Essays by DAR

Second Fatherhood:
A Pre-Natal Journal

(First published in Parenting)

September 8. I dropped my first-born off at college today, to begin his grown-up life. I bit my tongue as Alex wrestled his shiny new dorm key in upside down, held my breath as he nearly snapped the key in two, smiled wanly as he at last got it right. And all the way home I was depressed. My ex and present wives were chatting gaily in the front seat as they maneuvered the station wagon along the Mass Pike; I pretended to be asleep in the back while beside me, in another world, my second-born twirled his lacrosse stick to a tune on his Walkman. I was not really asleep. I was thinking: I'm not ready to give up fatherhood. I was thinking: I need another baby.

September 9. Last night I dreamed I was having another baby. In bed before turning out the light, Shelley and I talked about it, and then in my sleep I was making contact with an unborn fetus: running my fingertips over its mewling lips, exploring its soft head with wonder. Next thing I knew I could see through its fontanel to the brain, swimming there fine and solid, and suddenly I was seeing through the fontanel into the future. The truth is: I really can see further into the future than the last time I became a father. I can see that if I had another babe, his feet would grow bigger than mine, he would nearly snap dorm keys in two, and in 19 years, brushing his bristly cheek against mine, he might barely have time to say good-bye.

September 12. I took my second-born Marshall to get new ducks for the pond: a female pekin and a male harlequin. Toothless Bob the duck man walked us around his sweet hay- and-milk-smelling barn and showed us the incubator with its drawers of eggs. He opened a crate to show us a batch of Indian runners, just born last night and all chittering together under the warming bulb. Hard to know what Marshall was thinking. I wished I could peer through his fontanel and see what was going on in there. Would he be jealous if I had another child? But Marshall stared back at me with the opaque mask of a teenager, then went and sat down inside the car. As I watched Marshall behind his rolled-up window, twiddling his lacrosse stick, Toothless Bob startled me by seeming to read my mind. "Maybe you'll have another boy one of these days," he said collegially, one breeder to another. "Oh, it's nice when you get one of those."

September 13. Last night Shelley talked us into trying. But I felt depleted by the act this time. It was so regenerative! I knew the entire effort it entailed. I was exhausted not by the sending off of sperm, but by the knowledge that I might have just given up a good night's sleep for the next five years.

October 18. Confirmed: I'm doing it again nearly two decades later. Shelley's first, my third. Shelley became pregnant the week my first-born went off to college; he'll be born (I say "he" because so Toothless Bob predicted) by the time my college kid comes home for the summer.

Of course I know to cherish it because it really is fleeting. Of course I know how mundane it all is, and how amazing. But here is something I didn't know the first time around: That the baby will not be in any abiding sense ours; he'll be on loan till the culture takes him over.

November 2. Since when did doctors and nurses get so young? Last time they were all parent figures to me; this time the OB turns out to be the kid sister of someone I dated ten years ago -- with kids of her own she wants my advice on.

Other changes: Midwives are routine. Husbands are called "coaches." Mothers want pain killers again. At birth an electronic anklet is clamped on the new-born to guard against kidnapping. My children's old crib is not only outdated but hazardously not to code -- I could probably be arrested by the baby police.

November 7. Mostly, of course, the changes are in me. I was a young dad; now I'll be an old dad. I was in my mid 20's when my first child was born; I'll be pushing 70 when this one graduates from college. My points of reference are in collision: I feel less like the Peter Fonda of "Easy Rider" than the Henry Fonda of "On Golden Pond."

And what a difference it is to be siring at a time in my life when I feel patient and fatherly, rather than wanting to mix it up with every male who crosses my path. "Look," I say at the traffic light as I coast up to the young Hell's Angel who cut me off a mile back, "you're probably a nice kid. It'd be a real shame if you got yourself killed." As Marshall sinks down into his seatbelt, the guy contemplates how he's going to handle my effrontery. He squints down at the Megadeath tattoos on his forearms.

"Sorry, sir," he says.

November 18. Does Marshall sense something? Because he seems to be awfully rough on me these days. In the kitchen, he's always grabbing me from behind and yanking me to the floor with an alligator twist. Locked in one of his ten minute headlocks, my thought is always: better now than later. Because next time a teen of mine does this to me, I'll be 60.

Perspective, that's what's different now. It really changes things when you've seen first-hand how the precious little burps of infancy turn into full-blown adolescent belches. I know by direct experience that the helpless softie inside her is being built tough as nails to outlast us, with any luck, by half a century. This tadpole striving to clump brain cells together will someday get a high school paper back that will say: "Your argument on Nietzche was presented with great verve, but a few more footnotes would be helpful."

November 21. Toothless Bob is right: It is rough out there. The male harlequin has been nabbed by a fox. His mate, the pekin, has been squawking frantically for two days, paddling around in little circles by herself.

And so I admit: I'm nervous. I'm nervous on many levels. I've entered the sweepstakes of nature again and recklessly opened myself up to risk. Will the baby come out OK? How will it change the dynamics between me and my "real" kids? Haven't I done all this before? What am I doing?

I find I fear things I never feared the first time: falling down the stairs with a baby in my arms, letting him eat strawberries with pesticides. At 45, I know all the things that can go wrong. Maybe it's just common sense: The world has become a scarier place than it was on my last go-round. Look what's befallen the species in the past 20 years -- not just the big monstrosities like Bosnia and Rwanda but the little ones, too: Jonestown, John Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer. It will be miraculous if, Dorian Grey-like, an infant pops out unmarked, as pure as a babe ever was with no sign of our surging depravity.

November 24. Last night Shelley was crying in her sleep, dreaming a witch was trying to yank a baby from her grasp. I put my arms around her and told her it was just a dream. But I too felt the chill of dread.

Here's why. Nearly two decades ago I felt raw and vulnerable as I fathered two infants who were terribly, fearsomely, exposed to the world. The tenderness I felt for them was almost more than I could bear. But little by little I squired them through the diaper changings, the kidnap fears, the snarling dogs. Painstakingly, over the years, I shepherded them through the perils of childhood to the point where they could play a piano recital in front of strangers, fold The New York Times to read on a subway, even get a key into the lock of a dorm room. I brought two babies very nearly to a state of fruition, and it was empowering to me as well as to them to get to a stage where they could break the broomstick of any witch who might try to harm them.

Now that empowerment is being peeled away as I open myself up, again, to the unknown. The mystery is roaring back with a vengeance and I can't fight this sense of awe ...

November 30. Nevertheless, all my trepidation is offset by one thing: the loss I feel when coming across an ancient set of lip prints at knee-height on an attic mirror. The prints were made one New Year's Day twelve years ago, I remember, when I was packing away a tape my sons and I had just made, and in an excess of love they had starting kissing everything in the attic. Playing back the tape today, I am overwhelmed at hearing the voices of my children, aged seven and three, reciting what they liked best about the year just ended, and me assuring them we'd make another recording next New Year's Day, though we never got around to it.

How can I be tearful when this is life at its sweetest? Nevertheless I am. I hear the baby eagerness in their voices, all subsumed by the manly voices they use today; I understand the physical ache my generation is starting to feel in our arms because our kids are outgrowing our embrace. I want to produce more knee-high lip prints. I want to hear more baby voices -- and to hear my own voice, talking with startling tenderness to young children again.

What am I doing? Suddenly I realize. What I'm doing is investing in a new generation.

December 1. Time to tell the boys. Alex is taken totally by surprise. "Awesome!" he shouts over the phone from his dorm. "She'll live to the 22nd century almost!" Marshall is more down-to-earth about it. After a look of bug-eyed disbelief, he clears his throat gruffly and says, "We better bring him up to love camping."

"We!" What a great concept! My "real" kids can help raise the new one. I won't have to compromise my love for them but will supplement it. Instead of feeling left-out, Alex and Marshall can be with me on the grown-up team.

December 15. In her grief, the pekin duck is sleeping around with every wild mallard who drops by the pond on its way south. I confess I am a little shocked. Maybe it isn't "grief" at all; maybe she's forgotten her old mate and this too is part of nature's redemptive cruelty. What a slut!

December 20. The generations feel flattened out, on both ends. Not only do I feel more brotherly towards my sons these days, but I'm also aware that I am older than my father was when he raised me. In hindsight, I can judge his fathering, see that he did some things well and some things not so well. I can look upon the young father that he was as a big brother would; and this, I find, is healing to both of us. Meantime, Alex keeps calling from college with wonderful questions. Last night he asked if I missed the younger him, the Alex who was three? "Very much," I said -- but it dawned on me that having a new baby relegates his and his brother's childhoods to ancient history. The memories of walking Marshall on the ceiling suddenly seem like a long time ago, like faded black and white photos before the advent of color. And when I used to carry Alex to see the rooster next door -- that is ancient Egypt, the slaves building pyramids under a hot midday sun.

January 19. So what's different about this time? Maybe it's that I have the chance to watch another human being become a parent. Last time I was so caught up in my own amazement, I had no capacity to notice what was going on with my first wife. In the same way that a newborn can't take in the rush of unfamiliar sounds because its nervous system isn't developed yet, so were things so new to me that I couldn't register anything outside myself. Now that I'm more developed, here's what I'm privileged to see:

* Shelley's face is irradiated with happiness. As her womanhood enriches itself, I am in awe of the curve of her elbow, her fierce gentleness, the lightness of her laugh.

* In her address book, she has penned exclamation marks after all the unfamiliar inserts. "Pediatrician!!" "Diaper service!!!!"

* She chuckles to herself with each piece of infant clothing that comes out of a box of hand-me-downs.

* Her motherly instincts have exploded so that she gets all gooey when she sees an inch worm poking along, says "awwww" when she sees a little truck behind a big truck.

* She's suddenly less squeamish about a backed-up toilet, and when I can't throw away my plum pit while driving 70 mph, she takes it in her hand instead of needing a napkin.

* At the noisy restaurant with our friends laughing up a storm, she smiles quietly to herself with her hand on her belly to feel the private streak of a limb inside her skin.

February 10. So these are the things I can't believe I have a chance to do all over again:

* Try to figure out the smell of a newborn's head. Is it a dairy smell? The smell of pineapple yogurt? Tapioca? Walnuts? Potatoes? Mushrooms? Seaweed? Why is this one of the only perfumes that can't be adequately described?

* Try to get the baby to focus on me instead of blinking off to everything else in the room that's more interesting.

* Laugh so delightedly at his first smiles that it scares him and we have to console him against crying. But the thing I'm looking forward to most is taking part in that ancient human ritual of watching a baby sleep. Why is it so endlessly fascinating to our species to watch the march of tiny twitching moods across his face, the shooting up of eyebrows, the downward pouting of lips? As though we've retained the knack for brooding from caveman days, it's as hypnotic as staring into the embers of a fire or gazing into the night sky.

March 6. Oh, good. I get to be Daddy Know It All. At childbirth class (and how quaint, after the time I spent in divorce court, to sit in a class with young couples who hold hands!), the teacher turns out to be an old baby-sitter of Marshall's, and she appoints me the voice of experience to answer their questions about how they're possibly going to love a squalling blotch-faced infant.

I share with the class how I was so ambivalent, before my first- born, that I couldn't walk past the layette without averting my eyes. Then suddenly he was born and with him, a place was expanded in my heart. It was a double miracle: not only a birth of him, but also a birth of love within me for him. We're not just oak trees dropping acorns.

March 12. But then, just when I'm feeling patriarchal, I freak. At the baby shower (another change: dads are now invited), I open a picture book present that has one word per page. BOOT. Oh my god, I think, we'll really be starting back here?

So I'm as clueless as I ever was. Or maybe I'm upset because Marshall acted out in such opposite ways last week. He smoked dope for the first time, and he bought himself a jar of Gerber's strained pears. I'm glad he told me, I guess, but his teenage opacity is getting harder to crack. He seems sullen with sperm. I don't recognize the jaw that keeps nervously angling for a pose of toughness, nor the nose I pinched as a little boy, nor the skin hardening brown against me. Mostly I can't plumb the eyes, swimming with defiance, even though sometimes they slide by mine and I think I read a flicker that says: "Don't worry, Dad. Part of me has to do this, but you know we'll pull through."

April 7 - 20. Because things do survive. It's spring, and look: The pekin has eggs. Five pure white eggs, sitting in a hideaway of hay. I find I am touched, and tend the duck so she can stay put, bringing her dried corn, keeping the barn cats at bay.

It makes me acknowledge how resilient nature is. During an afternoon's thunderstorm, I step out on the porch and hold the hanging plants under the downspout to water them with the rain run-off. But as I pull one back from its watering, I notice that there's a nest inside and I've nearly drowned five baby finches, no more than a day old, huddled hairless and red in their plucked-out embryonic skin, and shivering blindly with their yellow beaks outstretched. All of a sudden I make out the peals of alarm from the mother finch inside the maple tree nearby; how long has she been trying to warn me off my brutality?

But day by day I keep checking them, and one week later the finches have not only survived but sport the wary wizened look of teenagers, the surly expression that they with their body feathers could survive anything; and sure enough, the next day they're flying. I feel the way I did as a middle-aged Dad watching my kids play in a band -- that I was duped into believing them vulnerable, when they both had it in them the whole time to grow into rock stars. Thus are all parents taken in by nature's niftiest trick: the trick of succession.

May 12. Alex is home at the end of his school year as we approach B Day. Clearing out his room to make space for the baby gear, I try to assure him he'll always have a home here, but he's way ahead of me. "Life goes on," he says, as we toss things into boxes: the baby cowboy boots I brought him back from Wyoming, the shirt cardboards on which he drew rockets. We stand at the door and carefully peel off the letters of his name. Working backwards, I coax off the X and the E, but Alex is having trouble with his L until finally he just shreds it in half. I gasp quietly.

May 16. The dynamics keep shifting and changing. In preparation for next week's due date, the boys get in a giant wrestling match, right there on the livingroom carpet. It feels primal, the two of them writhing in silence -- a dire struggle for dominance. Marshall is no longer only a little brother, he's also about to become someone's big brother, and as he pins Alex for the first time ever, he roars.

May 18. Dreams are coming fast and furious. In one, Shelley has given birth to a bunch of baby deer, wet and downy, and in bassinets with name tags like Sanchez, DelSesto, O'Rourke. All need my attention but I don't know which ones to care for. How can I be tender with one and not with the others? The revelation is simple: I have to be tender with them all. In my sleep I am flooded with a sense of compassion towards all living things. At first it hurts, there's the pain of extending love, but then it's easy, a river-release of generosity towards the world. It feels like I can sense something higher, the way an animal picks up a higher register of sound, a communal music that has always been in the air but that I never keyed into before.

May 20. But the duck! She's rolled her eggs into the pond! What's the matter with her? Out of what instinct has she tried to kill her own offspring? Should I hate her, as she stands there preening her neck feathers, already oblivious to what she's done?

To get the answers to these and a million other questions, I want to ask Toothless Bob, but I know it would be fruitless: If I lifted his limp bangs to peer through his fontanel, all I would see would be skull, bone cold and rock hard. In the panic before childbirth, I feel helpless. Who can I ask and what can I do?

Of all people, it's Marshall who comes to the rescue. Wiping tears from his eyes, he fishes the eggs out of the water with his lacrosse stick. Tall and able, he cradles them in his shirt as he brings them to the house. He upholsters a shoebox with straw and strings a low watt lightbulb inside, to keep the eggs at 98 degrees. And tonight he'll sleep with the shoebox in his room, the incubator bulb serving as nightlight, as he waits, a tender teenage ruffian -- waits for the future to hatch.