Yeah Baby!

When a couple is having their first baby, I love to ask them about their expectations, to get a feel for just how out of touch with reality they are. It's a sadistic pleasure of mine you see, because up until the very moment that the first labor pain strikes like a red hot, electric cattle prod dipped in sulfuric acid, the blissful couple still believes they can catch a movie the next day.

A baby, that little bundle of joy, hardly bigger than the span from your wrist to your elbow, is more devastating than a twenty megaton atomic bomb, a road runner to your coyote, spy vs. your spy, like McCauley Caulken home alone. Everything you knew has been stripped away like leg hair on a wax strip. Your friends become your old friends, replaced with other wild eyed, fledgling parents, who like yourselves, have swam too far under water to get back to the surface.

Sleep? We don't need no stinking sleep!

The laundry piles up, the house looks like a warzone. Unless you are one of the lucky ones, the baby cries for a variety of reasons: dirty diaper, gas at either end, hungry, tired, uncomfortable, wants to be held, wants to be put down, scared. The list goes on, but the worst part is, you never really know for sure. So you go through your list of remedies. For gas I patented the bicycle leg pump, which works like a charm every time. No two babies are the same, and what one finds soothing sends the other into a tiny tantrum. We've tried swings, rockers, placing the car seat on a running clothes dryer, running the blow dryer in the room for white noise, CDs of lullabyes, bird calls, and waterfalls, singing, cooing, talking silly, making stupid faces, tripping on imaginary banana peels. You name it, we've tried it. When the baby finally falls asleep, mommy and daddy collapse like discarded marionettes wherever we happen to be standing.

Sex? No unless you are both insomniacs.

My friends Vicky and Richard were our next door neighbors in San Francisco, and were one of the first to disappear once we became no fun. They invited us to a party once, but our youngest son, who was only around sixteen months at the time, nearly fell from a drop off in their back yard which could have killed him, so we had to leave to avoid the danger. That was the last we heard from them until Vicky got pregnant.

By this time my wife and I had moved out of the city and into our first house, and Richard and Vicky had moved into a house only ten miles away. Vicky and I commuted into the city together on the Ferry from Vallejo.

"So, are you ready to have this baby Vick?" I asked her.

"Oh sure, no problem," she said with swagger. "I have a dog, so I feel like I'm ready."

"Oh really," I laughed, "You think raising a dog is the same thing, huh?"

"Well, it will be a little different. But come on! Have you ever had a dog?"

"Several."

"Well, Charlie cries to get out, and you can't leave him alone. He always is begging for attention and we have to walk him. He's a huge pain in the ass."

"Ok, whatever you say Vick. But do me a favor and bookmark this conversation in your head, because we will revisit."

She gave birth to little Elias, affectionately known as Eli, a beautiful little boy that was a perfect blend of his parents. He had a devilish personality, and his parents let him do almost anything he wanted to do. For instance, they let him draw with markers on the floor, thinking that it would give a cute modern art feel. But as he grew up, his liberal upbringing made him hard to control. Vicky became exasperated and turned to my wife Beth for advice, and the two became great friends, as both were parents of wild boys. And nobody on the planet knows what that means until they've experienced it first hand.

Vicky had an epiphany one day and told Beth, "You know, I am so impressed with you for raising your son with no help at all. You didn't have any family around to help you, or any," she paused with an abashed expression, "friends. I wasn't there for you and I'm sorry."

After Vicky had a reign on motherhood, and her son and mine were playing together nicely, I finally reminded her of our little conversation.

"Eli has been a lot of work, huh?"

"He drives me crazy sometimes," she said affectionately, looking at the two boys with a dreamy far off look.

"No nearly as difficult, say, as raising a dog?"

Her laugh burst out, as if escaping. "Ok, you got me on that one."