Monday, May 12, 2008
What advice do I have for new parents? Assemble a pit crew, don't expect to take showers, and beware of noxious orange poop.
Oct 24, 2003 | A pregnant friend asked me the other day how on earth you're supposed to raise a baby, and what came to mind at first was a general approach to anything difficult, to getting one's writing done every day, for instance. You take really short assignments, one passage at a time, write shitty first drafts, remember the fertile richness of messes, failures and mistakes; breathe, ask for help, tell the truth.
I couldn't actually think of anything specific to share with her on pregnancy and parenting that didn't also apply to writing -- after all, both are elective courses in Earth School, and not things that everyone needs to do in order to feel fulfilled. But if you insist on doing either, you start where you are, and you let yourself do it poorly, you study the work of people you admire, and after some time, you'll get better, and be insane for shorter periods of time.
Then I realized I must know a little bit about raising kids, because there is a mostly sweet 14-year-old boy downstairs listening to the Grateful Dead. I do know how to endure and even transform life's raw materials -- joy, loneliness, cluelessness, exhaustion, wonder, self-loathing, narcissism, rage and shit -- into gold. So today's short assignment, Lesson 1, will be a letter to my pregnant friend, on new beginnings, infants and orange baby poop.
Hi Honey:
It's going to be all right, more or less. The most important thing to remember is that we are all in the same boat, together; and also that all babies produce baby shit that is so vile and bizarre as to defy physics and description. Sometimes it is orange, sometimes red, or green, sometimes all in one day: It's like a cross between goat turds and stinky little Skittles. Sometimes it resembles the kind of jelly with which you remove rust from hardware. Sometimes it looks and smells like the poop of a dying cat. It can smell so noxious that you will think about putting the offending baby outside, to hose down, after you have aired out the house. It is OK to think this: talk about shitty first drafts! You'll learn to take poop in stride without ever understanding how a 10-pound being can produce such filth. In the same way, you will one day, God willing, find yourself reading a finished first draft of the book you hope to write, and you will be filled with such shame and horror that you'll want to take the book outside and hose it off. Do not leave the book or the baby outside: Clean them up, and then go sit outside and hold them. Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you. Rest. Start again.
Dr. Spock is very good on the subject of baby poop. You can look it up in the index of his book, where there are lists of colors and consistencies, and you will mostly be reassured that whatever your baby is pooping, you shouldn't be too concerned. Also, you can skip ahead to the section on raising 2-year-olds, and therein find the secret to dealing with any difficult person, of any age -- child, parent, colleague or yourself -- be firm, but friendly.
There is one area that is definitely specific to raising babies and not writing, and that has to do with gender.
If you have a girl baby, you must begin to teach her about feminism and liberation as early as possible, since these ideas seem to have somehow fallen by the wayside. It is my observation that young women in their 20s are frequently in deep despair, because they experience much the same discrimination and objectification and obsession that women have always endured, but they don't have the path and thrill of the women's movement; the sanctuary, and oxygenation of sisterhood. On a cautionary note, however, the more committed you are to feminism, the more you can rest assured that your daughter will want to dress like Mariah Carey. (On the other hand, if you are a girly-girl yourself, your child will want to dress like Mickey Rourke.)
If you have a boy baby, you are going to have the weenie to contend with. Having a weenie automatically bestows great advantage and power to the child, economically, physically, psychologically, over most women, and over all of Nature. I call it the Situation. You only have to deal with it one day at a time, though, with one tiny male baby, not with all the men throughout history who have ordered Inquisitions or bombings or been unfaithful to you and given you herpes or tiny trust issues.
You do, however, have to decide rather early on whether you are going to circumcise your boychik. This is an extremely dicey, charged decision, which you and your partner alone can decide: As in all of life, you really have to trust your heart and instincts -- to quote the great Mel Brooks, "Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it." Rather than risk getting a batch of letters comparing me to a hunter, let me just ask you whether you see yourself raising a boy who will make time every day to pull back his foreskin to give the Situation a good thorough cleansing. Perhaps you do. If not, you might consider circumcision. Your call.
One quick closing thought, though: Jews know things.
All right then: onward and upward. There are great books on raising babies, full of stunning insight and advice. It's paradoxical, like most truth, that some of us have most frequently seen the light on the flat, opaque page. But even the best books will fail you: Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you. You get to tell people the truth about this tiny person, how much you adore him, and how insane you feel, how in love and how depressed, and how much he scares you, how everything scares you now. Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you. You will not want to tell most people how wasted and crazy you feel sometimes, because you do not want them to think that you are a broken cuckoo clock of a parent. But you probably are. We all are; mad as fucking hatters, to use the psychological term. And raising a child is like pouring Miracle Grow on all your fears and character defects, so you have to talk about what's real, with safe people. Otherwise you are going to feel so isolated and deficient that it will damage your spirit. I wrote about some of this stuff in Salon many years ago:
"No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again ... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days ... There are also good things they don't tell you, too, like how vibrational new babies are, how healing they are when they sleep on your chest, how you let out your breath and rest down into them and are set free of everything bad for just a moment ... But then again, no one tells you that sometimes you won't even like your child. Or that you are going to discover streaks of self-obsession and neuroses that make your crabby Aunt Nancy look like Meher Baba.
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