| November 2006 -A father with lots of kids reflects on the challenges of raising a large family from a man's perspective. While he promises no real profound insights, he is happy to share a bit of his hectic life with our readers and hopes you'll find his reflections entertaining. |
When I was young, I always had the sense that being a father would be difficult. Actually, not always. Just after hearing some of Bill Cosby's comedy routines on the subject. Of course, I realized that since they were comedy routines, they might contain some degree of exaggeration. Fatherhood might not be as bad as Bill Cosby made it out to be.
When I was a teenager, every Easter my father and I would visit his cousins up in Wisconsin. Their children--my second cousins--were older than me and already married. I'm not sure what my relationship to their husbands was...second-cousin-in-law? At any rate, I got along with them in spite of the age difference. One year in particular, my second cousin had a new baby. The baby boy was only a few months old, too young even to crawl. My second cousin, the baby's mom, was doing fine. Her husband, however...
His eyes were dark and sunken. He looked as if he hadn't slept in weeks. He didn't just look like Death Warmed Over, but rather Death that had been put up with the leftovers, then thawed and warmed over again the next day. But the most striking thinq was the look. He had this look on his face that was part "Deer in the headlights" and part "Look, there's another set of headlights coming!" and mostly "What have I gotten myself into?" I named that look "The New Father Look", and it would haunt me for years. Bill Cosby can make jokes about how scary fatherhood is all he wants, but there's nothing as scary as the New Father Look.
For years I tried to figure out what aspect of parenting would give somebody such a look. I listened to what people said about parenting and then combined it with my own fevered imaginings: Sleepless nights, the baby vomiting all over everything, the baby crying 24/7, the baby pooping on everything that hasn't been vomited on...
Time, of course, passes, and things change, and soon I was married myself. My wife and I had different ideas about how many children we should have. I wanted to stop at two, maybe three at the most. She wanted at least five. Every time she said that, the haunting image of the New Father Look would drift through my mind, and then get five times worse. I kept thinking, If having one baby did that to somebody, what would you look like after having five?!?
I was terrified of getting "the look", and told my wife so. She would always look at me, a bit confused and ask, "What Look? What are you talking about?" I tried to explain it to her. She kept insisting that it wouldn't be that bad, so of course I assumed that she didn't understand what I was talking about.
I was, to say the least, nervous as the birth of our first child approached.
After the baby was born, my wife and I went nuts sterilizing everything. Bottles, pacifiers, toys... One time the sterilizer got too hot and destroyed everything inside it. We had a special diaper pail that sealed dirty diapers into individual bags, with a "fresh-scent" coating. It worked, you could never smell anything. Sometimes the baby cried at night. Sometimes. We had a few sleepless nights. There was some vomit involved, and some poop. But mostly, things were OK. Overall, I got less sleep than before the baby arrived, but more than I had in college.
I must admit, I did get the New Father look. Actually, everybody does. But not as bad as my cousin's husband. And it isn't 24/7. And... you have a baby. Words really can't describe how incredible that is. If you've had a baby, you already know. If not, there's really no way to explain it to you.
I hate stories where the author jumps forward a ridiculous amount of time, but I'm going to do that right here. It's now nearly ten years later, we have seven kids so far, and I've discovered that being a father is difficult and tiring, and even scary, at first... but you get better at it. You learn, you adjust... You discover the helpful paradox that two children are easier to take care of than one, because two children will entertain each other. You learn -- slowly, over time -- that children are less delicate than they appear, and they can survive in a world where a few of their toys haven't been sterilized. You discover that a diaper tossed into an ordinary trashcan actually doesn't stink very much, and not for very long, and you begin to suspect that the makers of the fancy diaper pail are the ones telling everybody how bad they smell.
We have had the occasional sleepless night. We have had the occasional "multiple-crabby-kid" day where the only solution is to give everybody a Time Out. But I haven't worn the New Father Look in a long time.
Sometimes I wonder about my cousin's husband. Did he look that way all the time, or were they just having a bad week? Did he ever get over it? Does he still look that way now?
I haven't seen my second cousins in a long time now. I don't know the answers to these questions. But I would assume that he did get over it. After all, you're only a "new" father for so long.
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Article by: James Lehmann
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