DadWagon got a strong shout-out from Greg Allen over at DaddyTypes, a blog with its own worthy mash of reflections on David Bowie, hexagonal cribs and dadslapping. I’ve been hanging on his site as it is; glad to see he’s over here from time to time.
All this bonhomie reminds me of a big dad-to-dad question that came up this week: What kind of advice do we as fathers owe dads-to-be?
This came up because it’s nuptials-time in South Florida, and all the cousins and their babies have come down to play Rock Band and drink liquor and see my brother get married tomorrow.
It was the first time I’d seen my cousin after he had a baby eight months ago. The great times with the baby were great, he told me, and the bad times were exactly as bad as I had told him they would be.
What?
Had I really, when hearing that one of my favorite relatives was about to have a beautiful baby with his lovely girl, told him to gird for hell? Apparently I had.
Not that I was the only one, he said. Tell other men you’re going to become a dad and you invite, as my cousin put it, a “shitstorm” of warnings and dire predictions about the struggles of raising a baby.
Is this a bad thing? Not to generalize, but if a woman says she’s pregnant, she can mostly expect a chorus of cooing from her girlfriends. As she should. It’s a fricking miracle that anyone can get pregnant in this era of chemicals and careerism. Celebrate that shit.
Yet I’ve found that sometimes the most dire predictions have given me the most comfort. One particularly memorable warning from a friend of mine when he found out I was going to have a kid: ha, he said, you will never have sex again.
And while that hasn’t quite turned out to be true, it sure has felt like it at times. Knowing that I wasn’t the only one did me a lot more good than a thousand “oh you’re going to love being a dad” comments would have.
So I’ve gone around passing that warning forward. And others. Let none among my friends say they had no idea about the sleeplessness, the blown diapers, the irrational (and rational) rages, the altered marriages.
Some people really shouldn’t have kids. For the rest of us, myself included, the pros heavily outweigh the cons. Having a kid means ranging into high categories of love I didn’t even know existed. But you don’t need succor or advice to get through the good times. You need it during the many times when you fail your wife or your kid or when they fail you.
So fuck it. I’m happy to keep seeding the shitstorm.
Man, I so wish someone had warned me. I’d heard, “it will be hard.” Taking the heater core out of my car is hard. Having a baby–especially one that doesn’t sleep well–is, literally, torture. Why didn’t someone say, “there will be times you despise yourself. You will be plunged into black pits of despair and rage, and it will feel like it will never end?”
We owe other dads the shitstorm. We should also tell them they can call us up and tell us how bad it it, because we understand. We can offer them the only possible consolation, we can say, “I know how you feel. I’m sorry.”
Like all pain, time heals it, and wonder and love are to come, but that means nothing when you’re strapped to the tiger.
Also: Greg rules.
As a woman, I must tell you that you are mistaken as to the response women get. It is not “a chorus of cooing.” The chorus of cooing only comes from the childless or those with children over 15. Women hear a shitstorm of labor horror stories, closely followed by nursing horror stories. At my shower, one friend spend 30 minutes describing her repeated cases of mastitis while every woman in the room cringed and wrapped her arms around her own chest. That may have been overkill, but as I have pointed out to some of my dad friends, the whole reason moms (and dads) get together is so they don’t feel alone in the bad moments. And of course, that’s why dads have blogs.
This is a tough one, I really try to NOT be the person who offers unsolicited advice or lots of horror stories. If someone asks, my general advice is try to hold on to your patience as long as possible, but know that sooner or later you WILL yell at your kid(s). Simple, right?
For people who are having twins (like we did) I will get more specific about techniques, products, etc. This is because twin parenthood is a secret club and there are certain initiation procedures that must be observed.