Fatherhood is Physical
A different spin on dad bods.
On the cusp of fatherhood you’ll be subjected to a torrent of unsolicited advice. Luckily for us fathers-to-be, we don’t have to carry around the evidence of our impending child in the form of a swallowed bowling ball at all times, so we’re generally safe in public (unless of course, we are accompanied by the designated bowling ball carrier). But within our communities, once the word is out, it becomes like an upcoming wedding or a broken arm; when you encounter acquaintances you can almost see the wheels turning inside their head, like a roulette ball jumping around until it lands on the most salient conversational point: So when is the baby due?
It won’t be long before you are hit with the coy remarks that seemed designed to make you dread the experience you’ve been told is the most meaningful of them all. Trust me, they’re better when they’re on the inside, comes to mind. Or, enjoy baby jail. Other dads might wax patriarchally about how profound fatherhood is; how it changed them or shifted their perspective or convinced them to sell their motorcycle. Everyone, to a man, will mention the lack of sleep, and encourage you to enjoy it while you can, which I found as helpful as telling someone who is about to have a root canal to enjoy chewing. Yet the thing that surprised me most once my daughter joined us and my wife and I took on the role of parents, is how physical fatherhood is. No one ever told me about that.
The sheer physicality of the care your new roommate requires is pretty astounding. In the aftermath of his or her arrival one might expect to encounter a crater, a dent in the way things used to be. Instead there is a resounding fullness, an all-encompassing presence that obliterates any yearnings for the way things used to be. A new parent is not just underslept but overwhelmed, and for me this feeling was less emotional than it was physical. If I had time to reflect, perhaps I would have been struck with emotion, but in the early days what I felt mostly had to do with my body and the bodies of my family.
For one, my wife had just given birth, which, I fully admit, renders any of my observations about the physicality of fatherhood moot. Being witness to this ordeal, and the immediate demands placed on her as a new mother breastfeeding a shockingly hungry little critter, only made me want to step my game up and share some of the load, though it was clear early on that my contributions to the project of keeping our daughter alive and well could in no way match hers. Nonetheless I was inspired to try, racing around with a surge of either energy or delirium (or more likely, caffeine); to the pharmacy; to the changing table; to the kitchen; to the changing table again. The days of posting up on the couch for a potentially limitless amount of time were long gone. My seat became merely a perch, a place to briefly land but not to linger.
The same went for my daughter’s seat. Motion was the notion, or else she would let out a wail that cut straight to our cores. She was either bouncing in the Baby Bjorn, or we were bouncing her on the exercise ball, or pushing her around in the stroller. The bouncing and pushing became a rhythm unto itself, so much so that if my daughter were removed from the stroller or Baby Bjorn while I was bouncing or pushing, I would keep on ghost bouncing or ghost pushing, a feeling familiar to many parents in the throes of infant care, the baby seemingly present even when absent.
Even if there was the opportunity to linger, any “free” time I encountered was immediately filled by a better-late-than-never nesting instinct. While my wife wisely did the valuable work of thinking ahead, I didn’t really feel any urgency until matters became, well, urgent. Then, confronted with the sudden void of naptime, I found myself rearranging the closet so that it would perfectly fit our new stash of diapers and wipes. I’m not sure what prompted this instinct, though I suspect it was partly the belated recognition that our condo would require a thorough Marie Kondo-ing lest it disappear under a mountain of new baby stuff, which seemed to arrive on our doorstep from well-meaning friends and relatives on a daily basis.
All that junk I meant to take to the basement months ago? Gone in a flash. Our recycling bin was consistently the sloppiest one on the block, overloaded and in danger of crushing unsuspecting pedestrians.
Then there was the exercise. I know I’m supposed to be developing the soft outer padding of my dad bod, but, for now at least, fatherhood has had the opposite effect. If there were simply no nesting left to be done, instead of dealing with spit-ups I was launching into impromptu pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups. Since our daughter liked constant motion baby squats became a thing. By the end of the day, my newfound regimine of cleaning, cuddling, and crunches left me surprisingly sore. It didn’t help that the baby decided early on that the only way she would tolerate a car seat was if it was being flung back and forth like the pirate ship at an amusement park, so as horrified passersby looked on wondering whether or not to call child protective services, I would stand next to the car launching my child left and right in an exaggerated and exhausting kettlebell swing. My forearms have never been more defined.
If I sound, at this point, like becoming a dad turned me into a manic robot, incapable of love but incredibly capable of loading the dishwasher in the most optimal geometric arrangement, it’s only because I’m trying to drive home the intensely corporeal nature of the job. I have often likened it, in these early months, to being given a Swiss Army Knife. Sure you might not know what to do with it at first, but if you’re required to do everything with it for several weeks, including sleep, you’ll quickly become a pro. Never again will I awkwardly hold someone else’s baby like a squirming bag of bones. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule is no match for the bootcamp of being a new parent.
Which isn’t to say it wasn’t an emotional time. It’s just that emotion seems like a luxury for those whose seats are still seats and not perches. When I returned to work what I missed most was not the abstract thought of my daughter, and I certainly didn’t feel like I possessed any sudden dad-ness (dark circles under my eyes notwithstanding). What I missed most was the weight of her, and when I raced home after work and held her, what I encountered was not necessarily a feeling within but a resounding fullness. If I encounter a dad-to-be now, I won’t be warning him about baby jail or telling him to stock up on sleep. I’ll just tell him to get a stress ball. Might as well get those forearms pumping now.
