Fatherhood’s All Love and Sunshine Until You Screw Up the Car Seat
Chubby baby thighs: 1. Me: 0
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Before I get into one of my funniest fatherhood moments, I have to set the unfunny scene.
Two years after we got married, my wife and I had our only son. I was 36 years old. As the oldest of a half-dozen children, I had little doubt that I could handle fatherhood. I had already changed hundreds of diapers, warmed bottles, potty-trained toddlers, and rocked babies to sleep. I was as confident of my ability to take care of my son as I was of anything. But he was born in 2008, the same year that the financial markets — and my real estate business — collapsed.
That disaster left me feeling uncertain about nearly everything. I thought my company would implode in 2008. Instead, it blew up.
And I was a little depressed, which is to say, a lot. My son was born in August, but I started having cash flow problems by February. As I’m sure you know, having a business that is losing money is significantly worse than having no business at all.
I spent the months before the baby’s due date day drinking and taking long aimless walks around the neighborhood. Luckily, my wife still had a job so we could keep the lights on.
Within a couple of months after my son’s birth, my wife went back to work. With our savings long gone, she had to return when her paid leave ran out. And I started drinking a little more. Not too much, but still too much.
I like to think I shared parenting duties with my wife when my son arrived. She breastfed him — I couldn’t help with that — but I changed, bathed, and soothed him. I got up at night to feed him from a bottle. And I damn near carved a groove into our hallway floor, walking him back and forth in the dark.
He’s thin as a rail now, but back then, he was the chubbiest little thing imaginable, with great rolls of fat on his thighs from all of that good breast milk. In the mornings, we had a routine. After his mother…
