Fatherhood

Fatherhood

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Blood Lines

Psychologists and Sociologists suggest that birth order in a family creates certain predetermined types of personalities.

The First Born is usually a quick learner who is more driven to succeed and more of a perfectionist. The Middle Child is more laid back and often a good mediator, sometimes more of a social person. The Youngest Child is usually last to mature, sometimes a bit of a trouble-maker and often a clown who tends to act without a thought to consequences.

Of course many factors can affect the personalities of children and change these stereotypes quite a bit, but most of us can look at these generalizations and recognize ourselves and our siblings.

Thinking back to my first three children, I see how these personality types hold true for the most part. My first born daughter was an early speaker and reader, always driven to be the best at everything, though not obsessively, but more so because she simply wanted to do everything and do it right. My middle son is more relaxed and even tempered (though he, like I, sometimes lets his Irish heritage come through in times of stress) and he tends to see things from multiple points of view. My youngest son was always bright and inquisitive as a child, but also a source of constant amusement, and less driven to succeed early on in his life.

Now that we have brought into being a new “batch” of kids, I wondered how the birth order dynamics would play out.

The accepted thinking is that a late born child will be more like a First Child—but of course, we have twins, and it would be almost impossible to have two “A-Type” personalities pop out at the same time.

I do see two distinct temperaments in my little ones, but it seems like they may have arrived slightly out of order. Although they were only two minutes apart, the “older” twin, Anastasia, seems more like a middle child: mellow and unstressed and somehow amused at the whole process. The “younger” twin, Christina, is aggressive and active, physically strong and demanding.

In terms of slogans, the younger one seems to be saying, "I want the world and I want it now!" while her older sister, through her demeanor declares, "I'd like at least a piece of the world, but I'll wait until after my nap."

Of course, they are only six weeks old at this point, but if my first go-round is any indication, these dispositions will probably follow them, at least in some way, as they mature.

We may indeed be prewired for certain psyches and characters; all I can do is help them grow into theirs in the most positive way I can.

Friday, August 26, 2011

The Art of War

Our household is very much like a WWE Tag Team match these days.

In one corner are the twins.

Although they claim that they don’t yet have the power of speech, I am convinced that they communicate through some inscrutable system of correspondence—maybe a little known native people's language like in Wind Talkers—and that they hold clandestine baby meetings in which they plot their covert ops, including synchronized diaper-filling and tightly coordinated screaming jags that have my wife and I scrambling to plug in pacifiers, warm up bottles, change diapers, strip off soiled (and I mean, SOILED) clothing and seek the ever- elusive baby blankets (see blog entry on “Baby Physics”) like a couple of really bad Whack-a-Mole players . Their timing is nearly flawless, and their execution, Navy Seal-like in terms of shock and awe.

In the other corner are my wife and I.

We are not yet as sophisticated in our battle plan as the pint-sized ninjas we are committed to care for, but we are learning.

In response to the twins’ attempt to weaken us with sleep deprivation—which, by the way, ranks well above water-boarding in terms of sheer torture—we have begun to use the old “tap-out” system. Some nights I get up for all of the feedings while my wife sleeps, and the next night she does the same for me. By this system we stay sharp (well, OK, as sharp as really tired middle-aged people can be) and ready to respond to the next infant assault tactic.

We are also well armed.

We now own two of every item sold at Babies R Us, including wiper warmers, clip-on pacifier holders for the strollers (we have three strollers by the way: one armored transport version for twins and two highly portable umbrella strollers, that hold up about as well as an actual umbrella in a hurricane) and other tools and apparatus (apparatuses? apparatti?) necessary to hold out until re-enforcements arrive. Yes, I know re-enforcements are never actually going to arrive, but the concept keeps us going.

Currently, the conflict can best be described as a stalemate; that may also describe either my wife or me, since we rarely are able to work a shower into the battle plan. For now, we keep in mind the words of Sun Tzu: "All war is deception." I think we have successfully deceived ourselves into thinking we are winning.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Baby Physics

Most people have heard the facetious question, “Which is heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?”

The first time I heard that old joke, I had to think for a moment, before I smiled and answered that, despite the striking difference in their bulk, (and the difference in being struck by them) they do, in fact, weigh the same.

Now consider this: which would you rather hold for two hours, six pounds of feathers or six pounds of baby. Yes, the two weights are the same, but the two tasks are not.

That’s what I mean by, Baby Physics.

There are certain laws of infant dynamics that become apparent the longer you deal with babies. Here is a short list:

The Law of Relative Mass

A baby held in one’s arms will double in absolute density every ten minutes.

According to this law, a six-pound three-ounce child, after a time span of an hour, will weigh about 125 pounds (Don’t bother checking my math; if you don’t believe me, go visit a friend who has an infant and offer to hold him or her for a few minutes. Warning: stand between your friend and the door, and under no circumstances agree to “watch him/her for a minute” while your friend runs to the store for diapers and wipes. You will never see your friend again)

Murphy’s Law of Liquid Dispersal

Anything that can be spit up, will be.

This, of course applies to breast milk or formula—kind of an equal-opportunity maxim—but it also embraces anything that a baby ingests: a collection of viscous substances of uncertain origin, including baby cheese (you’ll know it when you see it). A related corollary states that the volume of the spit up will vary in direct proportion to the darkness of the color of the clothes being spit up-on, and the expense of having them dry-cleaned.

McGurskey’s Third Law of Nursling Acoustics

A Baby’s cry is nominally ten decibels more intense than the engine of an XF-84 Thuderscreech (generally considered to be the loudest airplane ever built) when they want something.

Of course, when they REALLY want something, it gets a little louder.

Swee’ Pea’s Corollary: Contrary to normal laws of acoustics, decibel volume tends to increase rather than decrease with the inverse square of the distance between you and the baby. No one has been able to explain this anomaly, but no one who has ever tried to ignore, even for a minute, a baby’s cry, will dispute it.

The First Law of Excrement

No diaper can hold baby poop.

For this reason, diaper makers will almost never make any definitive claim to feculence control on their packaging. They usually restrict their come-ons to the categories of “comfort,” “ ease of handling,” and some vague claim to “added absorbency.” Well, at two o’clock in the morning, when your cherub unloads on your pajamas for the third time in a week, you may be thinking of words other than “added absorbency” to include in your scathing email to Kimberly Clark. But, to be fair, one look at the stuff little ones produce and you have to cut the diaper guys a little slack. Just remember the joke about the optimist who gets pooped on by a bird, who then smiles and says, “Thank God elephants don’t fly.”

Houdini’s Law of Fluctuating Resources

No quantity of baby supplies is sufficient.

Prior to the birth of our twins, we received generous gifts of baby clothes and paraphernalia . At one point I think I counted forty-seven baby blankets. Yet, most nights, when I have finished feeding, burping, changing, re-feeding, re-burping, re-changing, comforting, rocking and crooning the twins back to sleep, I cannot find a single blanket to wrap them up in before laying them down—not even the blankets they were wrapped in when I picked them up to start the routine. I am not sure where blankets, burp cloths and onesies go to hide—probably the same place as the single socks that mysteriously vanish from the dryer. Of course, they magically reappear on laundry day (which is every day) in greater numbers.

This is only a partial list. For a complete index see Spock’s General Theory of Baby Dynamics (that’s Dr. Spock, not Mr. Spock, and if you’re old enough to know the difference between those two, you probably look like me, only not as tired).

Monday, August 22, 2011

Relativity

Becoming a father in the “September” of my years has created its own set of oddities. Among them: newly defined lines of relationships within the family.

I was married to my first wife for 22 years and we raised three children: a girl and two boys. Three years into my new marriage my twin daughters arrived. This redrew some old boundaries.

My youngest son, who used to be the youngest child, is now the “middle” kid. My daughter and sons now have something they never had before: little sisters. And where there had always been “my three kids” there are now “my five kids.”

The age differences are also a little bizarre. My first three children were 24, 26 and 28 years old when their new siblings were born, so there will be a generational gap between the two “batches.”

In addition, my two children living farther away—on the other side of the country, in fact—are understandably ambivalent to the idea of my suddenly having two infants who threaten to occupy my time and attention, coupled with the further skepticism that comes from the concept of having half-sisters—siblings who share one parent instead of two. My former middle child—my older son—and his wife have accepted the new arrangement more warmly, partly because they live close enough to visit on a regular basis, and partly because they are a couple who anticipate having a family of their own shortly and may be more receptive to the idea of a growing and evolving family.

Personally, I have discovered that a truth I learned many years ago still holds.

When I had one child and we were expecting a second, I wondered if I would ever be able to love that second child as much as I did the first. When the second little one arrived—and later the third—I learned there was no problem at all. Love is one of those qualities that, ironically, grows more abundant the more we expend it. If anything, each new addition to the family added a new dimension to the affection I felt toward each child.

The same thing is happening again. As I re-experience the joys, as well as the challenges, of fatherhood, I find myself remembering tender moments from my first time around, and I feel even closer to my older children.

Hopefully they will all tap into this curious and poignant phenomenon of renewed love that comes around only rarely in life.

It may be true that we can’t pick our families, but we can choose to focus on the joyous aspects of kismet and grow from the sudden outpouring of love that accompanies new life.


Saturday, August 20, 2011

Physical Therapy

It is nearly impossible to arrive at the age of sixty-one without acquiring those things we lump together in the category of “nagging injuries.”

Mine tend to center around my back.

In my forties I undertook the task of getting back into shape through long distance running (many readers will think right about now-- say no more). I was determined to lose weight and regain the muscle tone I once had, and I was successful. I worked my way up to about fifteen miles a week, and at the same time worked weekends as a volunteer soccer referee where I routinely ran another five or six miles on each Saturday. I also played full court basketball on Sundays.

The pounds fell off and muscle tone returned, but I paid the price of running daily on concrete sidewalks and paved roads. After about five years I injured my lower back in some way that no doctor can adequately diagnose other than to say, “You’re back is worn out.”

Of course, now that I am once again a father of infants, I realize it’s not just my back that’s worn out.

Taking care of young children is tough at any age, but after six decades of wear and tear, my body is sending me some pretty clear messages, like, “What the heck do you think you’re doing?”

Being a parent of infants requires a whole new set of physical motions: rocking, swaying, jiggling, nudging, and swinging; not to mention trudging, plodding and staggering, usually out of bed at 2:47 a.m. because the rocking and swaying you did at 1:56 a.m. was ineffective—again.

I have also resurrected some old skills: cuddling, cooing, humming, hissing, shushing, warmly reassuring, desperately begging and weeping uncontrollably like a big old girl.

But something else has happened—my back doesn’t hurt as much.

Now, it could be the occasional visits to the physical therapy clinic, when I remember to go between feedings and changings. But I don’t think an hour a week of fitting odd contraptions on my feet that allow me to “do the skating thing” (in the words of the nineteen-year old assistant-assistant therapist girl) are really the reasons for the improvement.

Spending time with new lives has a way of renewing more than just old parenting skills. Maybe it’s just a matter of focusing my attention on someone else with a greater need; maybe it’s the forced hours of relaxation where I must adopt a tranquil attitude as a means of self-defense—or something else intangible.

As a teacher of high school students for twenty years I have noticed that I seem to be generally less of an “old codger” than some of my contemporaries—although by using the term, “old codger” I may have to relinquish that claim—and I have often guessed it was because of my daily interaction with those who are still a few years away from codgerdom. Hanging out with kids who laugh at the idea of having a land line, and who discuss music groups like Incubus in the same breath as The Doors under the category of "those old guys," may keep the trappings of old age at bay a little longer.

So maybe I am getting something in return for my rocking, swaying and uncontrollable weeping; something restorative that physical therapy doesn’t offer.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Eye of the Beholder


Let's face it: human babies are, in reality, geeky-looking, squiggley little critters that we would normally find repellant or, at best, amusing, upon close inspection. But probably as a mechanism of species preservation, we instead look upon these helpless, squirming, gelatinous troglodytes as the most transcendently beautiful beings ever placed on the earth.

Because, honestly, if they came into the world as teenagers, we'd probably eat our young.

Now, almost all parents live in ignorant bliss of this irony. (Fortunately, my twin girls are actually beautful, otherwise I would be guilty of some pretty vain hypocrisy here) so I occupy some comfortable distance from which to comment on this odd phenomenon. By the way, I can provide photographic evidence of my daughters' unparralleled beauty (see sample above). Just respond with your email and I will send a few of the 17,000 pictures I have of them. There would be more, but Flash Drive #6 fell into the diaper pail and has not yet returned from being digitally remastered.

OK- so granted the disparity bewtween reality and perception might make it hard for us to be objective about our kids.

That is not such a bad thing.

Imagine how much harder it would have been for all of us to adjust to the vagaries and injustices of the world if we hadn't received unconditional love from our primary caregivers, or occasionally heard our parents say:
"Nice work - in fact, this is the best (fill in the blank) I've ever seen in my life! keep up the good work."

(By the way, this might be a good time to reveal something painful: you probably were not really the "Student of the Month" in fourth grade--sorry)

I remember when I first started playing violin at age 10. My teacher was a master of many instruments, but she was perhaps the best violin and viola player I have ever heard. I know that my early attempts to create something other than painful screeches out of the hand-me-down Steiner knock-off I inherited courtesy of my sister's abandoned music aspirations were probably agonizingly slow to develop. Yet Mrs. Marsh would flash me her approving smile, and, in a business-like spirit of collaboration, play the second part in the regular duets we performed at the end of the lessons.

Here is where it would be nice to say that I was a musical prodigy and eventually became a soloist or concert master, but life rarely turns out that way.

I did, however, use the knowledge and skill gained from four years of violin lessons and school orchestra classes to become a reasonably competent bass and guitar player in my twenties; I even worked professionally for five years--until I realized the odds of becoming the next Paul McCartney were uncomfortably stacked against me.

Still, without the benign half-truths and outright false praise we receive in our formative years, I doubt many of us would acquire the foundation of self worth we need to survive the often cruel reality that follows childhood bliss.

Some might argue that the "tough love" approach is better: helping young people build up thicker skins with which they might survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but it is certainly true we need to feel that at some point in our lives we were all beautiful to someone.

Monday, August 15, 2011

The Wonder of Car Seats


Car seats have evolved.

For people like me--dinosaurs of the Baby Boom generation--child safety systems were somewhere between exotic and non existent. Yes, there were such things as "car seats" when we were young, but they were the rare exception rather than the rule--let alone the law!

I remember my parents bought a contraption called a Wonder Chair that did multiple duty as a high chair, toddler chair, play table, stroller and, yes, car seat.

Of course, in the 1950's, with the family securely wrapped in several tons of Detroit steel in the form of a 1949 Hudson, the car seat was really just a kind of status symbol--one way in sprawling suburbia to get ahead of the Joneses. Besides, there were no seat belts, so the chair just simply sat on the seat; and there was one measley, narrow plastic belt that could be fastened around the baby's waist with a buckle that wouldn't even pass inspection as a decoration in today's world of litgation-avoidance and safety overkill (maybe those are really the same thing).

By the time I had my first kid, child safety seats were the law--sort of. I mean, we had to put them in something that could be held down with the now required seat belts.

The seats were simple and varied in their design, and it seemed like any means of securing them was fine: it was OK to have them in the front seat, facing forward, in the back seat facing backward, balanced on the engine hump of a '79 Dodge mini truck--OK maybe that one wasn't officially sanctioned, but no one seemed to worry about the particulars.

Fast forward 28 years.

The car seats (sorry, child safety restraint systems) of the--what do we call this decade, anyhow? the "teens"?--anyway, they have morphed into frightening machines of torture equipped with harnesses, chest buckles, crotch buckles, shoulder straps, head and body padding that looks like deployed airbags, canopies, adjustable handles, leveling dampeners, photon torpedoes and, I swear to God, cup holders.

We have to go the Highway Patrol or AAA just to learn how to secure them with a LATCH -- that's not a latch, but a LATCH: An acronym for Lower Anchors and Tethers for CHildren. Yep, that's right. They couldn't come up with an obnoxious enough acronym using only the first letter of each word, so they had to get sleazy and steal the "H" from "Children."

To make things worse, our little twins are on the small side: 5 lbs 7 oz and 6 lbs 1 oz, so putting them into these monstrosities borders on cruel and unusual punishment. Fortunately, there is no end to the accessories available, like rear-rear-view mirrors (to see the faces of the little ones facing away from you in the back seat) to inane music and lighting controlled with a remote--It's like something you would expect to see in a 70's bachelor pad--one click and you've got mood lighting and "Kumbaya" synthesized from the sides of the convex mirror showing you a distorted version of your precious cargo.

O brave new world, that has such Wonder Chairs in it!

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Men Who Stare at Diapers


I'm a hands-on dad.

By that I mean I have my hands on diapers many times a day.

I change diapers about once every two hours for each of my twins--which comes to about 24 diapers per 24-hour period. That means that in the 3 1/2 weeks of their young lives I have handled approximately 500 diapers.

By extrapolation, that should work out t0 6000 per year or about 15,000 by the time they are both potty-trained. Combined with the 16,000-20,000 diapers from my first round as a father, I think I will qualify for consideration in the diaper Hall of Fame.

I'm not saying I should have a concrete baby wipe in the sidewalk around Kimberly-Clark, but I think Huggies will owe me some kind of Golden Diaper in a couple of years.

Is this important?

Well, those dads who shy away from the process of diaper-changing for some chauvinist reason, or, more likely, because of the occasional unpleasantries associated with the process, actually are cheating themselves. The act of making your little one's life less uncomfortable and of spending some quantity time (because the idea of substituting quality time for the actual hours they need you is nonsense) is invaluable--now, and for the future of the parent-child relationship. I mean, how can we ever tell a teenager to take responsibility for his or her actions if we don't do the same when it's most important?

Monday, August 8, 2011

This Old "New" Dad



I find myself in a unique position in the universe: I am 61 years old, a father of three grown chidren, and becoming a "new" father for the second time. Now I have new responsibilities, but also new opportunities, as I look for ways to balance the needs of young twin girls with the ongoing challenges of evolving relationships with my adult kids.

This blog will document that journey.