Friday, February 03, 2006
The Evil Panty, or Why I’m a Bad Blogger These Days
“Paternity leave.” A month ago those five syllables sounded just barely less idyllic than “tropical island” or “undulating vibrations” or “on-call gourmet chef.” No more of that bogus “get up before dawn, cobble together a lunch out of lawn clippings and newsprint, and stand in the rain till a bus full of angry weirdos comes to take me to my dingy scrivening-garret for ten hours.” The life of a working stiff was over for me. I would henceforth be the opposite of a working stiff – an “idle flaccid,” I guess, which doesn’t sound so great now that I think on it. But I was psyched to be on leave, anyway. After years of sweating my blood for THE MAN, I’d be able to luxuriate in the private splendor of my own home, with no clock to watch and no one to answer to but my own self. I’d earned it, and it was about time I cashed in.
What I’d forgotten was that I was the only one on leave. Kel is still getting up at 6:30 to go to work, give or take a few snoozes for which I remain responsible since the alarm clock is on my side of the bed. And once the bathroom light goes on in the early morning darkness, blasting me directly in the face with hideous brightness, any hope I have of sleeping is pretty much dead.
So I roll out of bed before 7 anyway, despite my “on leave” status, and shower and shave, and settle in for ten minutes of therapeutic stretching and exercise. I unfurl my mat and lie on my back, starting by gently coaxing my vertebrae to return to a healthful alignment, sighing out my tension. This action, silent and subtle, invariably somehow awakens Zach in the nursery down the hall. The gurgling coo of his revivification is an unmistakable prelude to a keening wail if I don’t move quickly enough to get him out of bed, so, with resignation overlaid upon my accumulated backtension, I rearise almost immediately from the floor and pluck him, grinning and giggling, from his crib. I change him, prepare him a tasty and nutritious breakfast, and helplessly watch him spit it into his hands and then smear it up his cheeks and into his thick luxurious hair, all the healthier for the oatmeal-yogurt conditioner he so regularly and enthusiastically applies thereto.
And from that point forward, it’s all about Zach – as it should be. That’s why I’m here, instead of at my downtown desk with the free coffee and uninterrupted internet access. So I clean up breakfast (mostly by swabbing the boy’s head and hands, and picking up renegade Cheerios and Kix before they’re ground irretrievably into the rugs), and then play for a few hours. “Play,” in this case, meaning “run around after Zach as he pulls over everything that’s not bolted to the wall, crawls under everything with at least six inches of ground clearance, and desperately tries to explore and empty our many cabinets of poison and heavy blunt objects.” I’m surprised, actually, that I managed to survive here myself for so long, with so many death traps everywhere. Just lucky, I guess.
The clock I mentioned before that I don’t have to watch while I’m on leave, goes off two to three hours after Zach gets up, to tell me to put him down again. Whereas, at work, I just do my job till some arbitrary period of time has elapsed, at which point I just go and do something else, here on paternity leave I am now responding to a variable timeline over which I have only the most tenuous control. I just need to keep alert for the signals that the next phase of Zach’s day is imminent – usually, a subtle glassiness around the eyes, some rubbing of the face, and increasing tantrums against gravity and inanimate objects. That’s when I scoop him up, choke his tears with six ounces of warm formula (or “warmula”), and gently lower him into his crib.
He hates relinquishing consciousness, though, and often protests vigorously as soon as he realizes he’s horizontal. These protests are especially violent if he’s actually already asleep, but eventually he stops complaining and succumbs to the inevitable nap, giving me a chance to clean up his breakfast, finish my own, and put away those of his toys I’m most likely not to notice till I trip over them and hurt myself. Then I can sit down to check my email, play a quick game of Spider, open my blog for a little surfing – but before I’ve gotten far, I hear him sputter and cough back to life in the next room, and, all too soon, he’s awake again, crying piteously.
At this point I remove him again from the crib only to discover, to my dismay, that during his nap someone snuck into his room and filled his diaper with a richly aromatic mass of used vegetables and bilirubin. I hasten to cleanse his undercarriage and then we play for another half hour (he just loves the surge protector, the top-heavy spindle table, the torchiere lamps and the kitchen garbage can) before I strap him to a chair and grind up some food for his lunch. The afternoon then proceeds pretty much as the morning had, but I do get about an hour during his post-prandial nap to write, clean the house, do the laundry, and maybe get some rest while he’s in his crib sleeping, or, possibly, cursing me out like a furious, pre-verbal sailor. By the time Kel gets home around five, I’m sorely whipped, my to-do list is openly laughing at me in derision, and Zach is working diligently at removing, first my eyeglasses, and then my eyeballs.
We feed him, then ourselves; then we bathe him and get him into a sleeper, read him a few books (“Goodnight Moon” is now my favorite work of existential literature), dump another bottle down his bottomless gullet, and put him to bed with gentleness and trepidation and fervent prayers that he goes down and stays down. This leaves me with just enough energy to watch a little mindless television and go to bed, so I can awaken the next morning and do it all over again.
All of which is to say that paternity leave is every bit as fulfilling, gratifying, and emotionally powerful as I’d ever hoped it would be – but as far as relaxation goes, my old desk at work had a lot more going for it than I’d realized. It’s not for nothing that the anagram of “paternity leave” is “re: eat evil panty.” I’m not sure what that means, but you just know that it sounds like a lot of work.