by Jim Gaffigan
A priest, a rabbi, and a lesbian walk into a circumcision …
As I mentioned before, I completely blocked out most of what happened that night, as I did with the other nights my sons were circumcised. Of course, if they ever question why they were circumcised, I’ll do the manly thing and blame it on their mother.
The Invasion
Nobody likes being a new kid. It’s uncomfortable and strange. People are mean and call you “dog breath.” Well, maybe that was just me when I was the new kid in fifth grade.
When a newborn baby arrives, he or she is the new kid. In a family with young children, it’s not just uncomfortable and strange for the new kid, it’s uncomfortable and strange for everyone. Sure, the new addition to the family is always celebrated and loved completely, but he or she brings change to the family unit. At the time of birth, suddenly there’s another person in the room or, in the case of a home birth, in your bathtub. It’s really a special time. While this event is magical and mystical for adults, for young children it can be overwhelming and confusing. A three-year-old can witness their mother’s belly getting larger, and you can read them every book about a new sibling coming, but they are still surprised when the baby actually arrives.
You are so cute I just want to … punch … okay, I’ll kiss you.
For our one-year-old, Michael, the arrival of his younger brother, Patrick, was the shock of a lifetime and wildly confusing. As sweet and kind as Michael is, he still couldn’t understand this small stranger who somehow just arrived and was stealing some of his thunder. He was gentle and kissed the baby’s head the way we’d taught him to do with a doll before the birth, but when he looked to us for approval, there was some desperation in his big blue eyes. It was like the reaction of an aging chorus girl when the eighteen-year-old ingenue joins the show. “Welcome aboard. I hope you don’t get injured.”
Michael wasn’t alone; all our children acted like they’d had a couple of Red Bulls after a breakup. Sleepless and clingy became their MO. Sibling jealously is always an issue, even if you have one kid dealing with the arrival of a new baby. I don’t think any husband or wife would be thrilled if their spouse suddenly brought home another partner. “Bob, this is Frank. Frank will also be my husband.” When you have four kids and a new kid shows up, the results are a little more dramatic. I guess only polygamist sister-wives could identify.
Jeannie and I attempt to make the transition as easy as possible on the kids. I try to be a compassionate dad. I always sit our other children down and explain that the new baby does not mean we love them any less, but we will have to let one of them go. I’m kidding, of course. There is nothing that can be said to a child to alleviate the stress of a new arrival. It can only be solved by one-on-one time and lots of cuddles. This is perfect, because you have all the free time in the world when dealing with a newborn. When newborns are not sleeping, they need constant attention. I think our youngest, Patrick, slept for a total of thirty-four seconds during his first three weeks.
What can we say to the other kids? “Okay, the bad news is we’ve hired someone to do your job, but the good news is you’ve been promoted to ‘Former Cutest Kid.’ Congratulations.” The kids are not thrilled. With a new baby, it always feels like Jeannie and I are going through parental performance reviews. The other kids don’t act out toward the baby, they act out toward us. It’s not the baby’s fault he’s here. It’s our fault. They don’t know how we did it, but they know that we did it. Suddenly, our three-year-old starts sucking her thumb with a vengeance, looking at us like, “Mom didn’t nurse me long enough. Now I will ruin my teeth so you will pay thousands of dollars in dental work.” The first couple of weeks of a new arrival when you have four kids are like pledging a fraternity, except the parents are the ones being hazed. To make matters worse, there is no alcohol served during this process.
What about the new kid, Patrick? How did he adjust? He wasn’t thrilled. Newborns don’t smile, and they always give me that look of “Oh no, you’re my dad?” Patrick went from having his own room in his “man cave” womb to being thrust into the center of a madhouse. He seemed to look around at our apartment, disgusted, as if to say “Wow. And I thought my last place was crowded.” I know how you feel, my friend. I know how you feel.
Please take him. Take him now!
Eat the Coleslaw!
Even when I was a little kid, I always saw motherhood as an awe-inspiring occupation. My mom was always mothering my siblings and me. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day position. Running errands, making dinner, picking us up, and yelling instructions from the other room. “Eat the coleslaw!” would be bellowed from the kitchen as we ate dinner. How did she know we weren’t eating the coleslaw? Did moms have X-ray vision? We would giggle at crazy old Mom, but we knew that without her we were lost. All moms seemed simultaneously tireless and on the brink of exhaustion. Once when I was ten, I slept over at a friend’s house. For fun, my friend and I decided that we would try to stay up all night. Around two in the morning, we thought we heard a monster. After drumming up the courage to investigate, we crept down to the basement to discover my friend’s mom doing laundry in a neck brace. I remember thinking, “Maybe moms don’t sleep. Maybe moms are indestructible!” Moms always seemed to be in a state of constant mothering. Conversely, I remember thinking all dads seemed like they were just returning from playing golf or about to leave to play golf. Maybe that was just the shirts men wore in those days.
Even back then, hats didn’t fit my huge head.
Now, as a father, I have an even deeper appreciation for mothers. It’s not just the endless tasks and limited sleep. Motherhood is filled with executive decisions, and with each decision comes possible conflict with kids, husbands, and other mom friends. With these other mom friends, there are so many opportunities for major disagreements and awkwardness. Let’s say that a woman starts with twenty friends when she finds out she’s pregnant. There is going to be awkwardness with, let’s say, six of those friends because they have no interest in babies or are jealous she is pregnant. Then four won’t agree with how she behaves during the pregnancy. She’s too uptight, too casual, or not available enough as a friend. We are down to ten friends. Then there are the decisions of how the baby will be delivered, breastfeeding, circumcision, blanket or no blanket in the crib, and whether or when to return to work after the birth. These topics turn out to be more divisive than opinions about politics and religion. After a couple of kids, there might be one good friend left. And that friend is never available because she has too many kids herself. I’m amazed mothers have anyone to talk to. When a man finds out he’s going to be a father, it barely covers more than twenty seconds of a conversation with his male friends. “I heard you two are expecting! Congratu … Who do you think is the best quarterback in the fourth quarter?”
Mothers need to talk, and fathers need to escape. I think this is why women of my mother’s generation would go to ladies’ luncheons. I remember as a teenager twice a year my mother announcing, “Me and the ladies are going out to lunch.” She would return eight hours later … well, let’s say, not sober. “Your father’s a jerk! Now get me a gyro.”
I suppose parenting wouldn’t feel so overwhelming if Jeannie didn’t make mothering look so easy. At times, I think she has more than two arms. She is an amazing partner and wife. The only thing Jeannie is missing is her own wife. A wife exactly like her. If you think this sounds sexist, you don’t know Jeannie.
Since I am not “handy,” Jeannie tends to do a lot of the inevitable household repairs that result from having five children who break everything. Recently, I was assembling a kid’s scooter and futilely trying to shove the top piece in.
“Jeannie, do we have a hammer?”
“Yeah, we have like three hammers.”
“Where are they?”
“In the toolbox.”
“We have a toolbox?”
There is one exception to Jeannie’s superhumanness. As capable, organized, and amaz
ing as Jeannie is at almost everything, it is baffling how many times a day she loses her phone.
“Where’s my phone?”
“Didn’t you just find it?”
“Yes, but then I put it down somewhere. Can you call it?”
[RING]
“It’s in your hand.”
Jeannie calls this “mommy brain,” but rather than condemning mothers as ditzy scatterbrains, I think it’s just a matter of shifting priorities and focusing on the most important issues. Like taking care of me.
Jeannie is the mother of five children (six, if you include me) and my invaluable writing partner. I don’t mean partner symbolically, like, “Oh, here’s what the client’s wife thinks.” She is the partner. This is very rare in stand-up, so people are surprised that she is executive-producing my theater shows while being the mother of five kids. “Shouldn’t your wife be home fat and miserable?”
We made that quilt together, too.
Jeannie comes from a family of nine kids, and she and her mother have really bonded over the trials and tribulations of being in this awe-inspiring position of mother. There is a certain language that only mothers can understand. They talk all the time on the phone, usually having the same five-minute conversation over and over again for like eight hours. When they aren’t talking, I assume it’s because Jeannie’s lost her phone.
Toddlerhood
Toddlerhood is one of my favorite periods of childhood development, and not just because you can finally enter them in beauty pageants. (Don’t worry, they do get used to the fake teeth.) Toddler is a term used to describe children ages one to three. Babies and toddlers are mostly what I’ve been exposed to at this point. I’m hoping parenting just gets much easier after this. It does, right? I know this is a book and I can’t hear you, but I’m going to take your silence as a yes.
I used to wonder why I had hair on my legs, but now I know it’s for my toddler sons and daughters to pull themselves up off the ground with as I scream in pain. Based on my experience, a baby will start walking at around eleven months … I think. Oh, jeez, I don’t remember. I just know they start walking before they ride a bike and start smoking. All healthy babies eventually walk, but we treat those first steps like someone has just risen out of a wheelchair at a healing revival. “He’s walking! It’s a miracle!”
I guess walking is sort of impressive after ten months of just lying around. Actually, they don’t immediately walk or even toddle. They “cruise” or hold themselves up with furniture in search of the hardest and sharpest surface to bang their head on. When they finally let go and take a few steps, it’s more of a stumble or a stagger, like they are a drunken old man or a zombie extra from The Walking Dead.
What amazes me is that once they actually learn to walk, they are immediately trying to get away. You just say, “Time for a bath!” and they scoot away like they have an escape car outside. I don’t know where they think they are going. They can’t even reach the doorknob. I am always like, “What are you doing? You only know us! Think it through!” They’ve only been on the planet for twelve months, and they can’t really go stay with a friend or check into a motel, but that doesn’t stop them. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have a plan. They are just trying to leave.
Once your baby starts to walk you’ll realize why cribs are designed like prisons from the early 1900s. This is clearly because toddlers are a danger to themselves. The main responsibility for a parent of a toddler is to stop them from accidentally hurting or killing themselves. They are superclumsy. If you don’t believe me, watch a two-year-old girl attempt to walk up stairs in a long dress. It looks like a Carol Burnett sketch. Also, toddler judgment is horrible. They don’t have any. Put a twelve-month-old on a bed, and they will immediately try and crawl off headfirst like a lemming on a mindless migration mission. But the toddler mission is never mindless. They have two goals: find poison and find something to destroy.
Toddlers love toilet paper. I mean, I love toilet paper, too—who doesn’t? Even the most devout conservationist can’t live without their toilet paper. “Reuse! Recycle! Wait … What? We’re out of toilet paper? Chop down that forest! Fast!” But toddlers love toilet paper for all the wrong reasons. They have no idea what it is for or how to use it, but they are passionate about a nice, big, fresh roll of toilet paper. They love to play with it, wear it, eat it, and, especially, unroll it. Leave a toddler alone in a bathroom for five seconds, and they somehow unroll three hundred feet of toilet paper with supernatural speed. Then you walk in and bust them, and they just look at you like, “What? This stuff is obviously for me, right? It’s right at my eye level, and it’s the most fun thing in the house.” All the geniuses at the Fisher-Price laboratories have yet to develop something as fun for a toddler as a ninety-nine-cent roll of toilet paper. Unfortunately for me, whenever this unrolling happens, it’s always the last roll in the house. Have you ever tried to reroll an entire family-size roll of toilet paper? I just leave it in a big, undulating pile next to the toilet. I’m not going to throw it away. After all, it is still toilet paper.
I reckon a two-year-old is on the loose in these parts.
After toddlers make the evolutionary leap to Baby erectus, you still end up pushing them in a stroller or carrying them most places if you’d like to reach your destination in the next decade. Fifteen-month-old Michael loves to run around, yet he always wants me to carry him everywhere in my sling. He is huge, but I can hardly feel my back breaking when I walk around with Michael in the sling because of the attention that he draws from everyone we encounter. I call Michael a “gateway” baby. Even people who don’t like babies or children melt around his sweetness and charm. Michael makes the crabbiest New Yorkers smile. It’s like I’m carrying the heaviest ventriloquist doll ever, but the routine is in gibberish.
The interesting thing that happens when walking around with a baby strapped in front of you at adult eye level is the baby acts like he thinks he is the one walking around and you are just this weirdo strapped to his back. He starts to have “conversations” with adults that you encounter. When babies move away from just the mama-dada-baba sounds, they start to make sounds that could be words, but they’re not. It’s the seriousness with which they deliver their baby talk that is the most entertaining. Michael’s babble is delivered with the intensity and cadence of an Obama speech. People are compelled to respond in kind, but then Michael will just look at them like, “That’s not what I said at all, you moron.”
They make up for it when they turn two and they just start talking, and I mean talking all the time. It’s as if all of those things they wanted to say before just come jumbling out in a whirlwind of botched sentences. They can’t pronounce anything. “I wan pahk go down yittle swide eat appoo.” I’m like, “C’mon, learn English. This is America, for God’s sake!” When Katie was two, her English was so bad I thought she might be al-Qaeda. Some of this may have been because I when dressed her in a baby burka, she looked kind of suspicious.
Toddlers, for some reason, are always out of breath. They always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours in order to deliver important news. “Mommy, Mommy, Daddy, [breath, breath, breath], I need to tell you something [breath, breath, breath] …” This news is so important, parental titles are unimportant. “Daddy, Mommy, Daddy! I need to tell you …” I’ll chime in, “Yes, yes. What is it?” By that point, it will be apparent by the look on their face that they have completely forgotten what they even wanted to tell you. “Um … can I have some juice? I mean, I wet my pants.” Toddlers also love to tell you secrets, especially when you are wearing a white shirt and they’ve been eating chocolate.
Everyone with a toddler has had that embarrassing moment when their kid will innocently yell a word in public that sounds like a really bad grown-up word. Once when two-year-old Jack was playing swords in the park with another boy, he yelled, “I’m gonna hit you with my big stick,” but using the d sound instead of the st.
When Marre was
two, I was in line at a crowded New York City grocery store, and I gave her a sippy cup of juice in a futile attempt to stop a meltdown. She bellowed at the top of her lungs, “I don’t like jews!” Thank God, we live in New York City and my family looks like Hitler’s fantasy. Otherwise, that would’ve been pretty awkward.
Jeannie has often described two-year-olds as at the peak of cuteness. For some reason, everything a toddler says is adorable. Maybe it’s the squeaky voice. Maybe it’s the made-up words: “Lasterday I had pesketti.” or “It’s waining! Can I bring my unclebrella?”
They can talk, but they can’t exactly follow logic. Dr. Harvey Karp, author of Happiest Toddler on the Block, calls it the caveman phase. I’ve never known a caveman, but I guess that makes sense. You can’t really reason with a two-year-old. There is a lot of redirecting: “Okay, instead of playing with the scissors, let’s play with the ball. No, the hanging wineglasses are not a ball. Here, sit in this crib.” Two-year-olds don’t understand consequences. “If you keep taking off your shoes in the cab, you will lose your shoes!” Then you realize that’s the point. They are trying to lose their shoes. That’s why they are taking them off. The only consequences are for you. You will have to get them a new pair of shoes. Toddlers are adorable, but taking care of them doesn’t really get easier. Whoever came up with the term “terrible twos” must have felt very foolish after their kid turned three.
