As the earlier post and the picture of a sleeping baby suggested (it was very subtle, so you might have missed it), my wife and I are now parents. Proud parents of a beautiful ball of shrieking, shitting wonder. Life is a miracle. It truly is.
My deficiencies in sleep are still rather great, so I think I’ll forego a narrative for a collection of random thoughts, moments, and insights.
At 8:23, on a cool Wednesday evening, we backed out of the driveway and sped to the hospital. I was surprised at how calm I was, weaving through the evening freeway traffic. So much so that I began to feel inadequate. Here I was, failing to be the frantic cliché of an impending father you see in the movies. In a weird way, it left me feeling somehow ashamed that I wasn’t a bit more hysterical about the whole thing. So, thank you Hollywood. If the magical moving pictures you produce for my consumption cannot be relied upon as accurate and realistic standards by which to measure the events of my own life, what’s the sense in living? That’s right, apparently there is none.
The low point of the entire event:
After staying by Burcu’s side every second since bringing her to the hospital on Wednesday night, I took the opportunity to run down to the car and get our bags once Burcu got her epidural and was quietly resting in the delivery room. When I returned fifteen minutes later, the nurse was standing over her with a panicked face and Burcu was breathing through an oxygen mask with monitors all over her. In that short span of time, her water had broken, sending the baby to a vitally low heartbeat and forcing multiple nurses to rush into the room and give her an emergency shot to boost her blood pressure. When I had returned, everything had pretty much stabilized but not being there for Burcu as such a crucial moment made me feel shittier than I ever had.
The shivering that is a side effect of the epidural was far more unnerving to me than I would have anticipated.
A vacuum had to be employed to help Juniper make her uterine exit. Though watching the entire birth, cutting the cord, and examining the placenta oddly didn’t make me queasy in the least bit (the opposite of what I was predicting), I was terrified to see how much of her head was sucked up into that suction cup. The malleability of a baby’s head is both wondrous and shit-your-fucking-pants scary.
In what was truly the biggest WTF moment of the entire labor and delivery, we discovered that our delivery nurse grew up in the same tiny, traumatizing town in northern Illinois that I had. I can’t even begin to fathom the odds of this. And if anyone appreciated the rapid “Did you know so-and-so? Isn’t that so-and-so’s sister? Is so-and-so related to this so-and-so?” between my mother and the nurse, it was Burcu in the midst of pushing a small melon-sized being from her love canal.
My father died when I was a child and since the aftermath of that, there have rarely been moments that could make me cry. It’s just been a matter of comparison, I suppose. But when I saw my daughter slide out into the world, a slimy blood-covered mess, and placed in Burcu’s arms, I wept like a little girl and I’m not the least bit ashamed to admit it.
When deep in slumber, Juniper wears a myriad of facial expressions that make me laugh. My favorite has to be the half-smile reminiscent of an Elvis lip curl. Although, the super-serious frown that resembles an angry, judgmental nun (aren’t they all?) is pretty amusing too.
My wife chose to breastfeed Juniper and some early latching problems led to every subsequent feeding being a rather painful experience for her. Extreme nipple soreness isn’t just to blame, it’s the fact that our daughter has the jaw strength of a James Bond villain and the tenacious perseverance for rooting that a horror movie serial killer has for slicing up teenage skinny-dippers in wooded lakes.
There’s no terror quite like the moments when I am holding my darling daughter to my chest and she begins to root around for a nipple. I’ve seen the monstrous things she’s capable of doing to nipples – and food actually comes out of those. On the bright side, I don’t feel as guilty for soiling myself with fear since soiling oneself is pretty much the modus operandi around our house since the baby took over.
The Numerous Nicknames I’ve Already Devised for Our Daughter:
- Juni
- June Bug
- June Berry
- June Blossom
- Bug
- Count Colostrum (Because she feeds like a vampire breaking a week long blood fast)
- Colostrum Monster (“C” is for Colostrum and that’s good enough for her)
- The Product of My Superior Seed
- The Genetic Wunderkind
- Houdini / Judini (For her miraculous ability to escape the confines of the tightest swaddling in mere seconds)
- Shithead
My initial plan was to debut a new segment on the website titled:
THE DAILY STOOL: A POO REVIEW
The idea was that I was going to take the morbid fascination of new parents with the bowel movements of their offspring to new heights. I planned for high-definition pictures, in-depth reviews that took into consideration such crucial data as color palette, consistency, aroma (all with the intolerably haughty vernacular of a wine enthusiast), and a five stool rating system (like stars) so that one could filter one’s poo reviews by the highest rated. Pretty ambitious, I know.
Alas, it took but one fouled diaper to sully this dream. Because in all honesty, the last thing I’m thinking when I’m faced with an open diaper full of moved bowels is: let me go get the camera, snap various-angled shots, record pertinent details and initial insights, and then blog about it.
You’re welcome.
Oddly though, it’s not necessarily because I find it disgusting. Even though the thought of changing diapers had always frightened me, I stepped into it pretty seamlessly. Instead of retching, those initial “tar-like” poos you hear of were more an exercise in novelty to me than anything else – like cleaning extra-terrestrial space guts of the space shuttle windshield. They were gross, sure, but oddly fascinating.
No doubt, the most difficult part of parenthood is the sleep deprivation, which is exponentially exacerbated the longer it occurs, the louder the shrieks, and the more futile your efforts to stop said shrieking become. And it’s only natural that the worst occurs at night. When most of the world is at rest, the silence is more conspicuous, and you have fewer options to turn to for help. The first week was so awful that preparing for bed felt like we were arming ourselves to battle some horrific supernatural monsters that emerged only at night – banshee zombie vampires sounds about right. The mental preparation was literally a battening down of the hatches and the first, sweet rays of light as dawn stretched her rose-tipped fingers…that! That eagerly welcomed morn made you feel like the biggest, monster-surviving badass around. That’s right, suck it Van Helsing!
