There comes a time when the baby has been nursing continually for 17 hours straight followed by 4 straight hours of inconsolable screaming, not crying mind you, ear splitting banshee wailing, and it’s 4 in the morning and you have to go to work in a couple hours and you turn to your wife and she gets that look in her eyes, and new father’s if you don’t know what I’m talking about you will.  It’s that look that tears at the very fiber of your being.  The look that comes from behind a face of unparalleled exhaustion and insurmountable frustration, it has all the hallmarks of pleading but is still quite distinctly a demand for you to take this child, take it from her, for all that is good and holy, you must take this child, I don’t care what you do but I don’t want to see or hear or think about this thing this giant eyed devourer of souls for at least an hour.  You can sell it to the gypsies you can hire it out to a Chinese sweatshop, but I am done dealing with this child.  Do you hear me?   I am done.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about being married is that a woman can say an awful lot with one look.  I call this particular look the “Black Market Look”. 

Of course you won’t sell it to gypsies or hire it out to a sweatshop.  Partly because you’d have to answer for it the next morning when your wife has partially regained her sanity thanks to a solid half hour of sleep but also because you are only slightly less exhausted then she is and so at that moment you really wouldn’t have the capacity to pee straight let alone sell your newborn on the black market.

It is in these precious moments that your child becomes less of something that you love and more of something you are dealing with because you have to, you have to make it stop, please, for the love of God, please stop the noise.  I think it would be hard to feel loving toward anyone or anything that was doing an impression of a Kenny G album played backwards at high-speed on full volume with the treble all the way up and the base all the way down 5 hours straight directly into your ear.  So now you’re on a mission.  And you’ll do whatever it takes.  Whatever it takes.

I fancy myself to be a fairly quiet person, someone who enjoys meditating, someone who cherishes the serene stillness the infinite calm energy that dwells within all of us and all things…with the exception of babies.  Babies do not have this.  As far as I can tell babies completely hate the idea.  In fact, I’m pretty certain that if babies could they would poop on the concept of stillness. Babies don’t want quiet, they want a Heavy Metal Bagpipe band covering Marilyn Manson during a Monster Truck rally inside their cradle.  It’s when its completely still, like that wonderful time of night that gently beckons you to sleep, that is the time when babies totally freak out.    And it’s because of this fact that you often find yourself doing things that would be impossible to explain to anyone who happened to walk in on you.  “Aaron, why are banging on the stove with spatulas while shouting guttural tribal chants at the top of your lungs?”  Or “Why do you have your finger in the babies mouth while driving in the middle of a traffic jam with a recording of a blow dryer blaring over your stereo?”  Or “Is there a reason why you’re dancing around the living room in nothing but your underwear, holding a baby, while pushing a vacuum cleaner around on high, at four in the morning?”

Sometimes you hear experienced parents tell you “Oh, its hard, it’s so hard.”  Trivial Pursuit is hard this is insanity.  Sometimes I stop and think, "Some people do this on purpose".  Some people do this on purpose multiple times.  It’s in these moments that I start questioning these people’s sanity, people like my parents who had three children.  And suddenly, all those moments when my mother would tell me how I would make such a good father and oh I’d have such cute babies begins to seem less and less sweet and more and more vindictive.

Of course it’s not all doom and gloom.  There is the standard overwhelmingly wonderful heart warming good parts, which I’ve listed below.  

1. “The birth of our child was the most beautiful and miraculous thing I’ve ever seen.”
2. “Occasionally our child will select a 5 minute span at random to stop screaming and be totally content, laying on her back kicking her legs and making little kitten sounds.  This is cute.”
 
End of List

There are days when I come home from work to find my wife, my dear darling wife, waiting for me right inside the door.  Her cheeks are flushed and its apparent that she’s been crying.  She presents to me in her outstretched arms a screaming infant and she says, “Your baby has been very difficult today”.  Notice she said “Your baby” not “Our baby.” This is an important distinction.  This means that she is no longer willing to accept and is officially denying that she had anything to do with the genetic make up of this child.  This child’s behavior has driven her to the very brink and she has made the executive decision that this is all of your fault. The “Black Market Look” normally accompanies this. This is brought on by the really, really hard days.  The days when the baby cries while they are sleeping. Its times like these, when I see first hand the emotional toll that these precious bundles of joy can take, that I think about the fact that anyone is allowed to have children. This never seemed nearly as insane before I had my own child.  But now, when I think about it, when I think that anyone, I mean anyone, can have children.  It just blows me away.  There is no oversight for this.  You don’t have to sign anything.  I didn’t sign anything.  We just had a baby.  They handed it to us; we took it home, and proceeded to go out of our minds.  I mean it just seems bizarre to me.  There’s no application, there’s no test, there’s nothing that you have to do…well there’s one thing.  I mean for the amount of responsibility, dedication, and emotional fortitude that it takes wouldn’t you think there’d be something, a form, a license, a sub-committee, but there’s nothing.  It’s harder to get a Sears card.

And then there is the other odd thing that people keep telling us.  They say that eventually we’ll block out all the hard times, that we’ll have selective memory, that we’ll just remember the “joys of parenting”. I suppose that is the only conceivable way people would have more than one child.  Still it seems hard for me to swallow that I will forget all of this madness.  Then again my wife was just talking about having another one not 24 hours after giving me the “Black Market Look”.  

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