except maybe the Japanese maple outside my door). On four to five hours of sleep a night! I function with minimal memory and executory acumen, but I function. Which makes me wonder about all that life I missed pre-G. Such wasted opportunity! Three extra hours of awake multiplied by seven nights multiplied by fifty two weeks multiplied by… you get the picture. I could have learned Italian or mastered the cello or trained a dog to sniff out cancer cells.

2. There is a subset of humanity that loves babies. I hadn’t factored that in. I mean I knew people loved their own babies–but I’ve been amazed by how many people feel deeply connected to my G. And not just close friends, G’s aunties and uncles and godfathers (or in the case of my buddy Steve, god-cousin once removed), but peripheral friends, long-lost friends, the woman working the return counter at Target. People have asked me to create a Facebook page for Baby G so they can friend him–hoping their faces will be the first he sees when he’s old enough to log on. My downstairs neighbor has become grandma-in-residence. My dog walker wrote him a song on her flute.

Originally, I thought people were stopping by to support me, but more often than not, they politely ask me to leave the room so they can have alone time with Baby G.

3. I’m not so in control after all. I was of a certain mindset when creating Baby G. I was the master chef hand-picking (and then, ahem, hand-delivering) all the ingredients for the stew. For eggs, did I want a donor with Mediterranean skin? Brown eyes? Mechanical prowess? A two-time college field hockey champion or a sculptor? And what about the surrogate, the cauldron so to speak. Soft and nurturing, certainly, but what about worldly? Was “bubbly” code for manic? What kind of music would she listen to?

I saw this little-dude-to-be as an extension and expression of me. I‘m making a baby. First person possessive. My baby.  

But the moment I saw Baby G pop through to this side of the vulva, I realized I had it completely wrong. If anything, I was an extension of him. All my planning, my calculating, my designing. Ha! No way could I have pulled off such a remarkable being. He has a working spleen and fingerprints and already knows shit, like how to cry. This soul has his own destiny, his own potential, his own story to develop. I’m simply a character in it. Perhaps the Adyashanti devotees across the street are right and Baby G chose me from beyond and guided me, while allowing me the illusion of control.

So as a character in his story, my role, it seems, is not to mold G, but rather to provide him what he needs, teach him what I suspect to be true, love him like crazy, and most of all, well, get the fuck out of the way.

4. Poop. I find myself enjoying the cleaning of G’s poop. I thought I’d hate it. That I’d wait for it to accumulate over a day or two to minimize the number of diaper changes. Not at all! There is nothing more exciting than unsnapping G’s onesie to discover the contents spilling from the edges of the diaper, threatening to drip down his legs. Suddenly I feel like a surgeon with a job to do. “We have a situation here!” I announce to the dogs. I roll up my sleeves, Purell my hands, and get to work.

I love the challenge of it. How to keep the fecal matter off my shirt and off his socks and off his hands and off the wall of the nursery, while, at the same time, his limbs are flailing and his torso is twisting side to side. It takes strategy and planning. Where to begin wiping? How many of the dirty wipes can I wrap in the diaper before discarding it? It’s crisis management. An adrenaline rush. I call his nursery The Situation Room and feel important, like I’m ordering Osama bin Laden’s capture or flying a blimp.

Perhaps it’s the one thing I can control as I begin the lifelong process of letting go.