When I got home from the hospital, I found Quinn as delighted as ever with life. “Daddy!” she cried as she freed herself from the babysitter and threw herself into my arms. Then it dawned on her something was missing. “Where’s Mama?” she asked.
“Mama had the baby!” I said. “A baby girl! You’re a big sister!”
“But where is Mama?” She was no longer a happy, loving child. She was a personal injury lawyer taking a deposition.
“In the hospital! With Dixie!”
“I want my family back,” she said.
“But now you have even more family. We have Dixie, too.”
“I hate Dixie,” she said. Then she howled and bared her teeth.
It was an unpromising start. In this situation an unprepared father, a father who hadn’t done his homework, might say something foolish. He might say, for instance, “That’s not a nice thing to say,” or “Of course you don’t hate Dixie. You love Dixie. She’s your sister.” But I’d read the parenting texts, or at any rate the passages Tabitha highlighted and dropped in my inbox. I’d listened intently to the many reports Tabitha brought back from the parenting classes she attended every week. I’d taken note of the instructional parenting cartoon Tabitha glued to our refrigerator. I understood that my job was no longer to force the party line upon Quinn. My job was to validate her feelings.
“You hate Dixie because you’re afraid she’s taken Mama away,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes,” I repeated. And then…I was stumped. I couldn’t think of what to say next. All I could think was: Of course you hate Dixie. She has taken Mama away. I’d hate her, too, if I were you. Truth is, a tiny part of me was proud that she saw the situation for what it was, a violation of her property rights. It boded well for her future in the free market.
The parenting books don’t tell you where to go when your first move doesn’t lead to psychological checkmate. The only thing I had going for me was the toddler’s indifference to logic.
“So you want to go see Dixie?” I said.
“To the hospital?”
“To the hospital.”
She thought about this. “Can I have a chocolate doughnut?” she asked.
The hospital visit went well enough. The doughnut purchased the hour needed to initiate the first of the peace talks. But that night, when I put Quinn to bed, something was not quite right. First, she insisted that I lay her head at the foot of her bed and her feet at the head. Then she demanded three books and two stories instead of her usual two and one. Finally, as I switched off her light, she said, “In fact, you forgot to give me a kiss.” I gave her a kiss. “A kiss doesn’t make all the angry go away,” she said. And then: “Good night, Daddy,” in a voice I’d never before heard. A chillingly adult-sounding voice.
An hour later there came from her room a sudden noise. She was still awake, fiddling furiously with something on her floor. It was a book of family photos, given to her by her grandmother, which had given her a year of pleasure. She’d yanked it to pieces and scattered them across the room.
IN WADING THROUGH the parenthood literature, I have read exactly one piece of writing that comes close to capturing the potential misery of it. It was an article in The New Yorker by John Seabrook, in which the author hunted down a man named Ferber, whose research gave birth to a cold-blooded method of training babies to sleep. As I recall, Seabrook and his wife had been made miserable by their newborn’s tendency to holler through the night. Addled by lack of sleep, they set out to “Ferberize” their child. This meant shutting the door and clinging to each other as their baby in the next room shrieked with greater and greater urgency. Ferber extremists believe that parents should leave their infant to learn how to fall asleep on its own, even if the poor creature becomes so upset it vomits. One book even suggests that parents spread a plastic sheet under the baby’s crib to catch the mess. Before Seabrook went this far, he set out to find Ferber. When he found him, he also found that Ferber had recanted. He was no longer quite so sure about his early research. Millions of babies were being tortured without a theory.
Even if we had a theory, we couldn’t abide by it. It’s unnatural to leave a baby to cry alone in its crib; it makes you feel about as humane as a serial killer. And so our lives have now resumed a pattern they last had three years ago, when Quinn was born. Only this time it’s worse because Quinn is still here. Dixie—who is now referred to by the other three members of her family simply as “the baby”—wakes up every hour between seven p.m. and seven a.m. and bleats just loudly enough to alert Quinn to the possibilities. Quinn wakes up at eleven at night, then again at one, three, and five-thirty in the morning, and each time screams a horror-movie scream that sends a chill down the spine of the man across the street.
There is no way my wife and I could function if we each had to deal with both children, and so we’ve split the family in two. I sleep downstairs with Quinn, Tabitha sleeps upstairs with Dixie. On good nights, we meet for dinner. Essentially, we are both single parents. I reckon that Tabitha averages maybe three hours of sleep each night, broken up into forty-five-minute chunks. I get more like five broken hours, and while I should be pleased about that, I am, in truth, pissed off. That’s what happens when you don’t sleep properly for long stretches: You get pissed off. At any rate, that’s what happens to me. My wife grows melancholy.
I decided to keep this diary for a couple of reasons. The first was that I wanted a written record for Dixie, who, as a second child, runs a risk of being a blur; and I knew that there was no way I would take the trouble to record her arrival if I didn’t have an editor breathing down my neck for the material. The other was that I noticed a tendency to gloss over the unpleasant aspects of parenthood, in part because it’s unseemly to complain about one’s children but also because there is a natural inclination to forget that there was anything to complain about. But there is. In the first few weeks after a child is born—or at least after a child of mine is born—it is as if someone must pay for whatever it endured when it exited the womb and entered the world.
Here’s what my typical day now looks like, for example, beginning at what used to be bedtime. I awaken at eleven at night, and then again at one, three, and five-thirty in the morning, to persuade Quinn that there isn’t a spider in her bed. At seven a.m. she rises for good, somehow fully rested, and hollers at the top of her lungs for her mother. As battered as Rocky going into the twelfth round against Apollo Creed, I wrestle her to the ground, dress her in clothes she does not want to wear, and drag her out of the house, still screaming, to my office, where I feed her a breakfast she does not want to eat. She demands chocolate; I offer a fruit plate; after tantrums on both sides of the bargaining table, we compromise on an Eggo waffle. Around nine I get her to school and enjoy a brief feeling of self-satisfaction: I am coping manfully with a great big mess. I’m preventing my wife from further suffering. I am the good soldier who has leapt on the hand grenade, so that others may live.
This cheering thought lasts until I get home and find my wife in tears. Often I try to hide, but usually she spots me, and when she does, she will usually say something poignant. “I feel like I am going through this alone,” for instance. Or, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” Whatever she says neatly undercuts my belief that I am carrying far more than my share of our burden; indeed, it makes it clear that I am not a hero at all but a slacker, a deadbeat Dad. Demoralized, I tromp back down to my office and try for a few hours without success to put bread on the table, before retrieving Quinn from school.
By about the sixth day of this routine, I am as random as a misfiring piston and as raw as an exposed nerve. Driving Quinn home the other day, for instance, I was cut off by a woman in a station wagon. “What the fuck are you doing, lady?” I shouted at the windshield hysterically.
“Daddy, why did you say fuckyoudoing?” a voice inquired from the back seat.
“Oh.” Pause. “That’s not what I said.”
>
“Was she a fucky lady?”
“Funky. Funky lady.”
“You said fucky.”
Once home, there is paid help—for which I feel guilty, if you can believe that—and I try to use it to get back to work. In truth, I usually wind up curled up in a little ball of fatigue until dinner, which is my job to throw together. After dinner, I put Quinn to bed while Tabitha nurses the baby for the twenty-thousandth time. Then the cycle begins all over again.
I know that all of this will soon pass and our family will once more achieve some wonderful new equilibrium. With one more person on hand to love and to be loved, we’ll soon be drowning in finer feelings. But for now we’re drowning mainly in self-pity.
You would think that someone would have come up with a humane, economical method for absorbing a new child into a family. Certainly there’s billions in it for whoever does. As it stands, there are three approaches to the problem, all of them inadequate. You can pretend to believe the books and do whatever you must do to your children to ensure a good night’s sleep for yourself. You can throw money at it and hire squadrons of night nurses to tend to your children while you move into the local Ritz-Carlton. Or you can do what we are doing and muddle through as best as you can, grabbing at any old piece of advice that comes your way, less because it will actually help matters than because it offers hope. You tell yourself that eventually this baby will learn to sleep, just as eventually it will learn to walk and to use the toilet. After all, you don’t see a lot of adults who wake up hollering at the ceiling every forty-five minutes, just as you don’t see a lot of adults who crawl around on all fours, or who crap their pants twice a day. So it stands to reason that the problem will solve itself. Here’s hoping.
THE OTHER DAY on the way to school Quinn demanded, unusually, that I shut off the nursery rhymes. Then, even more unusually, she sat silently, staring straight ahead, ignoring my attempts to engage her in conversation. I tilted the rearview mirror to make sure she wasn’t choking on something and was greeted with a gaze of what I can only describe as mad intensity. Finally she said, “My Daddy is dead.”
Four weeks ago, before the birth of Dixie, this would have shocked me. Now it’s almost pleasantly familiar. Quinn’s going through a dark phase. A week ago she came home from school with a stack of drawings. Gone were the blue and pink pastels she had favored since she’d first become a prolific artist. In their place were many disturbing furious black scrawls. One horrifying ink and crayon sketch resembled an ax-murdered spider. My child had entered her first new period.
“Oh, so now I’m dead?” I said cheerily.
“You stink, Daddy,” she said.
“Am I dead or do I stink?”
She thought it over. “Both.”
On some days she hollers insults at me the whole way to school—“You stink” and “You’re dead” are two favorites—and if she can find something to hurl at my head, she’ll do that, too. Driving her around these days is like playing right field for the visiting team in Yankee Stadium.
The division of responsibility that’s followed the birth of a second child has left me exposed in whole new ways. With Tabitha essentially glued to Dixie, I am the only outlet for Quinn’s understandable need to scream at her parents. I am also her main parental influence. I confess I hadn’t realized the implications of this until the other night when, after a brutalizing day in which I foolishly agreed to take both children myself so that their mother might go to San Francisco, I was tiptoeing out of the room containing mother and nursing child and aiming myself in the general direction of the sofa bed. Mother seemed glum. “What’s the matter?” I asked, not particularly caring for the answer. Out gushed a torrent of complaints about Quinn’s behavior since Dixie’s birth. She’d become surly with babysitters; she’d stopped sleeping through the night; she no longer ate her vegetables; she was resisting the final, crucial stages of potty training; she showed no interest in any activity except watching Shrek for the 150th time; she’d been rude to her mother when she returned from San Francisco.
In the good old days when Tabitha complained to me about Quinn, she did so in a collaborative spirit. We were joined by common interests; we were Munger and Buffett hashing out investment strategy. This didn’t sound like that. This sounded more like an Arab attempting to engage an American on the subject of the Israeli army.
“She’s not eating her vegetables because she’s pissed off about Dixie,” I said.
“She’s not eating her vegetables because she had a huge cup of Frosted Mini-Wheats just before dinner,” she said.
The Frosted Mini-Wheats had been my idea. She didn’t say that; she didn’t have to. Everything about Quinn was now my idea. My wife knew this was the time in Quinn’s life when she needed to be indulged. But she also had an investment to protect.
“I just feel like my two and a half years of work on her is being washed down the drain,” she said.
“She’ll get all her good habits back once she gets used to Dixie.”
“Once you lose good habits you can’t get them back,” she said.
Never having had good habits myself, I was poorly situated to argue the point, and if I had, I wouldn’t have been believed. My wife was raised in a military household that left her in full possession of the martial virtues. I was raised in a home where it was possible for me every couple of weeks to steal a jumbo sack of Nestlé’s chocolate-chip cookies from the kitchen and secrete them under my bed at night without anyone being the wiser for it. I was meant to be six-foot-three and make straight A’s through high school but as a result of skipping dinner and instead eating a dozen Nestlé’s chocolate-chip cookies every night I wound up five-foot-ten with a D in biology my sophomore year. I could see my wife’s point. She had spent two and a half years drilling her better qualities into her first child only to see them sucked out in three and a half weeks of prolonged exposure to me. She was the ace of the pitching staff who had shut down the opposing batters for eight innings only to watch the closer blow the game in the ninth. (I’ve had baseball on my mind.)
In the past three years I have tried on occasion to imagine what effects I am having on my child. I do this dutifully rather than naturally because it seems like the sort of thing a father should do. But I never get anywhere with it. The fact, as opposed to the theory, of life with a small child is an amoral system of bribes and blackmails. You do this for me, you get that. You don’t do this for me, you don’t get that. I’ve always assumed that if a small child has enough joy and love and stability in her life, along with intelligently directed bribes and blackmail, the rest will take care of itself. And my approach appeared to be working. Right up until the birth of her sister, Quinn excelled at childhood and did so, it seemed, effortlessly. It honestly never occurred to me that I should be in some way shaping her. I was one of those easygoing CEOs who believe that excessive discipline crushes the creativity of his employees. I believed in managing by hanging around.
In retrospect, the only reason I was able to get away with this pose is that I wasn’t the CEO. I was more like a titular chairman, allowed to sit at the head of the table but never actually listened to. Now, clearly, I must take a different approach. The CEO’s attention has been diverted by a difficult acquisition in a foreign country. The chairman is, however briefly, in charge. Everyone else is anxious.
THE THING THAT most surprised me about fatherhood the first time around was how long it took before I felt about my child what I was expected to feel. Clutching Quinn after she exited the womb, I was able to generate tenderness and a bit of theoretical affection, but after that, for a good six weeks, the best I could manage was detached amusement. The worst was hatred. I distinctly remember standing on a balcony with Quinn squawking in my arms and wondering what I would do if it wasn’t against the law to hurl her off it. I also recall convincing myself that official statistics dramatically overstated the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome—when an infant dies for no apparent reason in her c
rib—because most of them were probably murder. The reason we all must be so appalled by parents who murder their infants is that it is so easy and even natural to do. Maternal love may be instinctive, but paternal love is learned behavior.
Here is the central mystery of fatherhood, or at any rate my experience of it. How does a man’s resentment of this…thing…that lands in his life and instantly disrupts every aspect of it for the apparent worse turn into love? A month after Quinn was born, I would have felt only an obligatory sadness if she had been rolled over by a truck. Six months or so later, I’d have thrown myself in front of the truck to save her from harm. What happened? What transformed me from a monster into a father? I do not know. But this time around I’m keeping a closer eye on the process.
I can’t honestly say that I’ve found Dixie, at least at first glance, quite so loathsome as her older sister. She doesn’t holler so much for no reason at all, and when she does, I’m usually not around to hear it, as I’m taking care of Quinn. That’s the main difference this time: I now have what her mother regards as a good excuse to avoid the unpleasantness of these first few weeks, and so I do. Occasionally I even forget that she’s there. It’s a strange sensation to walk into a room, flip on the television, watch a baseball game for twenty minutes, look to your right, and find a five-week-old child you did not know was there looking back. Still, I’ve been left knowingly alone with Dixie enough, and been made sufficiently unhappy by her with fatigue and frustration, to have felt the odd Murderous Impulse. At the same time, I have already noticed, in the past week or so, a tendency to gaze upon her with genuine fondness. Here as best I can determine are the factors contributing to what appears to be another miraculous shift in feeling occurring inside me at this very moment:
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