Death Wish

There exists, within an infant, the sort of determination anyone over 18 has had scrubbed from the whites of their eyes after years of public school and thankless employment. There’s something beautiful and inspiring about an infant’s drive. They reach for whatever it is they want and don’t ever, ever, ever stop until they’ve grasped their goal or (more likely) fallen into a heap.

It becomes a problem, however, when the baby – like my eight-month-old Aliyah – turns this stubborn determination on unreasonable feats such as launching themselves headfirst down the basement stairs for no other reason than “hey, I haven’t done this before”.

Aliyah started crawling sometime in February (after pulling herself around like the critically damaged Terminator in T1) and over the last couple weeks has found things to eat and destroy I never knew I owned. If something shiny and extraordinarily dangerous catches her eye, she scurries across the floor, squawking madly, faster than I can give chase.

A couple years ago, in the grips of a suffocating self-hatred, I subjected myself to an M. Night Shamaylan movie where the world’s plants turn against humans and drive them one-by-one to suicide. I have no doubt he came by the unique ways characters try to self terminate by watching an infant for a few hours.

Anything lying on the floor, no matter how microscopic, and my baby will find it and try her damnedest to lodge this piece – teeming with bacteria, dog hair and carpet fibers – into the back of her windpipe.

A butcher’s knife catches the gleam of the setting sun and she’ll squirm out of my arms to see how the blade feels to ram in her nasal cavity. Even her crib, ostensibly a baby’s most safe and benign space, has become a death trap. If she wakes up during the night and my skull is not available for her to bash in with the monitor (her new favorite game) well, she’ll simply vault over the bars to find it.

You can’t baby proof what you can’t see any more than you can baby proof benign household objects. My iPad, in Aliyah’s hands, is now a dangerous weapon. What was once a tiny crack has become, after the accumulation of several hundred excited flat palm strikes from an 8-month old, a series of splintering shards and hazardous jags. She’s cut herself twice on the tablet. And the drool she’s dropped on the screen has seeped through the cracks and rendered it unusable. I miss the days when it was used strictly for porn.

I always said i wanted my kid to play football and I suppose if one were to look at her injuries -scraped chins, bruised legs, cut fingers, a destroyed gag reflex and a tail bone that, after repeatedly crashing on her ass, has been reduced to talcum powder – it’s almost the same thing.

The Delivery Part Three

If I hadn’t been so burned out on adrenaline and the terrifying possibility I would not only be forced to watch, but take part in, a most horrific child-birth, I would have noticed we’d been assigned the one drunk anesthesiologist in the building. He showed all the signs: slurred voice, dopey, bloodshot eyes and the contented expression of a man who knows there’s a bar in Calgary’s industrial quadrant where his credit’s still good.

But anyone who’s gone more than 24 hours without sleep or withstood MDMA withdrawal knows the human brain becomes shockingly incapable of analysis and higher function after a certain point. The brain is a creature of habit and responds to changes in its daily routine with sullen withdrawal. Mine hadn’t quite come to grips with the notion I’d soon be a father – in fact, it was rejecting it with alarming ferocity.

“Listen, bro,” it said. “I know fathers and you aren’t one. A year ago today, you slept on a dog bed with a Cuisinart next to your head in case you threw up. You nearly burned down the house after you passed out with pizza in the oven. Just go home and stop this charade.”

I was so burnt out and preoccupied that I thought nothing of it when the anesthesiologist spent 11 agonizing minutes savaging Melissa’s back with the needle, muttering apologies through pursed lips. He asked me to hold down one of her legs and lend my neck so Melissa would have something to throttle each time he missed the mark. I’ve said this before, I think, but pregnant women can move a Buick during a particularly nasty contraction with the proper straps and braces. Once Harper catches wind of all the unpatriotic and bilious things I say about his crooked administration and deports me to the closest inhospitable island, I will not use oxen to pull my plow but a woman in labor. Their strength is that incredible.

It’s a terrible scene in the delivery room; sharp intakes of breath, crying, wailing - all very primitive. There is nothing modern about any of this. We may as well be in some hut next to a polluted river in the heart of Uganda, circa 1845. He’s a boob. A bungler. I should have taken his medical license on the spot and clapped him upside the head for good measure. He hits Melissa’s nerve – the one that controls knee flexing -  forcing Melissa to savagely kick a chair in front of her. This continues for what seems like forever. It’s interminable. I never thought we’d have a baby like this. A stone cold wino playing Operation, a pregnant woman kicking and howling and very depraved and unpleasant looking black man holding down her legs like they are a demonic lawnmower threatening to launch itself into heavy traffic.

It’s almost too much to ask anyone to endure. For me or Melissa’s mom. “Stand back while we take a few hits off this rubbing alcohol and jam this here ice pick into your girlfriend/daughter’s spine.”

Uh oh, as I’m writing this Aliyah has kicked up the Queen Mother of all Rage Conniptions down here in my office. Gnashing of teeth, piercing screams, wolffish howls, palm strikes to the bridge of my nose, a series of roundhouse kicks aimed precisely at my temple. Aliyah is a baby who takes any attempts to place her in a chair, bassinet or crib as a personal insult. And like a mafia don, she will not tolerate any personal insults without retribution.

OK, enough of a tangent. Back to the delivery room. She seems to be sleeping, or is at least calm and contented enough working her Nuk to let me get in a few more words.

The Delivery Part Two

Once Melissa’s contractions begin in earnest, terror seizes me by the collar and shakes violently, like a beat cop trying to rouse a drunk. It’s all happening too fast. The nurses hook Melissa up to a fetal monitor, tracking Aliyah’s heart rate and contractions which are rising like an abusive surf on a shoreline. Just when you think the storm is letting up and it’s safe to go outside and rearrange your scattered lawn furniture, another wave crashes, knocking pictures from the walls. Poor Aliyah has defecated in the womb which has caused a moderate level of panic and raised voices from the nurse staff.  There is talk of inducing. Expect for her to come quickly. Or not. This could take days. No one knows a damn thing.

The Werewolves of Responsibility are closing in, howling with lust and rage. I’ve backed myself into an alley. Nowhere left to hide. I’ve gone 29 years with no sense of responsibility or, some would say, coherent grasp on human decency and impulse restraint. There’s only so long a man can wallow as a bachelor in a basement suite, surrounded by dog hair, empty fast food containers and rum bottles. Or so I’m told. I had planned to push this lifestyle clear past the point of pathos. But you know what they say about best laid plans and all that.

I’m writing this all in my basement while Aliyah sits in a vibrating seat next to me, trying to swat the head off of Winnie the Pooh, who dangles from a handle just out of her reach. The tinny music coming from the dark reaches of this chair has me contemplating a quick dash across Deerfoot yet, despite it all, I can’t imagine being more happy that my plans of perpetual bachelorhood went all to shit.

I’d like to explain what it feels like to watch your first child smile, babble, coo and scream but if you’re a parent you already know how impossible it is to put the feeling into words that won’t have you sounding like the village idiot.

It appears we won’t be staying in the pre-delivery room any longer. The nurse who’d taken care of Melissa, a pleasant enough girl of whom I remember not a thing, shuttles us off to a different room down the hall. This is the room, they tell us, where Melissa will deliver the baby. Big, spacious, leather couches. I’ve stayed in worse hotel rooms than this. It could fetch $300 a night as a Vegas theme room. Relive your botched colonoscopy in our dazzling 700 square foot Hospital Theme room. Boasting such amenities as a defibrillator, a nitrous oxide mask and a completely adjustable bed, such decadence cannot be matched outside a hospice.

Is that howling I hear out the window? Yes, it must be. I can smell their blood soaked fur. They’ve come even closer.

There’s an incident with one of the many rotating nurses that sets me on edge. Melissa is in the shower, fully clothed, rolling on a yoga ball, staving off vicious contractions that have her doubled over in pain. She wants an epidural. Must have it at once, goddamnit and if my black ass knew what was good for it, it wouldn’t show its face again without a damn needle.

But when I try to arrange for one, the troll of a nurse seems reluctant to give it to me. There’s resistance here. But why? Does she expect me to steal the needle and stab myself in the jugular? Some kind of new drug the medical community and a subset of junkies know all about? A high so pure it makes smack look like Tylenol? It’s not a bad idea now that I’m thinking about it. Give myself a shot of it right between the toes and start tearing off my clothes in the lobby.  The cops won’t know what to make of it. They’ll know it’s not PCP but beyond that they’ll be stupefied as to why I can’t feel their baton blows.

On the six o’clock news an anchor will be near tears reporting  a new drug epidemic ravaging this money-grubbing hick town; a poisonous root smuggled in speed boats from godforsaken Jamaica. The only known cure for this new breed of drug addict is hollow point bullets. Give those Nazi cops yet another excuse to use their guns. I’m getting too Political and Racist. I need to get back on track.

I tell the nurse that Melissa has asked for an epidural but she won’t budge. She had the thuggish, evil look of a woman prone to mushing the face of any salesgirl unable to find her size sandal in the Aldo stockroom. These women all look the same; quick eyes and razor-sharp lips that betray a secret lust for human misery and fetish porn.

I was ready for a showdown with this woman. Some raised voices, wild gestures, a red alert to the security desk.

You remember that thug we let in a couple hours ago…well, you were right all along, he’s gone all rap video on us…what’s that? Yes, bring the tasers and restraints at once. Set them at the highest voltage. These black animals can summon a reserve of jungle rage. A single shot won’t bring him down.

It’s easy for a man to become angry during a labour. An idle man turns aggressive, beastly. It’s his nature to want to fix everything but in this venue he’s hopelessly outmatched. It kept me off balance. It’s not easy to cope, especially with your wife or girlfriend staggering around in a medicated daze like a teen whose had her drink spiked by a swarthy European at a rave.

The mother of your child is pleading and moaning like a GI in a Saigon torture pit and you’re expected to twiddle your thumbs on a leather couch. No, you’ve brought your tool belt for nothing. This is one thing a hammer and spackle won’t fix. Catch some Zs if you can and by God is we catch you fiddling with that nitrous mask again, we’ll throw you out.

Right when things are about to get ugly, a diminutive anesthesiologist enters with the epidural equipment. His arrival was serendipitous. Nobody knows why he showed up when he did but he came right on time. He has a sixth sense and if I wasn’t so panicked I would have asked him about it. I imagine he wanders the floor with the equipment until the moment he’s needed; once a shrill woman’s voice starts browbeating her husband. Then he knows. This is a job for Epidural Man.

My hero.

The Delivery Part One

Whatchu lookin at playa

Aliyah Rose Lynn Douglas was born sometime after noon on a Sunday afternoon two months ago today. I took some pretty jangled and incomprehensible notes that night, most of which read, the next day, as the deranged diary of a man who was apprehended behind the Crack Mac’s wearing a suit made from women’s skin.

I’m going to try to put them together into something way more coherent and way less paranoid than what I am staring at here. This whole thing will likely be broken down into five or six parts, dashed off in my basement office with a headfull of spiced rum and allergy medicine.

I’m hoping one day, when her tiny brain is ready for 5,000 words of curses, racism and misogyny, she can read this and know, from the bottom of my heart, how truly disgusting her entry into this world was.  Ah jesus, I just ended a sentence with a verb. We’re already off to a bad start.

I had it all worked out. I was supposed to be a hero. I had gassed the car, practiced the route to the hospital, packed a bag of clothes, books, onesies and bottles. I’d read parenting books to redundancy, carried 12 hours of prenatal classes under my belt and built a nursery from scratch – from scratch meaning assembling it from boxes with precise directions. This was to be the easiest labor ever and it would be owed entirely to my preparation.

It should come as no surprise that I fell apart completely when Melissa’s water broke. I bumbled about the house like a doddering fol, picking up and replacing keys and wallet and cell phone. I got lost on the way to the hospital - a hospital I had worked at for a summer in 2007 and when we presented at the maternity ward, I said to the nurse on duty “we’ve got a pregnant labor thing going on” as way of introduction.

I’m one of those people whose body temperature is so high, there is doubtless an underlying and potentially fatal issue at work with me. I sweat just as a matter of course – from March to November I must sleep in sub-zero temperatures or I’ll soak a sheet through to the mattress. When I’m nervous, it’s even worse. I can only imagine what the nurse was thinking when I shot up to the desk with the mad look of speed freak.

Stay calm, Darlene. Just give this black junkie the drugs you have behind the counter and he’ll go away. What’s that?  He wants in the maternity ward! He’s more dangerous than I thought.  Blast him with your bear mace and save the newborns while there’s still time! 

No matter how frightened you are of having a baby, it’s hard not to get a little excited when the time comes. Waiting nine months is the hardest part. After about the third month, when you’re safe from Down’s and miscarriage and know the baby’s sex, it’s a stretch of dead space that need to be filled with something.

Mothers have this part easier. They can more easily whip themselves into a frenzy over clothes and cribs and blankets and soothers and bottles. I tried to get involved in that – had, in fact insisted upon it – but one lap around Babies R Us and I was ready for the gas chamber.

She let us pass through without incident and another nurse came to escort us to a sort of pre-delivery room. We were surrounded by other pregnant women, in close quarters with the beds nearly touching and the equipment all tight and claustrophobic. We were separated by no more than three feet and a thin sheet from a girl who had to be induced and spent the better part of a half hour throwing up with great force and wetness.

The ordeal took on a bovine quality. After a certain trimester, pregnant women are treated more like prized livestock than human beings. I imagine it’s hard looking at someone that size, that disproportioned, covered with a sheen of sweat and desperate eyes and not somehow instinctively want to say “whoa girl” and  ”there there, Bessie”  when trying to move them.

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To the Stratosphere and Beyond

I was in the security line at YYC some years ago, en route to Las Vegas, deeply ruminating my disintegrating life when the customs official pulled my brown friend out of the line.

“Just standard procedure, of course. Nothing to see here.”

The wounds of 9/11 were still fresh, festering in airports across the continent. Police, security, custom officials, the occasional vigilante, all patrolled Departures gates with the wild feral look of cornered ferrets. My friend was Indian – not Saudi or Afghani – but it didn’t seem to matter. The difference between an Indian and an Arab is the same as a Russian and an Irishman but my friend’s skin was brown and that meant trouble.

I knew one misstep and these thugs would sodomize my poor friend with their batons and leave what’s left of him for the vultures at the Department of Homeland Security to pick dry.

I have to admit I was somewhat relieved to be in a room where for once I wasn’t the focus of the public’s rage. Not that I’m naïve. I have no doubts all those doughy geologists would set upon me like wild coyotes had I so much as adjusted my belt. Their wives and children would cheer the beating like Mexicans at a cockfight. The travellers were locked into a collective terror, thinking all at once, together in their fear that a bespectacled Indian was hell-bent on turning the 11:47 to Vegas’ fuselage into rubble.

“Is this it?” they thought. “Does that Arab have C4 strapped to his chest? Are we all done for? Now that I think about it that cheese-eyed Negro he’s with is looking mighty suspicious. He’s definitely a shade too uppity. The cut of his gib is all wrong. It wouldn’t hurt to give him a couple of blows with the baton as well. Just to be on the safe side.”

Somewhere near the Captain’s Lounge a four-year-old is losing consciousness in a customs agent’s chokehold for slipping past security with a half-empty Capri Sun. A Saskatchewan grandmother is absorbing a right hook for stopping to tie her shoe. It’s a madhouse here but I’ll be damned if anyone gives a shit.

Al Qaeda needs a new face so a toddler on a sugar high is as good a candidate as any. Tomorrow it might be you. Or your dog. It doesn’t really matter so long as you’re scared and won’t kick up a fuss once Karl Rove comes looking for your phone records and porn habits. After all, if that damn dog somehow learns how to push the button on the detonator, who else can save you but the Pentagon you Commie homo?

This was my first time going to Las Vegas, and in the week leading into it I had flamed out at a series of temp jobs, been sent to collections for an unpaid car insurance bill and found out my girlfriend of two years had been sleeping with a battery salesman at a cell phone kiosk. Nobody would deny she made an upgrade.

There are certain times in a man’s life where the universe will show him mercy and do away with all subtlety. The universe wanted me gone – preferably in a most grisly fashion by my own hand – and was letting me know it directly.

And I was tempted to oblige.

We had been booked into the Stratosphere; a hotel tower on the far end of the strip where the edge of controlled consumerism gives way to something else entirely. A low rent motel lay across the street, along with a 7-Eleven, a liquor store, a shop for souvenirs and cheque cashing and a secluded parking lot for the gangbangers to sell drugs and aftermarket assault rifles.

It’s easy to forget, on the strip, that people actually live in the city. We met a couple on our third day, at the outlet mall. I picked up an underaged Chola from one of the shops and in another a flamboyant homosexual told me my ass looked good in True Religion jeans. It was the first compliment I’d received all year. I was grateful.

By the end of the trip I had drank 130 ounces of rum, 52 ounces of tequila, 26 ounces of vodka and an uncountable series of shots at $13 apiece; I’d pulled on any random joint passed to me on rooftops and poolside parties; I made out aggressively with a married woman from North Hollywood, several Latinas from South Central and a Cherokee woman with a lisp from Minnesota; to top it off I sent frantic word home for a fresh infusion of funds, passed out in a restaurant booth and was ejected from a strip club for throwing up on my shoes and verbally assaulting a dancer.

I’d do it all again in a gunshot, except this time I’d try to find some decent cocaine or a blotter of acid and I would have taken a swing at that talentless hack Akon when I had a clear shot at the Hard Rock pool.

It takes days to recover from such a beating and years to forget the hangover that followed.

I remember this trip as I’m holding my daughter this past Thursday, the sun shattered through the blades of the blinds, the distant rumble of a street sweeper wreaking havoc on the peace and quiet of the adjacent block. Looking into her suspiciously square and Germanic face sets me thinking of life’s pendulum; how it can plunge to such depths and boomerang back out. The man who washed the vomit from his mouth by gargling tequila on a dingy bathroom floor of a cheap Vegas hotel would not quite know what to make of what appears in the mirror today. It’s hard to come to grips with.

And it’s scary. Because, two decades from now I don’t want to be on the other end of a frantic midnight phone call from my depressed child asking for a money transfer to drop on Game 5 of the NBA Finals. I won that bet by the way, just in case you needed reminder that Jesus is alive and his name is Kevin Garnett.

It feels irresponsible to bring another life into this mad world where a snake oil salesman of a US President has been handing out hand jobs to the banking industry to nary a word from the “fair and balanced” media and no thought from the rabble who believe so long as the president does urban handshakes with LeBron James and rides skateboards to press conferences, nothing at all is the matter.

It would be different if I had come to a point in my life where I’d made peace with the whole thing and could give her a good answer when she comes to ask me why life’s such a fucked up medley of pillage, robbery, pain and bestiality. What do I say when things to turn to shit, when her own boyfriend inevitably steps out on her with a cocktail waitress from Perkins? They’ll have to dredge the Bow River for his body but it doesn’t change that I don’t know what to say. How do you make things better? Especially when you were unable to do so for yourself  in that same situation.

Is there any other gig out there where the one thing you’re entirely unqualified to do is the one you’ll get anyway and with free range to do as you please. It’s like applying for a job at a junior high school after you’ve been swept up in a To Catch a Predator sting – and getting the job.

Bah, I’ve veered very far off course here and into pretty dark territory.  The pendulous nature of life. That’s where I was.  Life’s a crock of shit and maybe that’s the secret to the whole thing.  It doesn’t matter what you do because no one besides  handful of people and care enough about you to give a damn whether you win, lose, fail or catch The Clap twice in eight days. Not that I would know anything about that.

So there it is. The marrow of this thing. If it doesn’t bring happiness to you or someone you care about, don’t waste your time thinking about it. It sounds profound. I think. And even if it doesn’t soothe the troubled mind entirely, it’s a good enough start.

I’m hopelessly outmatched here and would consider myself victorious if I keep her off the pipe and the pole.

Damn it, I’ve lost my train of thought again. I better wrap this up quickly. My friend was eventually let go after convincing security he had no terrorist, communist or Saudi affiliation. On the way home I was forced to drink tequila just so I would stop shaking and they’d let me board the flight without fear of me having a seizure in the aisle seat. I’ve gone back three more times but have never acted even remotely as depraved and corrupt as I did that first time.

I suppose, with me, the more miserable I am, the more disorderly fun I’m having. I’m happy to report I haven’t had a lick of fun in over a year.

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Three Early Lessons of Fatherhood

1. Having a child is sort of like losing a limb.

Ten years ago, my biggest fears in descending order were Calgary Stampede rides, a bird uprising (which still may happen) and fatherhood. OK, to be fair, if you’d have asked me last month about my biggest fear, I’d still have said fatherhood (and birds, particularly that crow who follows me home every day).

It didn’t help that every parent I ever came across warned me life as I knew it would change lastingly. And judging from their half-mad, bloodshot eyes I don’t think they meant for the better. ”

The truth is, parenthood is not as hard as people made it seem. I mean, sure parenting cuts into my fantasy football strategizing time (probably for the best, I strategized so much last year, I tricked myself into riding Josh Freeman) and I have yet to string together more that three consecutive hours of sleep but it wasn’t the end of the world as I expected.

I liken fatherhood to a missing limb because a fully limbed person cannot imagine living without an arm but if by horrible chance, they lose one, they adapt and live an enjoyable but different (and maybe more difficult) life. But it goes on nonetheless.

2. Fatherhood is lonely

Fatherhood has changed over the past two decades from a tacit agreement that a man will provide financially for his children and sort of stay out of the way (he’ll bang a couple of girls from the secretary pool and nurse an alcohol problem for his troubles)  to this sort of helicoptoring, maternal hovering. Fathers have become Mom-lite.

The only problem is, the baby doesn’t want your sweaty, testosterone-laden ass anywhere near it for the first little while. Try and think of a newborn as a frat boy. He wants some titty then he wants you to leave him alone so he can catch some sleep.

3. Your Old Life Isn’t Coming Back.

Even though a newborn sees its father as a nacho-cheese-smelling buffoon who routinely interrupts its naps by cranking Reservoir Dogs on the Surround Sound, men are still not permitted to disappear into the basement with a flask of gin and a plate of chicken wings for the weekend. 

It’s only fair.

Remember those months when you slammed back Stellas at the local pub while your wife iced her swollen feet in the bathtub? Well, now you’re on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You must be within shouting distance in case the baby needs burping while your wife dozes off in front of the TV.

Good Lord Am I Ever Tripping

We’re give or take five weeks out from the anticipated birth date of our daughter and I’m still waiting for the moment the lump of ice-cold fear in my stomach melts. I don’t think that moment will ever arrive. I’ll watch as she’s delivered in an orgy of blood and gore by a disinterested resident and feel it. I’ll watch her work her mouth and flex her tiny hands in her bassinet and feel it. I’ll watch her head disappear through the door of school on her first day of kindergarten, her first date with a fool I’ll disapprove of who likely go on to break her heart, as she walks the stage during her graduation, as I give her away to the man she will marry, up until I take my last breath on a futuristic death-bed and I’ll still feel it.

The closer we get to the birthdate, the more this fear manifests; in the shake of my hands, the fitful sleeps, the absent daydreams, the long hours at my desk.

I watched as the half dozen ultrasounds visually marked her progress from a half yang of unformed mass to a full-bodied person, who at one point in our latest ultrasound opened her eyes, and the terror grows at the end of each one. I watched as cribs were purchased, bassinets brought next to the bed, garbage bags of dresses and sleepers dumped on the nursery floor, toys offered and surreptitiously chewed by my dog, the stroller that sits in our living room, the classes, the books I won’t read. Each event passes and I watch it and I’m reminded how unprepared, how bad I am at this, how perilously easy it will be for me to ruin this whole thing.

Even if, by some miracle, I perform my parenting duties adequately, there is an endless list of faultless problems we may have to endure – events I fear so much merely allowing them a home in my brain is enough to manifest them into reality.

I worry she won’t be delivered perfectly healthy. Most pathetic and selfish, I did not, at first, worry how such a tragedy would affect the child but rather how it would affect me. I don’t know if I’m a good enough person to care for a disabled child the way a disabled child requires care and I don’t know if I have the courage to admit this particular failing and sacrifice her to the proper home.

I worry I will be unable to satisfy this needy girl’s every want, that I will lose myself in the pursuit of her happniess, that I will lose the equilibrium my life has only in the last year achieved.

I worry my  self-destructively stubborness will alient all the unwanted people who will converge around me, offering an endless stream of opinions and ideas on how to raise a child, unintentionally (or maybe it’s done purposely, I don’t know)   asserting their control over how my child should be raised.

Altogether I’m at the station of the pregnancy when the anticipation has begun to diffuse and all that is left in its wake is fear and panic. It’s as though this child is not mine at all, that I have simply won to accept responsibility for this child, to care for her, protect her and absorb the crushing guilt should anything bad happen to her.

I wonder what is says that although I exist in a near constant state of panic, I have never once wanted to run, nor have I wished this all was not happening. I wish I had a word for this stage of prospective parenthood. It’s a very unique feeling. I say I want it all to go away, that I don’t know what to do, but at the bottom of this thing, I think I just want to know it’s all going to be ok.