My father was a mother hen. Though it was my mother who raised the seven of us and did the thousand daily chores the brood demanded, it was my father’s job to worry about us. For him, it was an article of faith that life was out to get us kids, that no creatures as fine as his children could be safe in this brutal world.
He came by his concern honestly. He was a doctor, a general practitioner with a thriving practice. He saw the dreadful things that couldn’t possibly happen to children, except that they did. He warned us about lawn mowers, diving boards, lighter fluid, fish hooks, hunks of steak, “projectiles” of all sorts. He warned us about traffic, doors, windows and ice. He told us cautionary tales about broken bones, sledding accidents, a boy killed on a horse. A garrulous, cheerful man, he was also a connoisseur of chaos.
When our son was born, my wife and I began baby-proofing our apartment. We bought caps for outlets, cushions for sharp corners. We locked closets, installed gates, stashed matches, checked the floor for splinters. We even checked the ceiling for splinters.
And then we waited as Josh blossomed into danger, lifting his head, rolling over, crawling. Finally he stood up and walked, a staggering little drunk with a rabbit on his shirt. Suddenly he was tall enough to bang his head on the dining-room table, then nimble enough to scramble over a chair. Each accomplishment brought new peril. I thought we would never be able to protect him. Once when he was six months old I had a dream about him. We were caught in a lightning storm, and I saw myself crouching over Josh, pleading with the sky.
About lightning, my father was a poet of doom. We were not only to come inside at the first drop of rain, but we were also to stay away from windows. According to Dad, no prudent person even took a shower when it was raining. When my brother Kevin and I were teenagers, Dad once drove his car across a golf course to scoop us up from the fourteenth green. We thought Mom had died. Not so. Dad had heard a weather report that rain was on the way.
Dad was a genius in his caution. Yes, we had to agree, it was not impossible to choke on a croquet mallet, and yes, though we’d never heard of anybody suffocating in a baseball mitt, we supposed that, too, could happen.
About driving, he was a master. Statistics had proved that there were more drunk drivers on the road on Sunday afternoon than at any other time of the week. Or perhaps it was during Lent, or when it was hot—he would customize his warnings to fit each situation. As for sleeping over at friends’ houses, he was a stickler. He wanted his kids home.
He did, however, make one exception. When Kevin and I were Boy Scouts, we asked, with little hope, if we could go on a canoe trip. My father replied with all sorts of questions: What adults were going? How long would it last? We answered in reassuring tones, awaiting his inevitable response: more Irish-Catholic boys died on canoe trips than in World War II.
Suddenly he got up and called the Scoutmaster, asking questions, greeting each response with a skeptical grunt. Hanging up, he rubbed his hands in excitement. “Good news, boys,” he chirped. “I’m going with you. The O’Neils hit the Great White North.”
We couldn’t believe it. We wondered if Dad knew that camping meant sleeping outside, the place where it rained. Where bears lived. We arrived at the lake, convinced the sight of water would remind Dad that most people died of drowning. But no. We set out into the setting orange sun, a string of canoes, each loaded with two boys and a man. That night we pitched tents, cooked burgers, put on sweaters against the October chill and fell asleep, canvas-covered and little-boy-bone-tired in the grip of an adventure.
Morning came cold and wet. Bundled in sweaters and rain gear, we set off across the lake. We were the last canoe in the chain, and the wind made the lake tough going. Before long, as the fog grew thick and the wind beat the water into a gray-white chop, we lost sight of the rest of the boats. From the stern came, “Let’s catch up, boys,” and I laid my eighty-two pounds heartily into the paddle. Suddenly a wave hit the canoe broadside, overturning it, and dropping us into the frigid lake. We were a few hundred yards from a small island. As I came bobbing up, I thought this was going to be a great adventure. But when I saw my father, his hair soaked crazily to his head, his face a white mask, I knew this was no adventure. That remains the only time I have ever seen him scared. He glanced at me and looked quickly around. “Kev-in!” he barked.
“I’m over here, Dad,” Kevin said from the far side of the overturned canoe. “I’m all right.”
“Hang on to the boat, boys,” Dad said calmly. “I’m going to push it to the island.”
“Why don’t we just swim, Dad?” I asked.
“Hang on to the boat, Hugh!” he shouted like a stranger.
Dad struggled with the clumsy canoe, and it began to move toward the island, saddled with two shivering forms, a submarine now, headed for landfall. Suddenly, my father let out a giant roar. “Help! Help!” It scared me.
“Help,” he shouted again.
“They didn’t hear . . .” Kevin began.
“Quiet!” Dad yelled, and as his voice caromed off the wind, an engine snarled to life, yapping across the water toward us. Finally the shape emerged from the fog, one man standing up in the bow, a second one crouched over an outboard motor—a gray presence coming out of a muted white morning sun. They fished us out of the water.
“Don’t worry now, boys. You’re okay.”
When we got to the island, the men started a bonfire. Dad took off all his clothes, told us to do the same, and we stood next to the blaze, three naked heathens. I remember its heat coming at me in great thumping waves. I remember my father wrapping his arms around us—rubbing our hands, our arms, our feet, our hearts. “Thank you, fellas,” he said to the men across the flames. “You saved my boys.”
When I was sixteen my father’s caution began to drive me crazy. Here I was taxiing for takeoff and he had his arms around my ankles. I used to imagine the romantic lives my friends led—letting the wind whip through their windows, staying out till all hours, taking showers in all kinds of weather.
Now, from my new-parent perspective, Dad’s caution makes sense. In fact, I occasionally wonder whether my father wasn’t a bit cavalier. After all, he let me play Little League baseball, a game in which an oversized twelve-year-old throws a rock-hard sphere with as much velocity as possible toward your child.
As parents, we want it both ways. We want our kids to know all the world’s exhilarating stuff. But we want them to learn about it in a padded room down the hall. And this feeling never ends. Not long ago we shared a rented beach house with my brother and his family, and our parents came to visit us. As Kevin and I bounded around the surf, riding the waves on our bellies, I looked up and saw my mother and father walking along the water’s edge, trying to look casual, but gesturing for us to come in, and finally shouting across the wind to their grown sons, “Boys, don’t go out too far!”
Though I talk to my father rarely these days, he is never far away. Recently, my wife and I were planning to escape on our first childless vacation, and I heard myself suggesting that we take separate planes. If we did, although the chance of Josh’s losing one parent was doubled, the chance of his losing both virtually disappeared. After thanking me for a cheerful start to our vacation, Jody recognized my father’s style.
“Did your parents fly separately?” she asked.
“No,” I answered. “They stayed home.”
Hugh O’Neil
Deep in Dadland
Greetings to all my friends . . .
I am sending this e-mail to you to let you know that I am okay. Don’t give away my spot on the end of the bar at Charlie’s or get anyone else to play third base on the team just yet. I’ll be back. I just don’t know when.
The reason you haven’t heard from me lately is that I’ve been hiding out in a plastic fort behind my garage. There’s a small but spirited band of three- to six-year-olds that are looking for me at the moment. A couple of them even belong to me. I tried to interest them in hide-and-seek, but th
ey wanted to play “Vaporize the Alien” instead. Guess who was voted in as the Alien.
That was weeks ago. I had no idea how obsessive kids are today. I’m kind of lucky they’ve been mostly playing spaceship with the cardboard box this fort came in. They’re not that much smarter than we were at their age. But they definitely have better cash flow.
I’m a full-time dad now. If one more person calls me Mr. Mom, or tells me “I look like I have my hands full,” I’m going to spit up on them. This isn’t temporary. Believe me, I don’t miss work. I can’t. I work harder now than I ever did at my job. No sick days. No Monday-morning water-cooler sessions. No casual trips to the office coffee pot. As most of you probably know, I spent the last few years at my old job toiling away at basically meaningless work in an inhospitable environment, drowning my creative self in mind-numbing routine. Most jobs I’ve had were like that. Except this one.
I was trying to hollow out a small cave of competency in a sand dune of stupidity, armed with only a plastic spoon and a Barney Rubble sip cup filled with gin. The sand dune won. Here I am today. My left leg is fast asleep. It’s been in a full upright and locked position since last Thursday.
The first kid is easy. You start researching fine cigars. You practice your juggling. You have nine months to paint a room (whoa!), learn how to coach your wife to breathe (duh), and read a couple of articles about diapering techniques and time-outs in magazines with cute bald babies on the cover. How hard is that? Everyone treats you like you won the lottery. Congratulations! You’ve just been upgraded to Dad status! You’re in the Dad Club! You get to shop in a whole new aisle at the grocery store, one you’ve never even seen before.
When the second child comes along (and the third—after that, who’s counting?) is when you really find out what you’re in for. That’s where I’m at now. To be fair, I wasn’t drafted for this duty. I enlisted on my own free will. I just didn’t realize how long boot camp was going to last.
On the positive side, I think our baby, Bartholomew, is a genius. He has a vocabulary that is expanding at a remarkable rate. Today, at the age of only three months, we’re pretty sure he can speak about four languages and six dialects. We’ve contacted an early language and linguistics expert to identify which ones they are exactly, since to our untrained ears he sounds like either an extremely intoxicated bull elephant seal or a screech owl giving birth to a basketball.
Our other boys are doing well too. Kevin is busy renaming the Seven Dwarfs for a kindergarten thesis project and drawing their pictures: Sticky, Icky, Greasy, Motley, Chewy, Hairball and Spud. He’s going to present the drawings to us at his graduation ceremony that’s coming up. Give me a break. Graduation from kindergarten? With caps and gowns and everything? Frankly, I think this self-esteem thing is out of hand.
Joey, our younger boy, is delving into a craft project his mother found in one of those magazines I mentioned earlier. He’s packing leftover baby rice cereal mash into old ice cube trays and baking them into bricks in the hot sun. He wants to build an outdoor adobe play hut for himself and his action figures to live in full time. The doctors say he’s making progress. We have our fingers crossed.
But hey. Fatherhood is rewarding. Really. It’s truly a beautiful experience when you kneel on a tiny plastic block while playing “horsey” for two. (Maybe that’s where the baby’s learning all of those new vocabulary words.) Or the wonders of storytime . . . spending an hour putting the kids to sleep with about a billion stories about lost bunnies and lonely balloons, only to wake them up by stepping on a talking Pooh book in the dark and having to start over. Or finding a banana that died of exposure behind the living-room sofa. Or the cordless telephone in the dog’s water bowl. I could go on. They’re right when they say it’s getting to be a small world after all.
As you can probably tell, I’m spending a lot of time with the kids. I’m learning new stuff every day, even about my house itself. The only part I was familiar with before was the backyard and maybe the garage. Now I’m on a first-name basis with every room, mostly because I have to clean them three to four times an hour. My kitchen appliances are not just machines to me anymore. They have personalities, quirks, tendencies, even habits.
I think I’ve passed over some kind of threshold. I went to an open house at the preschool with a Batman sticker on my shoulder. A strange woman with a bemused smile gently plucked it off me, with the same gesture she probably uses to brush dandruff off her husband’s cardigan or wipe peanut butter from her toddler’s cheek. We all laughed politely and that was that. I didn’t really mind. She had cracker crumbs in her hair.
Oops . . . gotta go. I think I hear the pitter-patter of little feet. E-mail me back with word from the outside if you get a chance. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got eighteen years or so to wait. So far, so good.
T. Brian Kelly
THE FAMILY CIRCUS By Bil Keane
“Did he say ‘go potty’?”
Reprinted by permission of Bil Keane.
Love Letters
Steve had been a dedicated labor coach. In Lamaze class, he held my head gently and panted along with me. He learned the names of all the different types of breathing and memorized the order in which I was to do them. I didn’t have to think; my job, he said, was just to lay back and deliver the baby. He was cool, he was in control; two qualities I found comforting since I wasn’t sure what to expect with our first child.
A couple of weeks before I was due, I had two T-shirts made; one for Steve that said, “Coach,” and another for our soon-to-be-born infant that said “Assistant Coach.” The baby’s shirt was so tiny that the letters covered all but the neck and sleeves. Steve didn’t hesitate to try his on. “Now you’re official,” I said with a grin.
All through my pregnancy, I had heard stories of men who empathized with their wives’ conditions so strongly that they would put on an additional thirty pounds or feel phantom heart flutters. Steve never showed that kind of emotional tie to my experience. He was happy and proud but wanted to stay calm so he could help me. That’s why I never expected what happened the night I delivered.
I had been timing my contractions since midday, and in my mind, there was no doubt what was happening. So when Steve came home from work about 9 P.M., I simply said, “We have to go to the hospital. Now.”
“Now?” he said with his head in the refrigerator, searching for the makings of a sandwich.
“Now!” I said, holding my belly as another pressure wave rolled through.
“Has your water broken yet?” he asked matter-of-factly as he smeared mustard on his bread.
“No, but the contractions are already starting. Let’s go.”
“Hand me a pen,” he said, cool as the cucumbers he was now eating. He took a notepad out of his pocket. “Tell me when you get the next one.”
I wrote two columns on the paper; one that said “Time” and the other that said “Length.” I made the first notation, because he was still eating. I saw him jot down three more before he said, “Okay. Maybe you’ve got something here. I’ll drive you over to the hospital and we’ll see.”
The rest of the night was something of a blur for me. I labored, I pushed, and by dawn, we had a beautiful new daughter in our arms. What I didn’t know is that I wasn’t the only one giving birth. Mr. “cool, calm and collected” had lived every moment with me, keeping extensive notes of everything that happened.
When I awakened the next morning, Steve handed me six sheets of paper and our new daughter’s journal. On the papers was my one notation of my contractions, followed by the recording of more than fifty others. Steve’s neat, precise handwriting became looser and obviously more fatigued as the night wore on. Although I slept between contractions, he had not, keeping a silent, steady vigil so as not to miss anything. He chronicled every word he or anyone else said during my admittance. Although he obviously tried to create an objective record of the experience, his own emotions came shining through every line. I could see that he was lab
oring right along with me as he struggled to keep his surgical mask on his face while trying to keep up with my every breath. Every other sentence ended with an exclamation point as his wonder and excitement built. In almost every way, he was much more aware of the event than I was, and much more awed by the result. “I was the first to shout, ‘It’s a girl!’” he wrote. All I could remember thinking was, What a relief to be able to stop pushing!
I looked over at him. Sometime during the night, he had changed into his “Coach” T-shirt. Together, we put the “Assistant Coach” T-shirt on our new daughter, which hung down to her pretty little pink toes. The real love letters, however, were not the ones emblazoned across his chest or hers but the ones he handed to me, which will have a treasured place in my heart forever.
Robin Silverman
The Mercedes
There’s nothing like a new car in the neighborhood to bring the guys together.
“Nice car, Wayne,” I said.
Mike crossed over from his house: “Hey Wayne, new or used?”
“Used.”
John was two steps behind Mike. “Six or eight cylinders?”
“Four.”
Jim peeked over the fence: “CD or cassette?”
“Neither.”
We were all impressed. Then, the new neighbor appeared out of nowhere and stole Wayne’s moment.
“Wow, look at that!”
We stared, our mouths dropped open, as Bob Henderson parked his new Mercedes in his driveway. We watched him walk inside.
“No kids, you know,” Mike said breaking the silence.
“Probably waiting until they’ve gone through their selfish stage.”
“Yeah,” we chimed. We had enough kids amongst us to field our own Little League team—bat boy included.