Last weekend, a comedian friend of mine, who I hadn’t seen in a while, said: “So you’re a dad now.” And then, with sincere concern for my well being, put his hand on my shoulder and said. “You doin’ okay?” He was single with no kids.
“Yeah,” I replied, “I’m great.”
“Really?” You can level with me, he didn’t say.
“Yeah. It’s a kid, not cancer.”
“Aren’t you tired all the time?”
I get that a lot from my friends without kids. And yes, I’m always tired, but being tired is kind of like getting caught in a downpour. At first, it’s the worst thing in the world, but, eventually, you’re soaked, and the fact is, you can only get so wet. At some point, you’re saturated and the rain doesn’t matter any more. Well, likewise, you can only get so tired until it becomes your default operating level. You’re in that sleepy, surreal state all the time, and you just get used to it.
“What’s it like?” is another question my childless friends ask.
Let me first say that I love being a father. In the way that some men were born to be doctors and lawyers, and some men were born to be artists and musicians, I was born to be a father. Mind you, I didn’t know that until just a couple months ago.
With that in mind, I always tell them that the early months of having a child is kind of like camping.
Who doesn’t love camping? But soon into the trip, you remember that you really love the idea of camping. Actual camping is much more exhausting.
You lay in your tent that you pitched on what looked like perfectly level ground, but now you feel every bump and divot in the terrain. The tent is, in fact, a nylon greenhouse with zero circulation, and you spend most of the night sweating like a hot dog on a rotisserie in the back of a gas station. A mosquito the size of a Predator Drone has somehow infiltrated your airspace. If you do fall asleep, it’s only for a couple of hours. In the morning, you unzip the tent and it belches like a hot bottle of 7-up left on a dashboard at the beach. You emerge dazed and disoriented. Your hair is barely disheveled, yet it’s soaked with sweat and matted to your forehead. Your mouth tastes like a raccoon used it as a latrine, and you still smell like a campfire that was extinguished with swamp water.
Anyway, that’s what it’s like having a two-month-old.
But here’s something that no one else will tell you, and it involves breast milk, so if breast milk makes you squeamish at all, please stop reading, no hard feelings.
Breast milk tastes just like the leftover milk in a bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
