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:
Maternal propaganda. I am a professional writer and therefore am meant to be keenly observant. Without Tabitha, however, I would notice next to nothing about my own child, and certainly nothing admirable. All I am able to see by myself are the many odd-colored substances that emerge from her that need cleaning up, and the many unpleasant noises she makes that shake me from my sleep. But there are all these other, more lovable things about her, too, and her mother sees every one of them and presses them upon me with such genuine enthusiasm that it thaws my frozen heart. Her facial expressions, for instance. She has her Smurf Face and her Bowel-Movement Face and her E.T. Face. She has her How-Ya-Doinâ-Today Face and her Call-Me-at-the-Office Face and her Mafia-Hit-Man Faceâwhich is the one when she curls her lip at you and you half expect her to say, âYou talkinâ to me?â
Her gift for mimicry. A five-week-old baby is for the most part unresponsive to ordinary attempts to communicate with her. You can scream at her or you can sing to her, and all youâll get in return is a blank stare. But if you press your face right up close to hers and contort it into grotesque shapes, sheâll copy whatever youâre doing. Stick out your tongue, sheâll stick out her tongue; open wide your mouth, and sheâll open wide hers, too. Lacking anything else to do when we find ourselves thrown together, we do this, and the more we do it, the more I like her.
Her tendency to improve with age. Already Dixie has progressed from waking every ninety minutes and screaming at the top of her little lungs to waking every two hours and screaming at the top of her lungs. While this might seem insufferable to anyone who didnât know any worse, to me it seems like extraordinary progress. An act of goodwill, even. She still wonât win any good citizenship awards, but sheâs gunning for Most Improved Player, and itâs hard not to admire her for the effort.
But thereâs something else, too, which I hesitate to mention for fear it will be used against me the next time we divvy up the unpleasant chores around here. The simple act of taking care of a living creature, even when you donât want to, maybe especially when you donât want to, is transformative. A friend of mine who adopted his two children was asked by a friend of his how he could ever hope to love them as much as if they were his own. âHave you ever owned a dog?â he said. And thatâs the nub of the matter: All the little things that you must do for a helpless creature to keep it alive cause you to love it. Most people know this instinctively. For someone like me, who has heretofore displayed a nearly superhuman gift for avoiding unpleasant tasks, it comes as a revelation. Itâs because you want to hurl it off the balcony and donât that you come to love it.
THE FIRST RULE of fatherhood is that if you donât see what the problem is, you are the problem. For most of the past couple of weeks I hadnât been able to see what the problem was. Everything had been going swimmingly. For the first time since the birth of my second child I was able to get back properly to work. My fear that my children would starve, or, at the very least, be forced to attend public school, was receding. The time I needed to earn a living had to come from someplace, of course, but it hadnât been obvious to me where in the family it should come from. Not from my wife, to whom I am addicted. Not from my eldest child, who has made it clear that she
Maternal propaganda. I am a professional writer and therefore am meant to be keenly observant. Without Tabitha, however, I would notice next to nothing about my own child, and certainly nothing admirable. All I am able to see by myself are the many odd-colored substances that emerge from her that need cleaning up, and the many unpleasant noises she makes that shake me from my sleep. But there are all these other, more lovable things about her, too, and her mother sees every one of them and presses them upon me with such genuine enthusiasm that it thaws my frozen heart. Her facial expressions, for instance. She has her Smurf Face and her Bowel-Movement Face and her E.T. Face. She has her How-Ya-Doinâ-Today Face and her Call-Me-at-the-Office Face and her Mafia-Hit-Man Faceâwhich is the one when she curls her lip at you and you half expect her to say, âYou talkinâ to me?â
Her gift for mimicry. A five-week-old baby is for the most part unresponsive to ordinary attempts to communicate with her. You can scream at her or you can sing to her, and all youâll get in return is a blank stare. But if you press your face right up close to hers and contort it into grotesque shapes, sheâll copy whatever youâre doing. Stick out your tongue, sheâll stick out her tongue; open wide your mouth, and sheâll open wide hers, too. Lacking anything else to do when we find ourselves thrown together, we do this, and the more we do it, the more I like her.
Her tendency to improve with age. Already Dixie has progressed from waking every ninety minutes and screaming at the top of her little lungs to waking every two hours and screaming at the top of her lungs. While this might seem insufferable to anyone who didnât know any worse, to me it seems like extraordinary progress. An act of goodwill, even. She still wonât win any good citizenship awards, but sheâs gunning for Most Improved Player, and itâs hard not to admire her for the effort.
But thereâs something else, too, which I hesitate to mention for fear it will be used against me the next time we divvy up the unpleasant chores around here. The simple act of taking care of a living creature, even when you donât want to, maybe especially when you donât want to, is transformative. A friend of mine who adopted his two children was asked by a friend of his how he could ever hope to love them as much as if they were his own. âHave you ever owned a dog?â he said. And thatâs the nub of the matter: All the little things that you must do for a helpless creature to keep it alive cause you to love it. Most people know this instinctively. For someone like me, who has heretofore displayed a nearly superhuman gift for avoiding unpleasant tasks, it comes as a revelation. Itâs because you want to hurl it off the balcony and donât that you come to love it.
THE FIRST RULE of fatherhood is that if you donât see what the problem is, you are the problem. For most of the past couple of weeks I hadnât been able to see what the problem was. Everything had been going swimmingly. For the first time since the birth of my second child I was able to get back properly to work. My fear that my children would starve, or, at the very least, be forced to attend public school, was receding. The time I needed to earn a living had to come from someplace, of course, but it hadnât been obvious to me where in the family it should come from. Not from my wife, to whom I am addicted. Not from my eldest child, who has made it clear that she
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