Introduction to My Baby Series

So You Wanna Runaway?

Um…kind of.

It appears I’m going to be a father. I’d be lying if I said this was expected or the way I had intended on procreating. More and more I’m coming to believe that black men are incapable of having children IN wedlock. The deck was stacked against me to begin with.

There are thousands of blogs out there devoted to expectant mothers and their trials with their baby. There are very few, if any, made by fathers so I took it upon myself to write my experiences. Writing has always been able to quell my moods in the past, so now that I’m in a state of terror nearly  every waking moment, it better not fail me now. Read more →

Baby Series: The Fine Print of Fatherhood

I don’t care how many pregnancy books you read, how many hours you spend babysitting your nephew or how many times you watched Three Men and a Baby, you will never, ever be fully prepared for a newborn.

Or at least that’s what I’m told. Repeatedly. And in the most annoying fashion possible.

People I haven’t spoken to in years – people I would have sworn had died – now think it is their sworn duty to prepare me for what lies ahead.  I can’t help but be offended. How stupid does everyone think I am?

Okay, maybe don’t answer that.  I did, after all, butter bread before sticking it in the toaster because I wanted the toast to have the crispy buttery shell of garlic bread. That was a very expensive toaster I ruined. Come Read Me Ramble a Bit More

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Eastbound and Downs Baby

If I was forced to stamp a starting date onto the whip-flayed back of my particular brand of anxiety, I’d bang it somewhere around my twelfth year.

I once read that anxious personalities are born from a delicate mix of childhood embarrassments and traumas the emergent consciousness is yet to understand. Well, on both counts, I’ve had plenty.

Since 12, the anxiety has swelled gradually, like a symphony climbing to defeaning crescendo, setting the windows and seats to shaking ,until reaching its apex, the day I found out I was to be a father.

As I hinted in The Fine Print of Fatherhood, I’ve spent the early stages of Melissa’s pregnancy with a Woody Allen-esque fretfulness. There are simply too many ailments that can afflict a newborn. How does any parent remain calm?

Pick up any pamphlet or book and you’ll see a sundry of prenatal warnings that almost everything you have ever done in your life will curl back to negatively affect the baby.

“Did you once eat an eclair out of the dumpster on 6th Avenue? Congratulations padre, your kid’s now growing an arm out of his head.”

As a man who has subsisted on a diet of french fries – charred to a carcinogenic crisp after falling asleep with them in the oven – and pizza ordered drunk and pantless at 2 am, there is reason for concern that my child may not burst forth from the womb quoting Sophocles. Read more →

This Here is in Your Blood

Melissa and I are six days away from discovering our baby’s gender and I am, contrary to previous belief, yet to become undone. My fear at being presented with a girl and the subsequent stack of applications I’ll be required to fill out to obtain my handgun license has started to waver.

Don’t get me wrong. I still want a boy. In fact, I’ve spent the last several weeks yelling quotes from Commando, Rocky and unhinged Mike Tyson interviews directly into Melissa’s stomach hoping to produce a most masculine baby.

I don’t care how far into femininity this baby has travelled, hearing “they drew first blood!” or “I want to tear his heart out, I want to eat his children” for several hours a day will reverse all such progress?

I’ve been writing a lot about this baby  – particularly my horrible fear of passing down the cerebral malady that’s affected my family for a few generations – but I can’t post it here as I’m working to get them published in a magazine.

I can say this much. Every person harbours demons or unsavory personality traits that they’ve either conquered or ignored for so long they can muscle a halfway decent life.

I’ve had my share of troubles, a turbulence I’ve withstood, conquered and left behind yet there remains that  voice – and I’m sure it will never be silenced – that says “what about you kid? This here is in your blood, boy.”

Which brings me to the nature vs. nurture carousel. As someone raised in a cloud of misery that followed me through my teens and mid-twenties, can it be shaken just off the strength of willpower alone?

The instincts remain within me, although they are extraordinarily diluted. Something doesn’t go my way, I want to smash something. Someone hurts me, I want to manipulate them and, failing this, hurt them in any way possible. These urges are but faint whispers of what they were but still…

I know, without a shadow of a doubt, my child will never see this in me. I will kick, claw, bite, scratch, fight with my life to keep this part of me, the person I was, buried. But if that voice is right and it’s in the blood, I don’t know what to do.

How do you protect your child from a virus you gave it?

It took me 28 years to finally be happy. I would die if it takes my kid just as long.

The kid’s going to born in just a few months and some nights I’m going to sneak into his or her room and watch the tiny hands open and close, the booted feet kicking while he or she dreams and I’m going to feel helpless against the mental storm that may come. I’ll stand there looking down, the moonlight bathing my bent head; my eyes will begin to water and nobody will understand any of it but me.

Gender Day Eve 2012

At this precise time tomorrow you will find me either Dougie’ing in the middle of traffic in front of the Calgary courthouse or weeping uncontrollably in a Starbuck’s bathroom.

At 8:30, Melissa and I return to the clinic to find out the baby’s gender. I’ve conditioned myself to label the child’s masculinity or femininity as its ”gender” instead of “sex” – especially when writing. I don’t want to wake up one Sunday morning inhaling diffusing tear gas canisters hurled through a smashed window by the Cyber Police nor do I want to attract perverts from the search engines. Trust me, they’re out there. As it stands, the sixth most searched term leading surfers to my blog is “big wet booty” despite my not ever mentioning the aforementioned posteriors in any previous post.

I’ve burned through a couple of books on fatherhood this last month and the magnitude of the situation, – catastrophic if the books are to be believed – led me to try to organize a battle plan of sorts. I’ve made lists of things babies need (a mesh roof to put over the crib while I watch basketball), a budget (cut drinking expenditure from $450 per month to $445) and general child rearing tips (if you must beat the child, try using a phone book).

I was once adamant on having a boy. A girl would be an affront on my masculinity and after looking at my smooth, hairless chest and silken legs, I can’t afford no more affronts, ya dig?

But as Gender Day 2012 draws near, I’ve found I don’t care as much. If it is, in fact, a girl, I have at least a decade of good living before I’m arrested for dragging her potential suitors down to the basement, which I will have fashioned into a makeshift Hart Dungeon. I’d love to see a twelve-year-old boy in a suit with a vase of roses try to escape from a Crossface Chickenwing.

Hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t talk about wrestling with pre-teens in my basement either.

If it’s a boy, what’s that going to mean? Moreover, what is it about men wanting boys? And I don’t mean in a way that would bring Chris Hansen out from a back room with a pitcher of lemonade.

I’ve got to assume having a boy is the father’s Mulligan. Everything I wish I had done when I was a child will now be the progeny’s job to carry out. I wanted to play professional hockey as kid followed by basketball as a teen, but I abandoned both once I discovered that alcohol removes the shame from hitting on a McDonald’s worker through the drive-thru speaker and sleeping in a nearby field because you dropped your house key will surfing in a flat-bed.

But guess who will be too busy with windsprints and shooting drills and three-man weaves for drinking? My boy. He’ll hate me for it. And I’ll love him for hating me. And when he wins the NBA Championship against LeBron’s son’s team, he’ll thank me in the post-game interview.

Or at least that’s how it would go in a perfect world. What’s more likely: I’ll hound him for a few years, he’ll play to please me before we both get tired of it. He’ll go off with his friends and I’ll go take a nap on the couch.

If, however, I have a girl, I imagine days filled with tea parties surrounded by the lifeless eyes of her stuffed animals, interminable sessions with dolls bodily proportioned in such ways to give offense to the average woman, and sitting still while she applies makeup to my face, bows to my bald head and bangles to my increasingly chubby wrists.

OK, I take everything back. I better be having a boy.

Baby Getting Her Chun Li On

Two weeks ago, my daughter, the tentatively named Aaliyah Lynn Rose, began to Ip Man my girlfriend’s womb. Aaliyah was only 21 weeks along – or negative 19 weeks old depending on how you want to look at it – yet her kicks were concussive and sharp. When placing my hand over Melissa’s stomach to feel the strikes, my hand moved, as if a snake roiled beneath her skin.

I didn’t know a person so small could boot so hard but I’m impressed and a little proud and hopeful. Those legs are suited for jumping and running or high kicking tattooed oil riggers wearing studded leather vests, combat boots and Affliction t-shirts when they ask for her number amid the thrashing bodies and beer-slicked floors of whatever honky-tonk bar Aaliyah uses a fake ID to gain entry to.

I’m going to Las Vegas in two days and, surprisingly, I’m spending more time thinking about an unborn girl who throws a pre-natal tantrum each night when I start wondering, out loud, if there exists a more unpleasantly assembled woman than Debra Morgan from Dexter. 

It’s possible this feeling is normal and actually relieving to those (ahem, my mother) who believe I am incapable of any emotion beyond anger and gnawing fear that I will no longer be able to find a good yet affordable platter of chicken wings in this city.

Aaliyah’s kicks marked the exact moment my fear of ruining the life of yet another who loved and depended on me, and the disappointment she wasn’t a boy, vanished.

Undoubtably, I’ll have fun in a non-sexual way  (I spent more time, on my last visit, calling my then-girlfriend each night at specific intervals to assuage her suspicions I was wearing a Freemont Street transgendered’s underwear on my head), it still involves my leaving my family for four days at a time I feel I should be there.

Aaliyah’s growing fast, and moving constantly, and, most importantly,  appears to respond to my voice. I’m positive she kicks when she hears my voice because she’s counselling her mother to put together and knapsack and bolt in the night but I’m told, by those with prenatal experience, the baby’s calasthenical response to my voice could not be for a more opposite reason.

On top of all that, it’s the narcissist’s greatest fear that affairs will collapse into chaos if he is not there to hold it together – even though the narcissist himself is the cause of most of it in the first place. So yeah, I would sleep a lot easier in Vegas if I had an alarm system or if Melissa carried a gun or if we had a Panic Room that worked a bit better than the one Jodie Foster tried to hide from Forest Whitaker in.

Long story short, this post is a roundabout way of saying: “Hey everyone, my baby’s kicking and I’m happy for it and will be thinking about both my girls for every moment I’m down there, whether I’m gambling or being escorted from the Bellagio casino for throwing up in a potted plant.”

Waiting for this Baby is Making Me Airsick

There comes a time in a pregnancy – particularly if you are not the one lugging a coiled, miniature person in the chambers of your stomach – when your life, everything extraneous of the pregnancy, goes quiet and flat.

The myriad appointments – the ultrasounds, the blood tests, hearing the heart beat so diminutive and rapid it sounds like a machine gun being fired underwater – are, for the most part, complete and the dicey, oh-my-god-what-if-she-has-Downs anxieties have abated. So now what? Do I just wait?

I’ve now entered the portion of the flight where the plane levels off above the unremitting cotton of the clouds and there is nothing to do but watch the miniature TV embedded in the headrest and hope the man sitting next to you doesn’t try to strike up a conversation.

It’s not entirely boring I suppose.

There’s some fun to be had monitoring the baby’s size (after a relatively quiet six months, she grows appreciably each day now) and feeling the increasing strength with which she kicks at implausible angles, the consistent time she wakes up and uses her butt to clear some uterine stretching room  and her capricious tolerance for certain foods (M&Ms and five cent candies are ok, chicken wings and chinese food are not).

But mostly, I’m just ready for her to be born. Though I’m sure my mother would like to use these last two months to give me more lessons on (a) never using the child as a static ball in the dryer, (b) never strapping her to the dog’s back with a braided hemp rope and sending them for a ride across Country Hills Boulevard, and (c) never trying to breastfeed her myself when Melissa is in Ponoka, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

I’ll probably throw up while changing her diaper for the first 18 months and Melissa will find me conspicuously absent during the potty training phase and I’ll long for the days I could get through a football game without a child screeching for some infantile want I will hopelessly misunderstand, but I’m getting so, so restless.

I want to know what she looks like, who she takes after, what  habitual echoes she inherits from our parents but mostly I just want to find out who she is.

Four months from today, when I’m on my second month of three-hour sleeps, when I’m running my bile covered, snot crusted, purée plastered clothes through the washing machine on an endless loop, when my eardrums have been reduced to quivering membranes, when I’ve shuttled to and from the hospital countless times for trivial coughs and sneezes, I want one of you to show me this post and ask me just what the fuck I was thinking.