Advice

“What you need to do,” Karen announced, “is approach the dog slowly and let him sniff the baby’s foot.”
“Oh yeah?” I murmured.
“And the dog will get used to the baby’s smell.”
“That makes sense,” I said. I nodded as I received this sagely wisdom.
 
It happened after the Thursday meeting about online banking, the one where the IT Operations manager and I had verbal fisticuffs about bill pay in front of a room full of managers. My boss Beth waved her hands frantically and attempted to kick me under the table from two chairs away, but I blithely continued to explain about how our bill pay payments are processed, to which Mike expanded like a puffer fish and tried to talk over me.
Seconds after the heated meeting ended, Beth muttered something about having to help the Collections manager, and I sat down in my office and clicked on Outlook to ponder my overstuffed inbox. The phone rang from the Collection manager’s office and Beth asked me if I could come help. “This one’s beyond my expertise.”
I strode purposefully to the Collections department. It was a technical problem with our resource database, I guessed. Beth greeted me and waved me to a conference room. “Surprise!” she said.
Lavender baby shower streamers ran from the cherry wood cabinets to the opposite wall. My manager, the VP of Member Service, the Collections manager, MVD clerk, Mortgage manager, two mortgage processors, and a Loan Records clerk all stood around a group of presents on the conference room table.
“Oh… my!” I said, suddenly the center of attention. A panicked thought crossed my mind. How could I possibly be at a baby shower without either Meg or Emma present? Surely there was some mistake. And that’s when the group of middle-aged women started to provide me with some valuable advice.
 
“Get sleep while you can,” murmured the Collections manager knowingly.
I’ve heard this particular one a dozen times and I find it the most puzzling piece of advice that people have handed down to me.
I picture a pantry in which I am hoarding rows and rows of cans with red and white labels marked Campbell’s Cream of Sleep. It’s not as if I can go to bed on Friday night and decide that, well, I might as well sleep until Sunday night, because by golly, I’m going to need it after the baby’s born. Sleep isn’t something that you can stock up on like toilet paper from Costco.
Nevertheless, I chuckle at the joke and try not to picture the rows and rows of cans of sleep that I have stockpiled at home.
The advice about introducing a baby to a dog was good, I suppose. But it’s a little weird coming from a 63-year-old woman who never had children. “My niece had kids, so I know,” Karen said, as if her credibility might be uncertain.
 
“They grow up so fast,” is also repeated by nearly every parent I’ve met, followed by either “enjoy it while you can” or “I wish they’d never grow up.”
The first notion I can embrace. I think it’s a way of saying, “While your child is young, don’t be a shitty dad.” And who can’t get behind that, really?
But I start to think about “They grow up so fast,” and I remember an article I clipped once out of a newspaper that stated that scientists have found that time is slower for children and faster for adults. I still find this a startling idea, but my subjective opinion is that it’s dead on. I don’t know about yours, but my childhood lasted several centuries. If anyone came up to me when I was seven years old and told me, “Enjoy being seven while you can, because you grow up so fast,” I’d think that they were crazy. Fast? My childhood enfolded at the speed of paint peeling.
So if someone says, “They grow up so fast,” the child isn’t growing up fast. You’re just watching too quickly.
But that’s missing the whole point. If they say “Enjoy it while you can,” it means that you should be observant and an active parent in your child’s life. If you’re around to notice all the milestones, then I guess you haven’t failed as a parent.
(Also, I might add, one piece of advice that they should tell you, but don’t, is “They grow up so fast—have sex while you can.”)
 
Sometimes I find myself congratulating myself as a virile man. “My boys can swim,” I think proudly. I envision my genes—well, half of my genes—floating around somewhere in Meg’s huge belly. And then somehow my mind jumps to Emma having kids of her own, and passing a quarter of my genes down to her kids, and so on down through subsequent generations. I puff up at this comforting thought, that pieces of me will make their meandering way down the ages of time. People will say, “Well, gosh, that fellow really knew how to use his penis!”
 
We’ve had a number of people tell us, “You and Meg will be such great parents.” Others tell us that Emma is going to be off the IQ scales and in college by the age of nine.
While it’s nice being complemented by friends and family, a part of me wonders, “How exactly do you know what I’ll be like as a parent?” I mean, what if I plan on being a mediocre parent, the type who forgets to wear pants around the house and farts at the dinner table? What if Emma turns out to be a student with a B minus average at school and starts dating jocks and frat boys at the age of ten? It seems entirely speculative, especially since Emma’s still T minus 3 weeks from even being born, and I haven’t changed a diaper in my life yet.
 
They’re all well-meaning, the advice-givers. And generous. Meg’s extended family gave us a huge shower. Everyone in the family was invited—women and men alike. We left with two SUVs packed full of baby stuff, mostly from our registry. When we got home, we wrote a stack of thank you cards and then sorted all of the presents and gift cards out. A stroller, a pack and play, a thousand diapers, hundreds of dollars. Two hand-crocheted blankets.
A few weeks later my boss at work held another small shower with a small group of coworkers. We ate at the California Pizza Kitchen (or, as Meg called it the other day for no reason, the “Pizza Factory”) and they gave us lots more gifts—and two more hand-made blankets.
By the time my surprise shower at work happened, we had pretty much everything. Not that you can’t have enough No Tears shampoo or cute baby girl dresses—but it’s overwhelming how many people wanted to give us something.
The worst one so far was when Cora—possibly the least inspiring teller I’ve ever seen —dropped by my office the day after the shower and proudly gave me a gift bag. I thanked her profusely. “Aww, you’re so sweet, thank you so much,” I cooed.
I paused for ten seconds. Does she expect me to open presents in front of her? Or can I thank her and then put it on my desk to open later, in privacy? She waited patiently, so I took the plunge and untied the bow holding the bag handles together. I murmured, “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” as I dug out the bag’s contents.
Cora apparently had visited a dollar store and spent twenty dollars on their baby aisle. When I showed Meg later, she wondered aloud if the baby bottles contained lead paint. There was a tiny blanket that felt so fake that I joked that if we washed it, it’d disintegrate and we’d find only a rainbow of fuzz in the lint trap.
We wrote a thank you card profusely thanking her for the gift—and then donated the entire bag to a charity for pregnant teens.
Mary and Andrea gave us the last gift, a cute dress and other genuinely nice baby things, and a card. Mary wrote:
Oliver and Megan,
I know this little bundle of joy will bring so much happiness to your world. It’s amazing that one little person can complete a married couple in ways you can’t describe. I know that Emma will be lucky to call you “mom and dad” and as she grows, you will still be in awe that you were blessed with this little miracle. I wish you nothing but the best… enjoy your sleep while you can. She will be worth every sacrifice.
Mary