Man With Child: Confessions of a full-time daddy in a mommy's world.

By Marc Kuritz

We’re told that less than one percent of American fathers are full-time dads. Every good dad is a full-time dad. But it does make a difference what shift you take. I happened to take the day shift…On preparing for parenthood”…Sure, paint the baby’s room and register at Babies“R”Us. Read some parenting books and fiddle with the car seat. It will keep you busy, but it will be about as relevant to parenting as the rhythm method is to contraception…” For daddies and daddies-to-be, here are some observations, warnings, and minor revelations. For mommies who stare at daddies as if to say “What were you thinking?” here is one dad’s answer. Both mommies and daddies will find insights about each other’s perspectives—with plenty of laughs along the way!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Mar 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9780982996584

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED

Parenthood is binary. Just like you can’t be almost or a little pregnant, you either are a parent or you aren’t.

And once you are, well, you just figure it out as you go along. Things happen. Sometimes they make sense. Sometimes they don’t. You’re still responsible either way.

Getting started. Even that phrase betrays a male adherence to linear order that is misleading. I suppose you can get started swimming by falling into a river, but I’d hardly call it an orderly transition.

Sure, paint the baby’s room and register at BabiesRUs. Read some parenting books and fiddle with the car seat. It will keep you busy, but it will be about as relevant to parenting as the rhythm method is to contraception.

For me, getting started proved less preparatory readiness than immersion. To a male, the notion that preparation does not really help with readiness is horrifying. But as the great American sage Mark Twain observed, the proverb is true. Like him, I’ve tested it. Though I humbly suggest that, at least from the parenting perspective, perhaps that proverb should better read "Providence protects children from idiots."

Indeed, most of us manage to survive the deficiencies of our parents. Looking forward is the only constructive imperative. Swim. With the current. Don’t stop. Try not to drown. Keep your wits and figure it out as you go.

You are allowed to laugh if you manage to get your head above water long enough for the extra breath.

It Depends…

Douglas Adams, the gifted and sadly departed satirical writer, based an entire series of books on the idea of a manual called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. On the cover of this celebrated fictional guide the words DON’T PANIC are inscribed in large, friendly letters. If you were unexpectedly the last human to hitch a ride off of Earth before your planet was demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass, you might invest a desperate confidence, redeeming faith, and soothing comfort in such a guide. Particularly if you happen to be a man.

A little information goes a long way for a guy.

Our psychological defense against life’s slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is a magpie cache of shiny facts. Getting ready to propose? We calm our nerves by becoming experts on cut, color, and clarity. Time to buy a car? We haggle like Shatner in a Priceline commercial if we have some specifications—horsepower, torque, engine displacement, mileage, and cubic feet of cargo space. Facing a long road trip to a tough holiday weekend with in-laws? We will study up on road conditions and plan stops to maximize pee/eat/refuel efficiency.

Our culture seems prone to regard men as more likely to embrace a risky or ambiguous task than women. However, this may be a cultural belief rather than a cultural fact. There is research indicating that even though women may believe themselves to be risk averters and men believe themselves to be risk lovers, both, facing a risky or ambiguous task, behave the same. In short, what we think about how we think does not seem to be what we actually think. I think.

Whenever we are lost in the forest, we men take a magnifying glass to the trees. However obscure they may be, facts are our thumb-sucking security blanket. In times of crisis and uncertainty, we want information the way a seasick stowaway wants dry land. Just a few fixed points in a heaving sea of ambiguities.

So right from the start this parenthood thing is a problem.

Kathy and I hit the pregnancy jackpot by intentional effort, but with completely unanticipated speed. So of course, I immediately sought reassurance in a massive prenatal fact-finding expedition. Make me smart, O Medical and Parenting Experts.

So what did I learn? Only two words. These two words comprise the literal or inferred answer to every single question I have yet dared to ask. The tiny little sentence formed by these two words encapsulates my every effort to extract any definitive from the dauntingly vast accumulated lore of parenting art and science. Apparently, the only apple on the parenting tree of knowledge is: It depends.

On each and every visit to Kathy’s doctors (yes, I tried to crash them all), I brought a typed page of questions. And I never received a single, solitary piece of definitive information. Nutrition and exercise? It depends. What kind of prenatal screening for potential birth defects and complications provides the most information at the least risk to mom and baby? It depends. What kind of birth plan options seem best for us? It depends. Doctor, does your formal medical training impart any form of identifiably useful knowledge or experience relative to constructively guiding the human reproductive process? Apparently, it depends.

This persisted throughout Kathy’s entire pregnancy. When Kathy was nearing a week past due, a doctor sat us down and told us horror stories about waiting too long. She used words like dangerous and critically low and stillborn. Abject terror. But a definitive at last! Kathy and I were ready for the medical equivalent of an immediate Delta Force hostage extraction: Let’s get this little girl out of there now, Doctor, right? Doctor: Well, that depends.

I still wonder if Doctor Depends knows how close she came to experiencing the irony of homicide in a hospital.

So how about the parenting books? You know—the ones that promise sound direction on every subject from diapers to tantrums. Surely there would be answers there. I burrowed into these with frantic purpose. I read reviews. I did research on authors. I gravitated to the latest, best-regarded works, rejecting anything that was old or experimental or fringe. I expected some reasoned dissent, but I also expected to be able to winnow some identifiable common threads of informed consensus.

Nope. It was like listening to multiple interviewees shout at each other simultaneously on a cable news show. Any alien reading these books would conclude that there is a separate and genetically incompatible Earth species for each and every parenting guide published. And even though most experts seem to disagree with one another (vehemently), none seem to really have true confidence in their own opinions. Every piece of advice comes with more warnings and caveats than a Viagra commercial. The only common theme I was able to extract from dozens of authoritative publications was—you guessed it—It depends.

Finally, in exasperated defeat, I caved. I picked up Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. The book that even people without children know. The book I had avoided because it was originally published before the first episode of Leave it to Beaver aired, before most child vaccines existed, back when male parental engagement presumably consisted of sharing useful tips about mammoth hunting.

It is still in print because the first chapter starts with these words: TRUST YOURSELF. You know more than you think you do. The first two pages gave me a euphoric clarity normally associated only with serious narcotics. In short, Spock’s book says that there are no clear-cut rules. That supposed experts disagree. That your own common sense and best instincts are vital. That you should trust the people you already trust. That you can and should seek answers for questions and doubts, but that you can’t really find out how to care for and manage a child from a book. That you and your child will belong to one another—and will learn from one another.

In short, that it depends on you.

Responsibility. Clarity. Confident independence. Music to a man’s ears.

Remember that heaving sea of ambiguities I referenced earlier? Well, I’ve rigged up a sail using the pages from all the generic How-to parenting books, stolen medical smocks and an interminable supply of swaddling blankets. I’ve got a few, science-heavy books specifically about brain development that provide an occasional navigational note. The latest edition of Dr. Spock makes a stout and serviceable rudder. Where is our little family boat headed? Well, it depends…

Sun Tzu and the Art of Naming

Naming our daughter was instructive.

I once had a Tae Kwon Do instructor named Mr. Howell. He was a marine with a genteel, southern manner. He was always smiling, always composed. Even when he flipped me over and tossed me across the room.

Mr. Howell was instructive, too.

Nearly every guy fancies himself a clever strategist, a bit of a historian and student of military lore. It pleases us to approach things as if we were planning the invasion of Normandy—with charts and plans and cunning organization.

One of the things known to real students of military history is that defending a fixed position puts you at a disadvantage. However strong a besieged fortress, it nearly always falls.

So what did I do? Four months before our daughter was due I gathered names that appealed to me, researched their meaning and origin, put them into tables in alphabetic order, and shared the first of these tables with my wife.

Like General Patton, I seized the initiative. Like Generals Eisenhower and Marshall, I planned and organized with acumen. Like a lot of other generals we don’t know because they were defeated and eaten by crows, I planted my flag in a poorly defended fixed position. Mine was in tabular format.

My favorites were names with prophetic meaning and purpose—suited to the fierce, shining, gifted embodiment of virtue and power our daughter was destined to be.

Here is an early iteration, cut and pasted from the saved files that chart the course of my inevitable defeat: