Backseat Parenting
10/15/12 (#149)
Being a dad
for a second time is a totally different experience. When my first was born, I
was a nervous wreck, barely hearing conversations around me because I was
incessantly monitoring my daughter’s condition: She just coughed, was that her normal cough? Is there such a thing as a
normal cough? Should I track cough frequency and chronicle it in a notebook? I
have a blank page between poop colors and sneeze counts, I should totally jot
this down. Wait, where’s my pen? Holy shit, I left the house without a pen?
What kind of father am I? What if I have to write to her doctor? Oh my god, who
allowed me to have a child, she…wait, she did it again. That wasn’t a cough, it
was a grunt. Is she trying to talk? Oh my god, did she just say her first word
and I dismissed it as a cough?
And on and
on and on. Everything was so new and foreign and heavy with the weight of the
world. I didn’t dare look away or even slip into brief reverie for fear that a
momentary lapse would result in my child falling into a culvert or accidentally
boarding a bus without me. She couldn’t even walk, yet I was able to concoct
imaginary scenarios of how a careless moment would decimate my existence and
leave me with 50 years of telling the horror story of how my daughter was
blinded by a llama or lost her leg to the escalator at Target. Those were tense
days.
Ten years
later, my infant girl coughs and my reaction is: She’s not blue. Cool. I’ll keep an eye on her.
Because I am
more relaxed about the minute-to-minute process, I’m able to pay a lot more
attention to the world around my daughter without feeling like I’m neglecting
her, and I’ve discovered a delightful strain in many parents, in the same way
that watching a movie a second time reveals nuances that you missed when you
were busy trying to figure out the plot.
Don’t
mistake this as a critique of other parents. Parenting is all-consuming, and every
child is different, so I empathize with everyone’s circumstances and keep my
opinions to myself. (And appreciate when others do the same.) But there’s one
compulsive bit of kibitzing I see that amuses me to no end. It occurs when a
child fusses or cries, and people offer unsolicited assessments of the cause.
For example, a conversation might sound something like this:
(baby cries)
Parent 1: (in playful baby voice) “Uh
oh. Somebody’s hungry.”
Babie’s mom: “She just ate an hour ago. I think she’s
tired.”
Parent 2: “It sounds to me like a full diaper. Bridget
gave that whine when she was wet.”
Parent 1: “I don’t know. Even if she
ate an hour ago, it depends on how much she ate.”
Babie’s mom: “She ate a lot. And I changed her just before you guys arrived. I’m
going to lay her down for a nap.”
Parent 2: “Make sure you check that
diaper. If she ate a lot, it’s probably poop.”
These
insights are always delivered with a tone of “just trying to help,” but there’s
often a passive/aggressive undercurrent of certainty, and there’s the rub: Anyone
who believes themselves to be right will bristle at being proved wrong, so
there’s an emotional investment in the advice. The baby might have gone days
without eating, but the “he needs a nap” parent is intent on having accurately
called the scenario. (“Sure, he’s humoring you by drinking some of that bottle,
but I bet he zonks out right after.”) Worse, when circumstances demonstrate
that one parent in a group is right, they often develop the swagger of a
subject matter expert, eager to demonstrate again their super-tuned baby radar .
Conversely, the parent who struck-out in their assessment quietly hopes another
issue arises so they can take another swing, double-or-nothing.
I expected
this would be limited to parents with similar-aged babies, each trying to elbow
past the others as the most competent caregiver, but it’s bigger than that.
Grandparents do it, too, piping up with the confidence of proven veterans
coming off the bench to show the rookies the ropes, quick to dismiss all this
new-school “new age” advice about how to holistically coax a child into full
bloom. “Why are you asking him what’s wrong? Babies can’t talk. Stick a bottle
in his mouth and he’ll settle down.”
Of course,
the advice is usually offered to a mom, and even on my first go-round, I knew
better than to try to tell a mother something she doesn’t know about her own
child. I’m probably batting only about .400 when it comes to predicting the
hungry/tired/teething/soiled/just-plain-grumpy cause of my own child’s discomfort, so when it’s happening to someone else’s
baby, I’ll let all the other experts in the room handle the diagnosis.
Though if
you’re wondering what is causing the exhausted eyes, the impatient tone, or the
irritable expression on another dad’s
face? That one I can hit out of the park.
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