tenpoundhound

I have to believe that’s not merely the ravages of time. Unless we’re talking about 1000 years spent trapped in a cigarette smoke-filled glass enclosure. I’m thinking she clubbed a record number of baby seals in another lifetime. Or maybe this one. I mean, who the fuck knows what she’s been up to since Heathers?

BTW, this is the wages of being perfect. I didn’t ask for this job; it was conferred upon me. With a crown and a sceptre.

I haven’t made a whit of time to write a damn thing of late, but something I shat out in this space ’round 2003 keeps bobbing around my outsized cranium lately. So, this is a cheap way of posting something (anything) while simultaneously sending Google’s spiderbots into a SEO-penalizing frenzy for duplicating content. Bully good.

And, let’s begin…

Some time back (I suppose about a year ago), a friend who was visiting asked me a question about being a parent. He said (and I’m paraphrasing here (likely, poorly)), “Everyone talks about the wonders and magic of parenthood, but there must be something, something you hate about being a dad. What is one awful thing about parenthood?” The query caught me a bit off-guard, and I think I stammered something about how being woken at odd hours of the night for feedings was especially vexing or some other nonsense, but, truly: 1.) the little girl was never particularly troublesome at nacht, and 2.) those are my favorite hours of the 24 to be conscious anyway.

However, the question stayed with me long after it had been asked, sorta sticking me from time to time like a pointed pebble in my bunny slippers. And, after fair consideration, I think I discovered my answer.

The thing I hate about parenthood is having something I can’t afford to lose.

People talk aplenty about their surprise at how becoming a parent has increased their capacity to love by a billion-fold, about how the love of a parent is infinite, impossible to measure, absolutely breathtaking in its breadth and width, about how their hearts fill to bursting when simply watching their child in slumber.

This is all true.

But, like all things, there is an equal converse. Where there’s up, there’s down. In? Out. Yin? Yang.

Light? Dark.

There is a terrible, terrible balance.

Having a love the strength of which has never been known, never previously experienced, in one’s life means also having the knowledge of what would happen if the object of that love is taken away. This knowledge (in my case) has manifested itself in ugly, ugly imaginings that can be literally paralyzing. And, as such, I will never commit them to anything more than memory (and certainly not here). But my point (if I have one. Dubious.) is that becoming a parent actually changed something in me at an atomic level. 0 turned to 1 somewhere in my innards. Being the bastard I am, lacking all empathy and grace, my outlook on most things pre-little girl was a bit… harsh (Sean. Stop laughing). Truly, it still largely is, save for one tender, tender Achilles heel-ish spot that I would wish away if I could. Knowing the absolute vulnerability of life, human life specifically (fuck, say, lab rats, after all), during early years has made me susceptible to very, very strong emotional (and sometimes, physical), reactions to any situation that involves the endangerment of a child. Gone, flown by night, is my ability to slough off all misfortune of others like so much dead snakeskin. Once a child enters the equation, the stories I used to scoff at now make me feel like I’m trying to ingest a railroad tie by way of my rib cage. This sucks.

To wit: I hate flying. I may even have documented as much here, previously. Oddly, I also have a voracious appetite for reports of airplane-related disaster. I remember once giving my sister a videotape so she could record some program or other that I didn’t have access to (lack of a sufficiently robust digital cable package being the likely culprit). She called me after and said, “I hope it’s ok – I recorded over the show that was on the tape you gave me… It had.. um. A bunch of plane crashes on it?” (Damn. Now I have to wait for the Discovery Channel to re-run, “A Ton of Fantastically Disastrous Airplane Collisions Have Been Captured on Videotape and We Mean to Show You Them All!”) It’s a morbid fascination. I’m sure most people have them. (At least, that’s what I told my therapist, to which she responded, “hm.”)

So.

A few months back, I came upon an article on CNN.com that had an actual transcript of the flight recorder from a small plane that had gone down, killing all flight crew and passengers aboard. I could not resist. One of the first lines transcribed from said recorder was not, in fact, from one of the pilots. I had not taken into account the possibility that the equipment would record anything except the increasingly panicked conversations of the flight crew. And I would pay.
This line from the transcription of the flight recorder, this one word, made me exclaim in a forceful whisper, “Jesus Christ!” wring my hands (I actually fucking wrung my hands), push my chair away from my desk, and leave the office – ostensibly, to get some air.

————-
[young child - from cabin]: Daddy!
————-

Months and months have passed. Reading that now produces much the same response in me.

What do I hate about being a parent?

This.