It’s Tough Being a New Parent

I wake up to the sound of crying, and for a moment, I do not know what is crying, or where, and what it has to do with me. It is a disturbance, but one that is isolated to another room in the house. There is no fire, no malfunction, no burglary. Only one small something crying in the night. 

Then I remember.

The walk down the hall is slow, shambling. I bump into a side table with framed photographs sitting on its surface. There is a happy couple in all of the photographs, a man and a woman. One of the pictures falls down, and I set it back up. 

In that one, the couple smiles and holds fluffs of cotton candy. The neon lights of carnival rides glow in the background. The woman is thin except for the large belly she uses to rest her cotton candy. With their free hands, the couple hold on to each other. They appear happy. All the signs indicate that emotion. Was that their intended output?

The crying continues. 

There is soft light coming from the room at the end of the hall. The room itself is pink, Coral Fantasy, the Pantone color code numbers blipping through my head, then gone. It’s non-essential to recall. Non-essential too to note that I had painted the walls with this shade of pink six months ago. I was not prepared then for this reality. I am still not prepared. The odds are I will continue to be unprepared. 

The baby cries in her crib. 

I watch her. 

Rosalind Caldwell: nine pounds, seven ounces; twenty-two and a quarter inches long; dark hair with eyes that are blue when they are not scrunched shut. She cries up at the mobile above her, the stars and unicorns that rotate like the carnival rides in the couple’s photograph. 

When will this baby output happiness?

I lean over the crib to pick her up. At my touch, Rosalind stops mid-cry, surprised, and stares at me. She stares and stares. Then she cries louder, in protest. 

I am not prepared. But I must try. 

Put one hand under her, cradle the head in the crook of the elbow, lift gently and lay against the chest, rock and rock and rock. I can do the work myself, but the rocking chair in the corner is designed for that very thing. I find comfort in forms that follow function. 

I sit and rock and cradle and hold and wait for the crying to cease.

It is three-eighteen and four seconds in the morning.

___________________________

“What are you doing?”

I wake up again and this time I know where I am. It is the pink room for Rosalind Caldwell, whose birthday is February third, which makes her one hundred and nineteen days old. 

I also know that the woman in green furry slippers who is rubbing her temples is Katherine Caldwell, her mother. Katherine depends on me. I need to deliver for her. I need to keep improving in my duties so she is happy again. 

“I am rocking her. She was crying,” I observe Rosalind against my chest. “She is still crying.”

What I note in Katherine’s current expression when I say this is not happiness. She bites her lip, and watches me with slightly puffy eyes. Based on these facial cues, I conclude that her question was not objective. It was meant to be investigative, and, perhaps, exasperated.

“How long have you been rocking her?”

I note the time. “Forty-seven minutes and eleven seconds.”

“In all that time did you think that maybe she needed something else? Maybe think why she was crying?” Katherine shakes her head and turns away. “Hold on. I’ll be right back.”

Though not entirely true, she returns quickly enough. I think it best not to tell her the exact amount of time she was gone. She doesn’t like my mentioning it. I take note instead to focus on the present moment and react accordingly. 

I practice this notion by observing what Katherine has brought back: a baby bottle filled with formula. Printed yellow duckies cover the bottle. I understand the meaning of the bottle.

“All right,” she says, “give her to me.”

“I can do it. Please allow me.”

“You don’t have the intuition. You have to think ahead. Roz is smart but fussy. She’ll run circles around you if you don’t learn to anticipate what she needs.”

Anticipate. I know the textbook definition, but I do not understand how one learns the awareness to prepare for future events. The future is never in the present. I am trying to stay in the present, like Katherine requested. However, the state of time changes as time passes. Therefore, I will fall constantly behind in my attempts to anticipate. Thus, my low odds for success in caring for Rosalind. 

But I should not talk at length about time or impending failures. Remember, Katherine does not appreciate it. So, like Rosalind with her crying, I attempt repetition for my argument.

“I can do it. Please allow me.”

Katherine pauses, her hands outstretched, the baby bottle gripped in her left hand. She searches my face for something I cannot identify. There are moments when her eyes shine like several of the photographs of her on the side table in the hall. 

Then she says, “Okay, fine. But I’m going to show you what to do, so remember, okay?”

“I will.” I amend myself. “I promise I will.”

Katherine smiles and laughs through her nose, a sign she is feeling better about the situation. She bends down alongside the rocking chair. “I warmed up the bottle on the stove. It only takes a few minutes. It doesn’t have to be exact. You’ll learn how to feel it. Now, hold it like this and rub the nipple on her mouth, so she knows food’s coming.”

I follow her instructions. Rosalind, sensing that the bottle is near, finally slows her crying and then latches on to eat.

“That’s good. Now hold the bottle up at an angle, like that.”

“Is this correct?”

“It is. Don’t worry.” With her thumb, Katherine softly strokes Rosalind’s cheek. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

Rosalind opens her eyes and watches me as she takes the bottle. Her eyes are blue but a shade I cannot identify, which is odd. I should know the exact shade and catalog number. I conclude it is not necessary. The blue is one I will remember. It is a pleasing color, a conclusion I have not drawn with other colors in my experience. What is more pleasing is that she does not cry when she looks at me. 

“Yes,” I say, “Rosalind is very beautiful.”

“You can call her Roz, you know.”

“Roz is very beautiful,” I say.

“You’re learning,” she says.

___________________________

I have learned that Roz does not like strained carrots, despite their nutritional value. 

A few months have passed in my attempts—I have not kept track of the time, and my memory runs more smoothly on current tasks because of this change—but I have had little to no success in feeding Roz her daily allotment of carrots.

“You should have a spoonful,” I say. “Please try it.”

Roz sits in a high chair at the kitchen table. She bangs her fists on the tray before her. Tiny cereal pieces rattle on the tray, which interest her more than my request. The late summer afternoon comes through the kitchen window and lights her face. A line of silver spittle runs off of her lips and down her chin. I find her spittle beautiful, though I cannot understand why.

“Please,” I say, and hold up the spoon with the lathed wooden handle. 

It is an old spoon, well-made, an heirloom Katherine has told me. In its existence, the spoon has apparently fed many children in the family lineage. 

Today, a bright orange glob of mushed carrots sits in the spoon, a few inches from the mouth of the latest child in this line. Roz does not pay attention. I am diminishing the spoon’s child-feeding success rate.

“No luck so far, huh?”

Katherine comes in, kissing the top of Roz’s head. “She’s headstrong. Aren’t you my little girl? Yes, you, are.” Then Katherine heads to the counter to pour coffee for her thermos.

Since Katherine has gone back to work after her maternity break, I have witnessed her behavior become more stable and regimented. It is good for her. The laboratory is a short distance from the house, so she can travel back for her lunch break and see Roz. Going to the office means Katherine must bathe and dress and compose herself for others on a regular basis. This routine has provided stability and a means to keep her thoughts on other less emotional subjects. In short, she is improving. 

Katherine also now trusts me to stay with Roz during the day. Unfortunately, she is witnessing another shortcoming in my performance. 

“Roz exhibits anti-vegetable behavior,” I say.

“Have you tried ‘Pilot to Hangar Nums’?” she asks.

“I am not part of any rank in the air force.”

“No, it’s a game.” Smirking, Katherine sets down her thermos. “Here, let me play it with you. Let me see the spoon.”

“Okay.”

Katherine and I stand in the middle of the kitchen. The window is open above the sink, and a summer breeze ruffles the curtains. From an elderly neighbor’s open patio door comes the sound of a TV game show on high volume. A studio audience claps after a contestant announces she would like to solve the puzzle. A pleasing light falls on Katherine’s face much in the same way it is pleasing on Roz’s face. Katherine is beautiful too, I conclude.

She raises the spoon between us. 

All of these stimuli happen in rapid succession. I am at odds in sorting them out and charting their associations and implications. Curiously, I surrender. I do not try to solve the intense calculations. This moment will remain as an unsorted memory, with fuzzy edges and loose logic, pleasurable in its warm confusion. I find myself enjoying the phenomenon of not knowing but only feeling what is occurring.

“Pilot to Hangar Nums,” Katherine says. She has assumed the voice of a gruff man talking over an intercom. “Granting permission to land.”

I understand her implication. I anticipate her conclusion. “Permission granted,” I say.

“Roger, roger.”

Then Katherine weaves the spoon through the air, making spirals and loop-de-loops. She purses her lips and blows raspberries to simulate the airplane’s engine. 

It is strange to admit that I can see the airplane Katherine has created. It is no less true. I imagine the bright, spinning propellors, the wings glinting off the shaft of kitchen light. Katherine has turned the ordinary task of feeding into an adventure.

She circles the spoon closer to my face. “Open the doors to Hanger Nums.”

Without a thought to logic, I open my mouth. I suddenly want her to feed me, to fill me up with her fun and care and excitement. To be closer to her is what I desire. 

But Katherine gets the spoon right to my lips and stops. I register the smells of hazelnut coffee on her breath and apple shampoo in her hair. 

“You see?” she says. “The game works every time, and on all sorts. Sometimes you have to use your imagination.”

Closing my mouth, I consider her statement. “I think I understand.”

“Good.” Katherine hands me back the spoon. “It looks like someone else wants to play.”

Roz goggles up at us from her high chair, the cereal forgotten on her tray. She reaches her hands up to the spoon. She wants the airplane, but she also now wants the carrots. There is no difference between fantasy and reality. They are one in the same, though it is more enjoyable to have both rather than either alone. Perhaps it is necessary to have both to grow and improve. I note this discovery.

“I will try to play.”

“That’s all we need to do,” Katherine says. “Keep trying.”

I kneel in front of Roz’s high chair. It is awkward at first to blow a raspberry. The fluid dynamics and muscle tension become easier the longer I attempt. Roz is befuddled at first, but then giggles when I use my own pilot voice: a thin falsetto like my own, but induced with copious amounts of helium. I even surprise Katherine, and she laughs. 

Soon I deliver all the carrots into Hangar Nums. Roz loves each time the plane lands. 

It is an afternoon I will never forget.  

___________________________

I wake up again in the night to crying. 

My immediate thought is Roz. Her first teeth are coming in—the bicuspids, in fact, which earned her my nickname of Count Rozzula—and she has not been sleeping well. Teething is a difficult task. It causes physical pain and emotional duress as one’s body changes and grows and matures. I marvel at the rapid growth from baby to small girl.

In the work room, I lie on the pull-out sofa that serves as my bed and listen. 

The materials and other machines in this work room are Katherine’s. A sewing machine rests on one table, the drawers beneath filled with needles, bobbins of thread, and bolts of fabric. On the opposite wall is a tool bench housing soldering irons, power drills, and jars of screws and nails. Near the pull-out sofa is a stainless steel cart with circuits, fiber optic cables, and an advanced 3-D print-generator. The print-generator is of Katherine’s own design, one she has prototyped for her department in the laboratory. She had finalized the print-generator a few weeks before she found out she was pregnant with Roz. 

Katherine, as I have reminded her since she and I have been together, is an exemplary engineer. She is capable of producing extraordinary things. Roz, of course, being the finest.       

But the crying I hear is not from Roz down the hall in her pink room. It is closer, much closer, yet somehow softer, more restrained. The line of light below the closed door is broken by two shadows, feet from someone standing in the hall, feet likely wearing fuzzy green slippers.

“Katherine? What is wrong?”

“…I don’t know.”

“Is Roz okay?”

“She is. I’m not.” I hear the slight touch of her palm placed on the door, as if to balance herself while standing. Her words come through muffled and ragged. “Can I come in?”

When I open the door, she looks up at me with red-ringed eyes. Her kinked and frizzy hair falls around both sides of her face. Her robe is crooked, the sash hastily knotted. Sleep has not come easy to her tonight. She is miles away from the happy woman who kisses Roz’s toes during bathtime.  

Without a word, I step aside. She comes in and lies down on the pull-out sofa. I join her. 

The two of us awkwardly share the makeshift bed. The springs beneath the mattress sproing and groan as we try to get comfortable. We struggle to make it work, to arrive at some level of feeling good together. It is not perfect, will never be perfect, but eventually we make peace with our bodies in the places they are and settle. 

Katherine softly sobs as I hold her. 

I gaze up at the ceiling and think of Roz in her old crib, when she would stare up at her mobile of rainbows and unicorns. My current view is not rainbows and unicorns. I feel something far different than happiness in this work room with its unused machines. 

“I am sorry,” I say. 

Katherine rubs her nose, touches my shoulder. “What are you apologizing for?”

“My failures. I clearly am not making things better.”

“You are.” Her voice is hollow, so she says it again, with emphasis. “You are.”

“But you are crying, and it is the bad kind. I can sense it.”

“And I love the fact that you can sense it.” 

There is a breath between us that lasts either nine seconds or indefinitely, depending on whether I use logic or emotion to measure time. I have learned that both are correct, the notion of paradox no longer confusing. The combination of them, in fact, makes the moment far more real.

Then Katherine says, “The past few weeks have been good. They’ve been really good, actually. Even when Roz got sick. It’s a strange thing to say, but it made me realize how fortunate I am. Between work and trying to take care of her, I would have lost my mind if you weren’t here. You knew how to get her to take her medicine, and you made her favorite soup, and you held her when she couldn’t sleep. You knew what she needed.”

I nod. “Like I know now she needs ice for her gums. She is a crabby countess without it.”

“Right, that’s right.” Katherine says. “You’ve come a long way since Roz was a newborn. I can’t believe how much you’ve changed.” 

I can feel her smiling in the dark, even as her voice grows wistful. 

“And lately, I’ve gotten swept up in those changes. I think ‘This is how it was supposed to feel.’ I think it when we’re dancing in the kitchen while washing dishes. You’re cha-cha sliding in front of the sink, and I sashay over to you, and I see some soap suds on your chin, and I wipe them off to the beat of the music. And it’s good, I feel full and good. And I get so swept up that I come in for a kiss, and I get so close with my lips to your cheek and then…”

“You remember,” I say, and go further, overriding my directives. “You remember him.”

I expect more crying, or yelling, or both. Instead, Katherine is calm, held within the eye of the storm that encircles her.

“I never call you by his name,” she says, “out of respect for Paul and for you. You two are not the same. You are not him, and I don’t expect you to be.”

“Even though I look like him.”

“What could I do? Honestly? I was grieving for Paul in my first trimester with Roz. I was thinking about her, thinking about how she’d never know her father. She would look at photographs and hear stories but never see him, never have him hold her hand.”

She lifts herself up on her elbow. The pull-out sofa lurches but steadies. I can feel her looking around her work room, her voice landing on the soldering irons, the circuits, the 3-D print-generator. 

“If someone else had the same resources I had, wouldn’t they do the same thing? If they had the chance to build someone from scratch and program their algorithms, wouldn’t they choose someone they lost?” 

I say nothing in response. Instead I think of images and sensations. 

The whiff of apple shampoo. 

A paint tray full of Coral Fantasy, a brush roller spreading the color over nursery walls. 

The blue of Roz’s eyes. 

Strained carrots on a spoon with a lathed wooden handle.

The spoon was an heirloom from Paul’s side of the family. I think about this paradox: I feed Paul’s daughter with Paul’s childhood spoon. I raise Paul’s daughter. I look like Paul. Paul’s daughter looks like me. Yet I am not Paul.

Conclusion: would I ever be more than a reminder of what was lost?     

“He and I were supposed to have decades together,” Katherine says, “but Paul’s heart had other plans. A heart attack at thirty-four isn’t supposed to happen. It’s not in the design, not in the plan. And my own heart couldn’t take it without him.” 

She continues talking, though it sounds more like well-worn thoughts finally spoken out loud in front of me. 

“I’m the lead engineer, and my department had spent years working on the technology. I literally helped design most of the machines for production. I could only work on the project if it went beyond the Alpha Company. This prototype had to be for Roz … and for me. If I succeeded, then everyone would be happy.”

“Are you happy?” 

The question comes out stronger than I would have liked. But now that I have crossed my own logical thresholds, my emotions are accelerating, evolving, overwhelming. 

“Are you happy with how I am?” I ask. “With how things are?”

Katherine opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. I hear the distinct click of her jaw, as if the mechanism between her brain and mouth is stuck in a feedback loop, unable to break free. 

It is a terrible sound. My heart sinks at the sound, or at least what I believe to be the sensation of a sinking heart. I wonder if this heavy heart was what Paul felt when he was shutting down. If so, I understand. I feel like shutting down myself.

But then Katherine reaches out and touches my face. Her thumb strokes my cheek. It’s a familiar touch, one I’ve seen her give Roz. A touch of love, of affection.

“I am,” she says. “I am happy.”

“Will it ever be as good as before?”

“No. It won’t.” Katherine continues touching my face. Along with her hand, her eyes take in each of my familiar details. “It will always be different. I’m learning that different is okay. Different is far better than not having you at all.”

I touch her hand and keep it there on my cheek.

“I’m learning that too,” I say.

We lie like this on the pull-out sofa, surrounded by machines that helped build our life together, until I hear a familiar cry from down the hall. Katherine is fast asleep, so she doesn’t hear me slip out of bed and head to the kitchen. 

If she had woken up, she wouldn’t have needed to tell me what to do. I had put several teething rings in the freezer just in case Count Rozzula had a late-night toothache. I am prepared.

___________________________

It is late summer again, though several summers after that first one. Roz has lost most of her kid teeth, and grown many of her adult ones. She is a gangly girl with dark hair and freckles across the bridge of her nose. She has my ears, which stick out from the sides of her head … but in a cute way, Kathy reminds me.

Dusk settles across the midway. The neon lights from the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Dragon Coaster compete with the stars that prickle the sky above. The moon hangs low on the horizon, caught in the spokes of the Ferris Wheel. 

We buy tickets for each of these rides, along with ones for the Fun House, where we laugh at how strange we look in the wavering mirrors. 

Roz stretches even taller, what she will surely look like as a teenager. 

Kathy’s head grows three times larger, which we joke is because of that brain of hers. 

I bend into a crooked old man that I will never be. 

Though I haven’t changed physically in the intervening years, I do feel older. I remember the best parts of helping raise Roz. She’s at the age now where she rolls her eyes if I go into too much detail about Pilot to Hangar Nums—especially around her school friends—but Kathy enjoys hearing me reminisce. 

Sometimes, from the corner of my eye, I catch Kathy smiling at me. In those moments, I feel like I’ve been here with her the whole time. 

And at night, when I’m turning off the house lights for bed, I will stop by the hallway table and look at the framed photographs. I recognize all of them, but the one from the carnival is the one I pick up. 

Kathy and I hold each other. Roz nestles between us, holding all three fluffs of our cotton candy. We are smiling into the camera, the midway lights behind us and the stars above us. 

And I know in that snapshot we are happy.     

___________________________