Chapter One – Two Fateful Words
Mattias: “Daddy, you suck.”
Amy: “Mattias, tell your daddy you’re sorry.”
Mattias: “Okay. Daddy, I’m sorry you suck.”
-Mattias, 3 years, 3 months
“Fuck it.”
These two simple words are what started the baby ball rolling in the Piatt household, back in January. After months of counseling, discernment, weepy nights and sleepless mornings, I submitted, succumbed, caved in like the roof of a Geo convertible.
I know ‘fuck it’ is an ironic choice of words, considering the circumstances. I also think it’s sadistically ironic that we men are biologically tuned to be unfettered humping machines, sticking it wherever we can fit it, yet we’re usually the ones who freak out the most about the byproduct of said poking. In some ways, I’m such a typical male, visually aroused by anything vaguely resembling a boob or a female backside. For crying out loud, hourglasses make me pitch a tent. In other ways, I’m far from normal: working from home and sharing responsibility with my wife for the daily development of our four-year-old son, Mattias.
In some ways, it’s this shared responsibility, I think, that makes having another kid such a big deal in the first place.
“I think you take it more seriously than some dads,” said a shrink friend of mine who counseled me through some of my initial anxiety when we first started talking about more children, several months ago. “You know that half of the responsibility of another baby will fall on you, whereas some guys are happy to have more children, since they aren’t really around that much anyway.” Doc, as I call him, has been both friend, physician and in many ways, a surrogate father to me when I’ve most needed him. A father of three boys himself, he knows a thing or two about family, and if he’s as emotionally and physically available to the rest of his former clients as he is to me, his extended family tree looks like a frigging Chia Pet.
The thing is, even though I love Doc as much as I do anyone else on the planet, he can be kind of a dick too. On the one hand, he’ll offer up these insightful little gems like this that help validate why I’m so freaked out about expanding our family, and then he’ll smile and tell me to stop being such a pussy, to just man up and do my seminal duty.
It might come as some surprise, given these first few paragraphs, that my wife, Amy, who is nearing her thirty-fourth birthday at the time of this chapter’s creation, is a minister by profession. She’s not exactly your typical minister, which should be pretty self-evident, given that she’s a woman, but I feel compelled to point it out anyway. We started a church together almost four years ago in southern Colorado right after she finished seminary in Texas, just as Mattias turned six months old. We’ve joked ever since that raising a toddler and starting a church is a whole lot like having twins, but I guess that just wasn’t enough of a challenge for us.
I have my own life outside of the church, which is good since I have yet to receive a paycheck from the church in four years. I help out with everything from music and leadership to outreach, toilet unclogging, landscaping and whatever else is left unattended to at the end of the day. In some ways I like being a volunteer because it allows me to say “no” more often than if I was paid, though I rarely say “no” anyway. It’s just nice to know I could if I wanted to. I actually make a living as a writer, which explains how it is that I can at least pretend to have a career, volunteer fifteen or so hours a week at church and still pitch in my fifty percent toward parenting.
It just seems to me that a full life is a blessing, but only to a point. After that, anything else you pile on just makes you a fucking moron or a masochist, or both. So what I’m left with is a lingering question about why the hell I agreed to this, and if it’s something I want, or if I’m doing it more or less to keep my wife happy. And at what cost to me?
If you haven’t figured out already, I’m a fan of irony. Most people don’t actually understand what it is, and to be honest, if someone pinned me down and forced me to give a spontaneous definition of irony, I’d be hard pressed. I’d also wonder who let the psychopaths loose from the English department, but that’s beside the point. People talk about things being ironic all the time, including people like Alannis Morissette who sings a whole hit song about irony, but who clearly wouldn’t know irony if it jumped on her face and wiggled.
My wife came down the stairs last Saturday morning with the little pee stick that showed two little red lines indicating that her ticket had been punched. I had no inclination that this was coming, as I didn’t even know she had a secret stash of preggo tests upstairs in the bathroom. The first thing my son wanted to know, of course, was what the pee stick was.
“It’s a thermometer,” my wife lied, not too eager at that specific moment to explain the implications of what she had only told me to this point by sticking the pee stick under my nose.
“I wanna try it,” he said, pulling it toward his mouth. “Here, take my temperature.”
“Not a good idea, monkey,” I said, snatching the still-moist stick from her shaky hand. “This one goes in your butt, anyway.” That took care of his interest in the pee stick.
The irony of the whole exchange wasn’t that he thought the pregnancy test was a thermometer, or even that she had presented it to me only a few minutes before we took Mattias to play his first soccer game at the YMCA. All of those, though perhaps interesting, are not ironic in the least. The fact that this particular Saturday morning was the day before Mother’s day, and given the fact that, only a few days before, we had talked tentatively about going back on birth control at the end of the month, makes the pee stick incident more than ironic enough for me.
So there I sat on the couch, pregnancy test in one hand and coffee cup in the other, pretty much wanting to vomit, but trying to smile instead. “Well,” I said in my trademark measured tone, giving away nothing, “I guess that means pressure-free sex for the next nine months.”
“And my boobs will get huge,” said my wife.
“Yeah, there is that, I guess.”
“It’s kind of like cheating,” she said, “but with me, attached to someone else’s boobs.”
“Thanks,” I sighed, “but you don’t have to sell me.” There was a long, pregnant silence, if you’ll excuse the phrase.
“Guess we ought to get ready to go to the soccer game.” She said, holding herself up along the back of the couch.
“Guess so,” I rolled off the edge of the couch and to my feet. “The Mighty Giraffes won’t wait forever.” As I helped Mattias get his shin guards on and double-knot his soccer shoes, I couldn’t help but imagine trying to do it with a little slobbering machine under one arm. There are plenty of things that stress me out about the idea of having another baby, but the messiness of it all is right up there. I’m not exactly a neat freak, but I do like things a certain way. Amy can tell you that surprises and I are not good friends, which will give you some idea about how I felt toward the telltale pee stick. My Blackberry and I are good friends, party because it’s the informational equivalent of heroin in my pocket at all times, but also because it promptly and politely reminds me of everything in my life that is going to happen, fifteen minutes before it does.
Babies, on the other hand, are unpredictable. They don’t sleep when they’re supposed to sleep, they cry about pretty much everything, and their digestive systems are possibly the most inscrutable mystery I’ve ever known. I had never seen so much puke in my life until I had a son. If there’s anything that weirds me out the most about kids, it’s puke, and not just that they barf a lot, but that they rarely give you any warning at all. Their eyes may bulge or glass over a bit, but more often than not, you’ll get a spew-blanket in a matter of seconds, most likely right after you’ve put on a freshly-ironed button-up shirt that’s precisely the opposite color of the vomit.
If they had a vomit warning light or some other sort of early detection system, I’d be a much happier person. It would be especially great if the warning system gave me enough time to hand off the little guy to my wife, who doesn’t particularly seem to mind being barfed on. I, on the other hand, am much more likely to return the favor when covered with curdled milk, mixed with stomach bile. I’m funny that way.
I have gotten better about managing chaos in the last few years. Family, after all, is a choice I have made. It hasn’t been forced upon me, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything else in the world. But it’s messy, unpredictable and stressful as hell. It doesn’t help either that my son, though brilliant, funny and infinitely charming, has a wild, independent streak a mile long. One of the things that some advisors and friends have offered is that the odds of having another child as strong-willed as Mattias is statistically improbable, but my thinking is that Mattias plus anything else - even a slightly animated sack of sweet potatoes - may be more than I can handle.
Worrying about it certainly isn’t getting me anywhere, though. It’s coming whether I’m ready or not. At least I have about eight more months to get used to the idea, and in the process, pour my thoughts out onto the page in a desperate attempt to administer some sort of self-service therapy. So I’m pretty much back to where I started.
Fuck it.