Whale-Baby: Day 4 at home with my three-month-old son
Draught of a Draught
It’s a little after 11:00 am, and if you could see us, you’d be able to tell that we’re doing fantastic. We have done the dishes, folded the laundry and started more laundry, read several chapters in Moby-Dick and had a baby bath. Hagen is asleep in the Ergobaby now, smelling a little less like a milk monster. We’re pretty okay with bath time these days, especially the rubdown afterwards. I have not showered yet, and I am okay with that. There are again periods of time during which no one in the house wears pants.
My dad just texted, saying he is on the way over. We call him Paw Paw, which is what we called my Dad’s dad. I did not know him — he died when I was very young — but I remember him through a handful of smiling photos and through the stories I’ve heard about him. It’s curious what all accumulates into your memory of someone you didn’t know. His name was Walthall “Pete” Peters.
It’s a beautiful day, as if spring is playing catch up. We go for a walk.
Behold: we are three generations — plus a dachshund — strolling through the neighborhood. I have a child, I remind myself. This child in the stroller is my child. I am also a child, now also a father, here with my father pushing my son in the… (I have not slept enough lately.)
We pass the Montessori school near our house. It is recess, and the playground is busy and loud. My dad points out a soccer ball in the street. He says we should toss it back over the fence to the kids. I wave him off, not wanting to do that if it isn’t the school’s ball — and what if there’s something malicious about the ball? You just don’t know, and I do not want to be the stranger guy tossing things over fences to schoolkids. We walk on.
Then I hear, “Hey! Boy! Hey, boy! Hey!”
It is a young girl. She is talking to me, and I turn. Her face peeks through the fence. “What’s up?” I say, but I know she wants the ball.
“Can you throw that back?”
I pick the ball up. The kids yell and scream. I make a show of it, “Okay! You ready?” I pause. Some kids have their hands up. I throw a high arc and it comes down near a shaggy-haired boy and bounces off his hands and onto the ground. I am upset with him.
One of the teachers yells thanks, and we move along. I look at my dad and nod, as if to say, See? We are the kind of dads who return lost balls to schoolkids.
During the final months of pregnancy, Lauren suggested I pick a book to read to her belly every night so that Baby Biscuit could learn my voice. He would come out knowing her voice no matter what, but I had to be more deliberate about it.
I picked the book Daddy Kisses, which I think my mom gave me for my birthday last year. In Daddy Kisses, we learn the various ways animal daddies show affection for their animal babies. A representative selection:
“Daddy giraffe gives his calf a kiss on the neck.”
It’s cute. By the sixth or seventh time, you’ve got it memorized. The painted illustrations are warm, bright, and simple. I recommend it to expectant daddies.
Not long before Hagen was born, I came home on lunch break to meet the HVAC guy. His name was Garrett, a slim, fastidious man in his early forties. He tuned up our AC and said that all was okay for now, but if we had kids — do you have kids? he asked; soon enough, I said — since we’d soon have a kid, he encouraged me to go ahead and get a quote on a new system. In the event ours went kaput, we’d already have that planned out and wouldn’t swelter too long with a newborn.
I thanked him for the advice, and in doing so I must have seemed to open up, because we soon began talking about being a dad. Garrett had a few kids, teenagers now, he shared. I imagine his family’s well cooled home in the suburbs. “Those first several months after our first,” he said, “I didn’t feel needed. You want to help out, but it’s definitely more about the mom. It wasn’t until much later that I felt like I bonded with him.” He slid his glasses up the bridge of his nose. I see a younger Garrett, peeking over the crib at his newborn son, afraid.
That has not been my experience. I knew my priority was ensuring Lauren’s comfort and wellbeing, but I wanted it to be that and more — and it has been. I have had the diapers and the spit-up and the late-night bouncing next to the microwave vent fan in the kitchen, and through those things Hagen and I have bonded.
We packed Daddy Kisses in our hospital bag, and I read it — in person— to Hagen. He did not know much at this point in his life, but from the wise look in his eyes I could tell he knew very well that, for some reason, daddy frog kisses his froglet on the eyes.
I am thankful for this silly little book. It teaches the unsilly lesson that affection and tenderness are the responsibilities of fathers, that those things are the real work of parenting, no matter who you are. Daddy human gives his son a kiss on the head; the work is never over.
Speaking of work and thankfulness: I am very thankful for Daxko for allowing new dads to take two weeks of paternity leave. It is a new benefit and a needed benefit and I am wallowing in these days at home. Am I the first dad to take advantage of it? (Don’t blow it for everyone else, Chuck.)
Today, as I pretend-walked Hagen across my lap for what felt like a glorious and giggly hour, the phrase luxury of time came to mind. And this has indeed been a luxury. I feel indulgent. I smile a long, pleading smile at Hagen so that he’ll smile back — and he does, and he’ll do it again when I smile again. Huzzah!
How to keep this luxury, when everything resumes normal busy speed? When I no longer have as much time to write? Can you keep it, or is that the kicker? Is it what we’re all up against: how to adequately pay attention despite everything else?
Don’t blow it.
Meanwhile, things are cruising along on the Pequod. The merciless winter is behind us, and we have met more of the main players. I forgot how cartoonish these characters are. But it’s the introduction of Starbuck, our “long, earnest” and “uncommonly conscientious” first mate, that strikes me. He has wild, sad eyes for his faraway wife and child. He is interesting in the way doomed men are interesting.
Then at last. Enter: Captain Ahab. The grim, moody father figure of our ship. We confirm his loss-of-leg status, speculate about his mysterious full-body white-lightning scar, and chuckle at Stubb’s outrageous suggestion to affix cotton to Ahab’s peg leg as a muffle. Already sailors are dreaming about being whacked by Ahab’s leg.
We also get the first mention of the titual whale in Chapter XXXI — “If ye see a white one,” Ahab shouts, “split your lungs for him!” Second mate Stubb will believe it when he sees it.
And just when the adventure plot seems to kick in, we get Chapter XXXII. When the novel loses readers, as I’m sure it commonly does, it’s probably around Chapter XXXII, titled “Cetology,” in which our narrator holds forth on whales in general and the Sperm Whale in particular. There is no mention of any character or event hitherto mentioned. Instead, we get a cockeyed compendium of all manner of whale names and types and habits, told with the enthusiasm of a child sharing some new thing he learned. This goes on for a surprising number of pages. If you have ever wondered what it was like to not know about whales, this is the book for you.
This sounds like a bore, but I’m telling you — the exuberance of Ishamel is delightful and contageous. If only we could all be so astonished by the world.
The end of this chapter has a few of those sentences you underline as you read them: “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but a draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” (“Cash” seems out of place, right?)
Finally, for those of you who might be wondering, Lauren (aka the Dairy Queen, aka Milk Mama) continues to crush the ultramarathon that is breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is no joke — one of the great surprises for me out of this whole experience is the sheer ongoingness of it. And I’m just a spectator (wink), bottle washer, and occasional delivery milkman.
She’s already mastered the at-work pump, and, as can be seen, Hagen is keeping up. He turned 12 weeks today. Cheers!
I’m on paternity leave for two weeks with our son, and I’m going to write about it. During this time, I’m also reading Moby-Dick.
