“All right! All right! I’ll stop.”
She kept on crying and jerking her head around. Eventually, she gave me a full-on head butt and I recoiled in anger. I remember being furious with her, which is insane because how can you get mad at a baby? Oh, but you can. Late at night, when no one is watching, you can get obscenely angry at a baby. You stupid fucking baby. Sometimes you read about babies dying from shaken baby syndrome and you wonder, Why would anyone want to shake a baby? How is this such a widespread problem? And then your child head-butts you in the dead of night and suddenly there’s a little voice in your head whispering to you, Go ahead, shake that baby. Maybe shaking it gets all the tears out! You just want the child to snap out of it and calm down, and you’re willing to consider anything, even the stupidest idea. You feel like a monster merely for having the thought. It’s almost as if the baby is testing you—putting you in the most pressure-packed situation possible to see if you make the right choices under duress.
I alternated between massaging the girl’s belly and patting her back until she let forth a majestic belch that echoed through the nursery like a bell rung in a ballroom. It was a perfectly executed, adult-level burp. I had never been more proud. She was now asleep in my arms and I jammed the bottle back into her mouth so that she would unconsciously take the rest. I propped her head up with my left hand so that she would stay upright, and I could feel my arm begin to ache under the strain of the baby’s giant head. It was like her skull was made of cast iron. I stared daggers at the bottle, watching the fluid drain down further and further, the fontanel on top of her head pulsing along with each sip. Almost there. So, so close. I was so excited to go back to sleep, I could hardly stand it. When a baby finishes a bottle, you can hear the nipple squeak like a dog’s chew toy because all the formula is gone. It’s the sweetest sound in the world because it means that you can finally get up and get on with your life. I was angling for that sound. I burped the girl again at the one-ounce mark and now it was only a matter of time. The formula kept going down, and then, just as I was about to hear that gorgeous squeak . . .
Thpppppppppppppp . . .
A shit. A big ol’ shit. It was almost as if she had been holding it in until just now on purpose. I was at the end. I could have been in bed within three minutes. Instead, this.
Before you have children, you look upon changing diapers as some kind of disgusting task, one you do with your hand to your nose. But actual parents don’t care about that. The poop is beside the point. You get alarmingly used to wet feces showing up in random places. Oh, it’s on the stove. That’s curious. It’s the disruption that changing a diaper causes that makes every parent hate it. I knew that changing the kid’s diaper would fully awaken her and leave me stuck rocking her back to sleep for the next seventy minutes. I was screwed. I had to change the thing.
Or did I? After all, the baby was still sound asleep. Why disturb her? Wouldn’t that be cruel? And hey, poop is warm. Everyone likes being warm! Maybe it would be okay to leave that puddle of shit in her pants. Maybe she liked it that way. And if she liked it that way, who was I to argue? You should do everything in your power to keep your child happy, right?
I put her back in the crib with a shit in her pants.
I sneaked back into the bedroom and turned the monitor back on. I sat on the bed ever so gently, so as not to disturb my lovely wife. My aim was to shut my eyes tight so that I could fall back asleep as quickly as possible. If I managed to fall back asleep, I would win. And the second I hit the pillow, the exact second my head touched linen . . .
Durrrrrr.
Was that her? Maybe that wasn’t her. Maybe that was some other ambient sound, I thought to myself. This is always wishful thinking. If you suspect the baby is making noise, it’s making noise.
Hack.
Maybe she’s just settling back in, I thought to myself. She was quiet for a moment after that, and I lulled myself into believing my work was done. I was in the clear now.
Hack hack hack.