COLUMN: Unqualified to be a father
It’s official: I’m not qualified to be a father.
It’s hard to admit that because I used to be one of those people who walked through Wal-Mart watching parents ignore their screaming children who were doing everything short of anarchy and think, “Geez, how on Earth did these people become parents? There should be a test to become a parent. It’s a shame making babies is so simple.”
Unfortunately, yesterday, I found myself at Wal-Mart again, and this time I was thinking, “Geez, who let me become a father? There should be a test to become a parent. It’s a shame making babies is so simple.”
My wife is eight months pregnant and just this last weekend it finally dawned on me that I will soon be a father. That instead of watching sports with the guys, I will be changing diapers and learning nursery rhymes. I will soon be watching more “Dora the Explorer” than “SportsCenter.”
Instantly I went into panic mode.
I don’t know the first thing about being a father. Sure, I have a good father and I turned out all right, but come on, he’s a dad. I’m not. I’m just a kid whose idea of good parenting consists of hoping somehow a good therapist can reverse all the damage I cause. I might even leave my kids some money to pay for the sessions. Maybe.
My paternal ineptness was brought home with stunning force when I went shopping for baby supplies yesterday. At first, things went well. Everything is color coded nice and simple. Blue is for boys and pink is for girls. Thankfully there isn’t a baby emo movement, so I don’t have to worry about black for at least another 12 years.
I learned little jumpsuit thingies called onesies come in packs of five and once I figured out the whole 0-3 meant months, not a math equation, my life got a whole lot easier.
I even discovered which dress size my daughter will wear, which will probably be the only time in my life I understand that, because as near as I can tell, women’s sizes are completely arbitrary. I don’t know how you can have a zero size and still be alive, because in men’s clothes, a size zero would mean you don’t exist.
The problem with my baby shopping experience came when I reached the baby feeding aisle. Perhaps it was the sight of nursing pads that gave me post traumatic stress flashbacks to the disturbing nursing class I attended where I saw more nipples than I ever hope to see again, but suddenly this whole baby thing got a lot more complicated.
The mechanics of feeding a newborn baby seem pretty simple. Get a bottle, fill it up with milk or formula and pop it in the baby’s mouth. In reality, it’s a whole lot more complicated. I thought a bottle is a bottle. Apparently that’s not true.
Down the aisle, I was confronted with a slew of baby bottles that all looked sort of the same but were all priced different. Trying to be a good father, I wanted to pick the best bottle, but which one should I choose? My wife didn’t know either.
I had a dilemma. Should I just buy one and risk killing my baby – since, according to those stupid baby Web sites, everything you do will kill your baby – or should I break the Man Code and ask the woman with 15 screaming kids which bottle to use?
In the end, my wife called her sister and got a recommendation. Things were starting to make more sense, but then there was the whole deal of finding a breast pump. If you’re feeling uncomfortable about now, join the club. Childbearing is one giant uncomfortable scene, and I’m not even the one carrying the child.
Breast pumps confuse me. There are manual hand pumps and there are electric pumps with prices ranging from $30 to $6 trillion for a celebrity-endorsed pump. Maybe it’s because I went on a field trip to a dairy in elementary school, but hooking up an electric pump to your chest seems kind of demeaning. I know it’s the same general idea, but come on, that’s just weird.
After all that shopping and agonizing over which bottle and pump to get, we came home empty handed. This means yet again I will have to brave the baby aisles and realize how little I truly know.
As cliched as it sounds, why isn’t there a manual on parenting? There’s a manual for my computer, a manual for my iPod, even a manual for how to take a Tylenol. A child is more complex than any of those things, and yet, there’s nothing.
Fortunately, there’s always TV, the source of all knowledge. I figure there have been plenty of good sitcom fathers I can learn from. As near as I can tell, all I’ve got to do is learn how to say, “Ask your mother,” and “Go to your room,” and somehow everything will work out.
But I still don’t know how to use a bottle.
Seth Hawkins is a senior majoring in public relations. To receive a weekly newsletter on how not to raise children, e-mail him at seth.h@aggiemail.usu.edu.