November 16th, 2009

Papa Bear

They don’t tell you how emotionally overwhelming it is having a baby. I guess they leave that part up to you. It seems obvious, I guess. Most people just assume that creating a human life and then watching it enter the world will be emotionally overwhelming. But that’s not it. The most overwhelming stuff happens much later, once you’re home from the hospital and you’re digging through a box of stuff you had when you were ten that you keep moving from house to house. You’ll find some piece of a toy you had then and think ‘Wow, I had no idea what it would be like to be a dad the last time I held this thing in my hand.’ All of a sudden everything you do takes on a dad angle. And it isn’t gradual, either; at least it wasn’t for me. It started the night Zoe came into our lives and I watched them try to lower her heart rate with bags of ice, and was blindsided by an urge to grab her like a football and run away with her to somewhere safe–away from all the machines and the needles. “Papa bear” is what my friend calls it. He says he felt it almost immediately following his daughter’s birth. And it’s a weird feeling.
But it makes perfect sense if you think about it; babies are helpless. We work long and hard to bring them into the world. We plan it to be just so, then often it isn’t the way we imagined. Often you find yourself rushing to the hospital at three o’clock in the morning to have a natural, uneventful birth. Other times a routine checkup turns into a surgical intervention turns into a arrhythmia turns into a brain hemorrhage. At the end of it all is this little tiny human. It can’t talk or feed itself. Without you, it will <em>die</em>. Papa Bear is evolution making it easier and more desirable for you to slow down and care for the baby, instead of returning immediately to the bison hunt. Papa Bear thinks nearly everything the baby does is cute, thinks everyone who disagrees with that is dangerously stupid, and dares you to look askance at his little cub.

They don’t tell you how emotionally overwhelming it is having a baby. I guess they leave that part up to you. It seems obvious, I guess. Most people just assume that creating a human life and then watching it enter the world will be emotionally overwhelming. But that’s not it. The most overwhelming stuff happens much later, once you’re home from the hospital and you’re digging through a box of stuff you had when you were ten that you keep moving from house to house. You’ll find some piece of a toy you had then and think ‘Wow, I had no idea what it would be like to be a dad the last time I held this thing in my hand.’ All of a sudden everything you do takes on a dad angle. And it isn’t gradual, either; at least it wasn’t for me. It started the night Zoe came into our lives and I watched them try to lower her heart rate with bags of ice, and was blindsided by an urge to grab her like a football and run away with her to somewhere safe–away from all the machines and the needles. “Papa bear” is what my friend calls it. He says he felt it almost immediately following his daughter’s birth. And it’s a weird feeling.

But it makes perfect sense if you think about it; babies are helpless. We work long and hard to bring them into the world. We plan it to be just so, then often it isn’t the way we imagined. Sometimes you find yourself rushing to the hospital at three o’clock in the morning to have a natural, uneventful birth. Other times a routine checkup turns into a surgical intervention turns into an arrhythmia turns into a brain hemorrhage. At the end of it all is this little tiny human. It can’t talk or feed itself. Without you, it will die. Papa Bear is evolution making it easier and more desirable for you to slow down and care for the baby, instead of returning immediately to the bison hunt. Papa Bear thinks nearly everything the baby does is cute, thinks everyone who disagrees with that is dangerously stupid, and dares you to look askance at his little cub.

Papa Bear is a force for change in a life in search of meaning. Woah, you are saying, that’s heavy. Yeah, well. You try sleeping in forty minute chunks and see if it doesn’t give you some deep thoughts. And my wife sleeps even less than me. Any minute now I’m going to wake up next to Gandhi, if no sleep is what it takes to give you deep thoughts. But the Papa Bear takes care of that, too. It’s really a perfect system, and I’m trying to make sense of it all.

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