The Incoherant Ramblings of a Poetic Compulsive: The Naivety of my Parenthood

Seeing a theme are you? Not sure when I started chapter 2. But tonight I’m writing in the heat of a late August evening in 2002. We’ve been married three years and our 6 month old son is having a difficult night. He’s teething. The wife’s in the living room with him in her lap, as she reads the “bug squasher” medical encyclopedia seeing how we can appease him. It’s pretty much bedtime and since we’re all awake I figured I’d pay the bills since they really need to go out tomorrow morning. In doing so I received a late notice on one and tried to look up the account online, but couldn’t remember my password for the web access. Started a Search on my computer and somehow pulled up this silly excuse of an auto-biography. How this file came up from a search on “Citibank” is really beyond me. I just switched to Windows XP. I haven’t decided if I like it or not yet. *Rabbit trail* Anyway, my son has been quite a delight. He smiles quite often and everyone who meets him falls in love. Up until recently I’ve been able to dodge all of the really bad “#2” diapers. Not tonight. I happened to be holding him, trying to get him to say “Dad” when his entire face contorted into this look of severe concentration. As if he was psychically trying to peal the paint off the interior walls. My mind raced for rhetorical excuses for that look. But I knew. Deep down in a place I didn’t want to admit to….I knew. What followed was a smell that nearly did peal the interior paint off the walls. And then it was finished. “Finally!” my wife was secretly thinking to herself. “You’re holding him, you change him.” How could something so large and composed of purely disgusting material come out of such an innocent, cute little boy. And how in the world did that all fit in him, anyway?! I begged, I pleaded, I offered up to a thousand dollars cash if she would just take him and let me know when she was through. No dice. This was an experience she had obviously been waiting to put me through. Two diapers and a couple dozen wet wipes later I had him successfully changed. And to my chagrin I’m quite sure there’s many more to come. Potty training just got bumped up several notches on my exhaustive list of priorities. See, we’re trying to buy a house. Mortgage brokers, financial consultants, banks and anybody else in the world that tries to estimate your approximate appropriate monthly mortgage payment amount without actually looking at your monthly expenditures, needs to go back to second grade and learn remedial subtraction. I’m bitter. We want a house, everyone tells us we can afford one, but when I check their work I realize just how they came to their conclusion. With imaginary numbers. That’s right. Let me pull an “estimated monthly grocery bill” out of my posterior for you. There you go! You don’t need more than $50.00 for food, do you??
Did I mention how cute my kid is? Watching him being born was the most amazing thing on earth. I’ve gone from wanting 2 to possibly 4 kids after this experience. He’s been a real joy. But, man, if he didn’t have us scared out of our minds when he was first born. 5 weeks eager, as a co-worker at my new job calls it. Oh did I forget to mention? The hospital didn’t work out. Anyway, being 5 weeks early comes a whole host of “Oh my God, what’s that tube going into his for?” kinds of questions. He had wires, and tubes and at one point he had to wear these sunglasses that covered his forehead to his nose and went ear-to-ear. They called it “jaundice”. Seeing your brand new son go through the kinds of torture you only see on the medical channel is like……..is not describable through any analogy that I can come up with. Never before then have I truly ever fallen to my knees, gushing in tears that came between gasps for air, yelling and screaming my pleas that the life of my new son be spared and that he be allowed to live a life that I take for granted. Never before have I asked, and absolutely without hesitation meant it when I begged God to allow me to trade places with someone in a condition like my son was. Never before that moment did I truly understand the kind of pain I must have put my father through. And the kind of pain I put my God through, everyday. And never did I appreciate more the sacrifice He made when His son died on that cross. And if that was not hard enough, then comes the realization that Christ died, and God gave up his son…..for me. The unworthy, ungrateful, unclean individual that I am, with unmentionable and innumerable flaws.
Perhaps I will expand upon this chapter later. Or perhaps, 2 years from now (hopefully sitting in a house I’m buying back from a bank) I’ll simply jump back in with Chapter 4. Or perhaps this concludes my auto-biography. In which case, I need to go finish my bill paying. So goodnight and God bless.

Bazooka-Joe made it so at 8:28 PM

iTunes I'm Diggin On Today:

My Links:

My Friends:

Sunday, February 06, 2005

The Naivety of my Parenthood

0 Comments: