Miss Piggy Lunchbox

I think The Boy is gay.  What else could explain him voguing at such a young age.

He’s like a comic book private eye with his cigarette jauntily hanging out of his mouth.

I think The Boy’s a little tired of having his picture taken.  How much longer until he starts slugging the photographers?

I want to be in a band when I get to heaven
Anyone can play guitar and they won’t be a nothing anymore.

- Radiohead (“Anyone Can Play Guitar”)

There’s a song that’s pretty certain to make The Boy’s welcome-to-the-world mix.  I want my son to dream.  I want him to dream about being a rock star, or being a baseball player, or about banging supermodels.  Heck, right now I’d settle for him dreaming about a world that wasn’t so miserable that it required constant crying.

But seriously, I want him to dream that anybody can be whatever they want to be.  I don’t believe in such tripe (I mean, seriously, think about your friends in grade school…how many of them really could be President “if they just set their mind to it”?).  But I still want him to dream it.  Life will be full of dream-smashing experiences, but I don’t want to be one of them.  I don’t want to sit my son down and do the math to explain that it’s pretty much impossible he’ll ever play Major League Baseball like my dad did with me.  I don’t want to push my rock-infatuated son to pursue “math and science” just because he’s good at that and it seems safe to me like my mom did with me.

Remind me of this in 15 years.  Please, God, remind me to let my son dream, no matter how silly or wrongheaded his dreams seem to me.  I mean, if he dreams of being a druglord, then fine, I’ll quash that, but any dream with a hope of a glorious outcome, no matter how slim, please let me allow that.

Anyone can dream…that they won’t be a nothing anymore.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about parenthood: That everything they tell you about child care is a lie.  Let’s count:

1) Babies like to be swaddled.

Holy balls is this one wrong.  If The Boy is quiet, which is almost never, being swaddled throws him into a fit.  If he’s fussy, being swaddled sends him over the edge.  There is nothing in this world that pisses off The Boy more than being swaddled.

2) Newborns sleep 16 – 18 hours a day.

Umm, try 8-10 hours and in 20-25 minute increments.  The Boy has three states: eating, screaming, and sleeping.  Sleeping doesn’t really happen, and he’s working on a way to eat and scream at the same time.  Fed, cleaned, held, whatever…you can give him everything he could possibly want, and he’s still going to tell you how pissed off he is about what was wrong a few minutes ago.  Reminds me of somebody….

3) Even in the fourth trimester, newborns interact.

Nope.  No facial mimicking, and he does not love the sound of our voices, unless he’s expressing his love by furrowing his brow and screaming at the top of his lungs.

4) You will be so focused on the baby that you will grow apart from your spouse.

Thank god this one’s wrong, too.  Now that we have a “common enemy,” My Baby and I are closer than ever.

So not only is he a huge time sink now, The Boy is retroactively wasting our time, making sure that all the time we spent in child care preparation class is completely wasted.

Guy In Office: [something about his kid]
Me: How old is your kid?
Guy: Eight months
Me: Oh, mine’s eight days.
Guy: Wow, congratulations.  I can’t believe you’re back at work already.  [short pause] Actually, no, I totally get it.

So this week we had Opening Day.  I can’t remember an offseason that went so quickly, and I can’t think of an Opening Day I’ve anticipated less than this one since my sports- and TV-free, but girl-obsessed hippie days at the arts high school.  This obviously has to do with The Boy’s arrival, but more than anything I’ve finally come to reject the marketing arm of sports that insists I need to see and remember every detail of every game to be an important consumer in society.  Past Aprils have brought with them anxiety that I wasn’t watching enough baseball, dammit, and so this year I just accepted early on that there was baseball that wasn’t going to get consumed in my household.

Plus all my teams are expected to do well, and the cloud inside the silver linings of those expectations is that my teams can only manage to disappoint relative to them.

But despite my relative ambivalence toward baseball this season (emphasis on relative), I have an insane crazy urge to watch a lot of golf.  I think it’s the result of all those hormones released in the father during childbirth.  I have never been this excited about The Masters, though I will probably just end up disappointed I didn’t get to watch that.

Marketing, you win again.

…and introduces a new character.  Please welcome, The Boy, pretty much a blatant rip-off of Twins Geek’s name for his son, I know.  Born Thursday night, here he is, at 4.5 days old, doing his best Tommie Smith impression.

Me: I don’t feel like a father yet.  I just feel like me with a lot more to-dos.
My Baby: Yeah, I think that’s fatherhood.
Me: Okay, then I feel like a father.
My Baby: But I know what you mean, I don’t feel like a mother, I just feel like I have this new thing I’m really into.
Me: So it’s like me when I got Rock Band.
My Baby: Yeah, I think so.

When I was young enough to be young and old enough to be aware of the conversation people who weren’t young enough to be young were having about my age group, I was constantly bewildered. Why did they get it so wrong? Why were they talking so assuredly about what we were like while being so inaccurate? Why were they piecing together a few trends to make blanket statements about what “kids today” were like? Whatever they were talking about, it didn’t have any resonance to the way I saw the world of my friends and me.

That sense of puzzlement will be important for me to remember for the next 20 years or so. Mind Hacks helps by seemingly interpreting the main message of The Breakfast Club directly into parent-speak.

The monologue that bookmarks The Breakfast Club, with the line “You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions”, succinctly captures how society’s view of youth changes and yet always stays the same.

For the current younger generation, the simplest terms are mostly taken from psychiatry. This will eventually change and our recurrent anxieties about the young will largely be expressed in the next most convenient definition.

As a society, we are strangely blind to the complexities of youth.

As much as I like that last line, I do have to quibble with it. Do we need to call youth complex? I’m not saying it isn’t, but what gives those old people the wisdom to call it so? Again, when I was young, I remember being completely confused hearing adults talk about how hard it was to be a teenager. Sure, I had problems, but I didn’t see my awkwardness as such nor did I attribute any of my problems to being young…it was all I knew up to that point in my life. I think a better closing line would have been to say we are blind to the properties, or experience, of youth.