You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations by Black Michael Ian

Author:Black, Michael Ian [Black, Michael Ian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Humor, American Wit and Humor
ISBN: 9781439167854
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2012-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

i hate my baby

We are four months into parenthood and I hate my baby. When friends ask how it is going I always answer the same way: “Terrible.” They think I am kidding but I’m not. So far, being a dad sucks.

The main problem is the sleep deprivation. Martha and I are always awake. Every day, all day. I feel as though I have been awake for eight months out of the last four. I have grown to know the wee hours of the night in an intimate and hostile way, the way I might get to know a prison cellmate.

I cannot think. I cannot function. I am suffering. Martha is suffering, too, but I do not care. Right now, I am immune to anybody’s suffering but my own. Of course, I knew sleep deprivation would be a problem heading into parenthood, but I did not realize that when people said, “You won’t get any sleep,” what they were actually saying was, “You won’t get any sleep.”

Elijah almost never stops crying. He cries every night from about ten o’clock until four in the morning. He cries at six-thirty in the morning, again at nine, noon, and periodically throughout the day. Obviously, babies are supposed to cry, but not all the time, right? Why does he cry so much? What does he want? Why is my baby such a dick?

When the middle of the night comes, as it must, and his cries come, as they must, we lie in bed arguing over whose turn it is to get up with the baby. It is always the other person’s turn.

“Your turn,” we say to each other while he wails.

“Your turn.”

“Your turn.”

“I got up last time.”

“I got up two times in a row before that.”

“I’m not getting him.”

“I’m not getting him, either.”

Ten or twenty minutes might go by like this, neither of us willing to move, the tension growing between us with each wailing exhalation. They say if you just let babies cry, they will eventually cry themselves out. This is not true. Not only will babies not cry themselves out, but the act of crying actually slows down time itself—the more you let them cry, the slower time goes. That’s why it took eight months to get through four.

Finally, one of us surrenders, throwing off the warm blankets so as to let as much cold air into the bed as possible. “I hate you,” she will say to me or I will say to her, and it won’t be said in a whimsical, “aren’t we cute,” Ally McBeal sort of way. The hatred we have for each during those cold hours when somebody must tend to the hellion she created is a visceral, concentrated hate. It is to normal hate what a diamond is to a lump of coal. The only thing preventing us from strangling each other in moments like these is the knowledge that doing so would mean even more time alone with the baby for whichever one of us is left.

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