great expectation: a father's diary...excerpts
June 12 | November 4 | November 28 | December 10
December 10
All of this snow--we're up to about fifty inches already, and it's still officially fall--has gotten me thinking in a different way about the wisdom of having a baby in the middle of a Syracuse winter. Months ago, I'd imagined us nesting comfortably, huddled inside and occasionally peering out the window to see how far the snow had built up and how long the icicles were on the eaves. I'd imagined an occasional stroll to the store to get some essential supplies, like marshmallows and brownie mix, plus an occasional and energizing trudge to the woodpile. Basically, we'd all exist for the first few months inside the amniotic sac of our house, the heat turned up and some Mozart playing quietly on the stereo. I'd have to leave now and then to go teach my classes, but I'd glide through those without any real disruption of our main routine. And when spring arrived, we'd emerge from the house along with the buds on the trees, and we'd enter without a ripple into the comfortable and easy northern summer.
Now I'm thinking of the complications. What if there's a blizzard on the day Maura goes into labor? (A likely scenario at this point.) And there's the dog, which of course we didn't plan on having but who needs to go out four or five times a day, so that the seal to our little sac is constantly broken, a cold breeze whooshing through the house and little clumps of snow melting throughout the kitchen and all along the path through the dining room to the coat closet by the front stairs. (I can't take off my boots every time I come in, because I usually need to go out again soon after.) Someone has to shovel the driveway and the sidewalk. And pretty soon the ice rink. Our lives are not as hard as that of the woman from whom we bought a Christmas tree the other day. She raises not only trees but also alpacas and some other unspecified critters, and the roof on her barn collapsed under the snow and so she has to make other arrangements for the animals before they freeze to death. Her driveway is half a mile long and she plows it herself. She seems to work several different jobs. Buying a tree from her not only put us in the Christmas spirit but also put our lives into a necessary perspective.
This week's New Yorker has a wonderful little essay by Louise Erdrich about having babies in the winter in Minnesota. She's found, now that her oldest daughters are teenagers, that her timing means horrible things like them learning to drive in the winter. "Because the oldest two both took the driver's test the days after their sixteenth birthday," she writes, "much of the practice driving--with learner's permits, and me riding as the requisite adult passenger--took place on those slush-ridden, black-iced, snowbound, or low-visibility Minnesota mornings as we made our way harrowingly to school." So much of the difficulty with kids seems to involve cars--as it does, in fact, with adults.