Everything I Need to Know About Babies-I Didn't Learn From My Husband

In society, I realize that most men are portrayed as little better than children themselves when it comes to child rearing. We’ve all seen the sitcoms where the men don’t know how to hold the baby or are continuously getting peed on in a gag that never seems to get old. While we all laugh at these oafish husbands, let’s face it, it wouldn’t be funny unless some poor wives out there actually experienced these events and could understand exactly where the exasperated TV spouses were coming from. While I have no children of my own yet, it is for good reason. Not because I do not love children, although being an elementary school teacher does push back the old biological clock by a few years, that is for sure. Who wants to spend their entire day with children, most of whom are good, but a few who make you want to poke your eyeball out with a crayon, and then return home to your own restless brood. Nevertheless, this is not the real reason that my husband and I have delayed having kids. No, our reasons are more practical. I recently discovered that if the Department of Children’s Services found out about my husband’s misperceptions and ridiculous assumptions about child rearing they wouldn’t let me out of the hospital with a defenseless baby.

I first learned about my husband’s complete and total lack of child rearing knowledge after a friend of his had a baby. As my husband and this new father were discussing the infant, the conversation turned to bathing. The man explained that they had to cleanse the child almost daily if not more often due to the lack of bodily function control from both ends. My husband’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped. This was news to him. “ I thought you only bathed them once a month, quarterly at the least,” he stated with complete and totally innocence. I did not occur to him that a child that small could get that dirty. If they weren’t jumping in mud puddles or sand boxes, what was to wash? You would think with a little brother who is ten years younger than he and a master’s degree in education under his belt, he would have at least a slight awareness of some basic baby protocol. This was clearly not the case, but thanks to my husband’s friend, my beloved, who wanted to father his own lacrosse team, was starting to realize just the beginning of what went into having one child, let alone six. As I would soon learn, bathing was only the beginning of my husband’s dearth of baby logic.

Let me explain that my husband is the one pushing for some offspring. Even with his obviously limited knowledge about children, he is constantly informing me that we are going to have a family of at least six. To which I continuously respond, “ Who will be having your other four babies?” Not a chance that I will be popping out six kids. In addition to the enormous pain, stretch marks, and morning sickness involved in the birthing of an excessive number of babies, I’ve given this family planning some thought. Here’s what I have concluded: in general, life is much simpler with two youngsters for a few, what I believe to be, very logical reasons. First of all, it is far easier to get a table at a restaurant with a small, even number of kids; no one has to pull up an extra chair and sit on the end or in the annoying corner spot. Secondly, going on rides at Disney World also becomes less of a struggle since nobody feels left out or has to ride with the creepy adult reliving his youth in the Mickey Mouse ears. I was hoping that the more my husband learned about kids and realized the brilliance in my logic, the fewer babies he would want to have.

A few years later, one of my good friends had a baby and I went to visit. While there, I was passing along the wisdom that my husband had acquired about washing your baby daily, and she informed me of a piece of sage advice that her father had given to her. In all seriousness this wise man told her, “Whatever you do, don’t leave your kid alone in the car,” as if this was not common sense for most people. We both laughed at his sincerely thinking that he was conveying a well-kept piece of secret fatherly advice.

After I returned home, I told this story to my husband and laughed about how ridiculous it was that her father would even think that he had to tell her this. Haven’t we all watched far too many news programs about the dad who forgot it was his turn to take the kid to daycare and left the sleeping child in the back seat on a hot day? Horrible lessons from which we all can learn. Apparently, my husband had never seen such reports. As I conveyed this tale, which I believed to be a humorous anecdote, my husband, between bites of omelet, replied, “You can leave them in the car for a few minutes if you’re just running in to Best Buy.” Why Best Buy, I don’t know, but I practically choked on my pancake at this. I truly believe that my ovaries went on strike at that exact moment. It was as if they knew that creating a baby with this man would be a very unwise decision.

Now a bit wary of this man being the potential father of my children, I exclaimed, “No, you can’t. You can’t ever leave them unattended. Are you crazy? Don’t you watch the news?” He thought about this for a second and then came up with an alternate plan that seemed to satisfy him, “Well, what if you leave Reggie (our dog) with the baby? I trust Reggie.” This is the same dog that eats garbage and once got stuck trying to jump over a fence.

I tried to explain that Reggie was a dog not a babysitter. I, at the least, required opposable thumbs in a childcare provider.
“What if I’m just running in to get a six pack?” He offered as another possibility. I did some quick math in my head before responding to this as I was seriously considering how many baby producing years I would have left if I got a divorce and found a new husband with an ounce of common sense. Unfortunately, the numbers weren’t in my favor, so I was forced to deal with the human conundrum in front of me.

“I can’t even tell you how many things are wrong with that situation. 1. You’ve left my child alone in a car, which can lead to kidnapping and/or death. 2. You are buying alcohol while in the care of my child. 3. If you get pulled over, how are you doing to explain that to the cops?” This was a bit overwhelming for him. He continued to eat and contemplate all of this new knowledge.

A few minutes later, moving away from the child in the car issue, he inquired as to what age people start dressing their babies. This is ridiculous, I thought. This wasn’t the jungle of Africa or even the Ozarks; this was suburban America. With incredulity in my eyes, I told him that people start dressing their babies at birth. They take them out of the hospital with clothes on. They even make socks and shoes for babies these days. The wonder of modern society is that we can dress our babies from the day they are born. It didn’t look like he believed me at first until I reminded him that whenever we saw our friend’s children, they were all fully dressed.

This was all too much for me. This man was talking about wanting babies yesterday and these were his child rearing ideas; we had a lot of work to do. Immediately following our breakfast, we headed straight to Barnes and Nobles for a book on fatherhood. Forget the first nine months, I could handle that because at least my husband couldn’t leave my fetus unattended or unclothed on a chilly day. We went straight to the books on the first year and what to do after the child is born. We found a pretty good, made for men, manual on babies. I informed my husband that if he wanted kids, he needed to read the text from cover to cover and answer some questions. There would be a quiz.

I have to give him credit because a few months later, as we were flying to a family holiday, there he was, highlighter in hand, reading the daddy book with all the intensity of a college text. Although he would occasionally report on information about baby bodily functions and clean up at a volume too loud for an enclosed airplane, he was clearly excited about this new wisdom. As an added bonus for me, there was an entire section devoted to not leaving your baby to fend for himself or herself. Thankfully, another man could convey to him the importance of this lesson in a way that made sense.

While we still remain childless, every time I notice my husband take the baby book and highlighter into the bathroom for a good half hour of contemplation, I begin to feel a little better about his potential fatherly abilities. Don’t get me wrong, he won’t be left unattended with any babies for at least the first six months and he has passed a series of rigorous tests, in which he will have to prove his baby knowledge. I will also probably keep him away from the baby swing for a while, as we had an unfortunate incident with a friend’s newborn and cranking up the swing to the highest level. Nevertheless I have a feeling that in spite of my husband’s deficit of infant intelligence he will eventually catch up. Right now, I’m just waiting for him to finish the book.