I went to the bathroom and filled up a new bottle. At this point, I was failing in my efforts to remain half-asleep. I did my best to remain partially comatose so that, whenever this ordeal was over, I would fall right back asleep. But that hope was dashed now. I was legitimately awake. I took the baby down to the TV room and fed it while watching a Food Network show on mute, holding the bottle awkwardly, like when a child feeds a baby goat at the petting zoo. She wasn’t interested in the milk. I stood up and walked around with her to calm her down, but she kept right on crying. I grabbed another pacifier and wiggled it around in her mouth, as if to anchor it in the back of her throat. She spit it out, so I put it back in again and held her close to my chest so that spitting out the pacifier was physically impossible. My spine was quietly falling apart. I had already had two operations on my back, the second one coming two weeks before the baby was born. My then-pregnant wife saw me lying on the hospital gurney before my operation and was like, “It’s supposed to be ME on that thing, you bastard.” My back was not yet equipped to handle the yeoman’s work of carrying a baby around constantly, but the baby clearly didn’t give a shit about my troubles. “Please fall asleep,” I begged her. “Please, please, please. I’ll do anything. I promise I’ll never try to sing to you again.”
But she just went on crying. I mouthed a quiet fuck it, took her back into the nursery, and put her in the crib, still crying. You aren’t supposed to let a baby cry out the night until they’re much older, around three to six months. Leaving a crying two-month-old is thoughtless, selfish, and cruel. But again, I was very tired.
I left.
I went back to the bedroom and didn’t bother to turn the monitor back on. My thinking was: If a baby is crying and no one can hear it, is it really upset? I thought not. My wife, who was supposed to be sleeping, was quick to let me know she didn’t share my viewpoint. I don’t know how she managed to wake up after not hearing something, but there you have it.
“You have to turn the monitor back on.”
“No way. I’m not turning that thing back on.”
“Fine. Then I’ll get the baby.”
She got up and started walking out.
“Wait!” I said. “Does this count as your shift? Because this totally shouldn’t count as your shift.”
“Go to bed, Drew.”
And I did. I slid into bed and it felt as if the bed were embracing me, as if I were nestled in the palm of some greater supernatural being. So soft and warm, I wanted to die inside of it. Nothing could pull me away. My wife was with the child now, but they were far away, in some other universe where things are loud and turbulent and nothing like the land of purple unicorns that I was entering. I became a nucleus: a tiny, impossibly dense thing tucked down into a void so expansive that the nearest particle seemed to be a million billion miles away.
Three hours later, the monitor went off at previously unknown decibel levels.
WAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
I lay perfectly still. My wife lay perfectly still.
Hack hack hack WAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
“It’s your turn,” my wife said.
“What? No way. It was my turn last time.”
“But I relieved you, so now it’s your turn again.”
“Are you joking? You were the closer. I did all the hard work. That doesn’t count as a full shift.”
“I was the one who was up last.”
“This is an outrage!”
“Please.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.”
WAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!
No one moved. The bed was far too comfortable.
GYMBOREE
My wife signed our daughter up for a gym class because she had to get out of the house with her. That’s the biggest challenge of owning a one-year-old: You’re constantly looking for ways to fill up the day. I was working in an office at the time, so this was of no concern to me. I got to go to work and talk to other people and dick around on the Internet and take a whiz whenever it suited me. I wasn’t the one stuck with a one-year-old all day. The child was close to being ambulatory now. It could be taken out. It had to be taken out.
The brochure said that the classes helped toddlers with coordination, but that was mostly a ruse. They just provided a room full of padded, germ-ridden crap that toddlers could run around and fall down in. The main reason parents sign up for this kind of class is because it gives them a chance to relinquish primary control of the child to a peppy twenty-five-year-old gym teacher for forty minutes while they talk to other mothers about what a pain in the ass everything is. My wife loved the Gymboree class. If we had had the resources, she would have signed the girl up for it every day of the week. Not only did it give my wife time to rest, it also sucked all the energy out of the child so that she was perfectly set up to nap later in the day. Children have sixty times more energy than functional adults, and all that energy needs to go somewhere. Best that it goes into shaking a dirty parachute with a group of strangers.
I got home from work the day of the first class and my wife was overjoyed.
“Drew, it’s so great. I don’t have to do much. I even got to read a magazine for two minutes.”
“That’s great.”
“You should take her.”
“I’m not gonna be the only dad there, am I?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Were there any other dads there when you went?”
“No, but that was a weekday class. I’m sure the weekend classes are different.”
“All right,” I said, piling up metaphorical brownie points in my head. “I’ll take her. You stay here and relax. Take some sorely needed time for yourself.”
“Actually, I have to do the laundry.”
“NO, NO, NO,” I said. I wanted this gesture to count. If she spent all that time doing housework, then I wouldn’t have any excuse to demand free time of my own later on. For every hour a mother gets to herself, a father will demand five times that amount for drinking with friends and acting like an immature dipshit. “Don’t do the laundry,” I said. “You work real hard. Watch TV. Take a spa day.”
“I have to do her laundry or else she’ll have no clothes to wear and she’ll throw up on her own naked body.”
“Then I’ll do the laundry.”