The Smile Of The Newborn Could Be Farts

Our friend Emily came by the other day to meet Animal for the first time and in the course of talking about how nice it is that random people are interested in babies, she mentioned that there's a sort of sad moment when you finally see a baby that's smaller and younger than yours.

For now though it still seems like no baby is smaller than Monkey. I like this feeling — people stop us on the street and marvel at how angelic Squeak is. Sometimes they say something along the lines of, "Great job!" We must look like idiot kids or something with our shit-eating grins and generally disheveled appearance.

So anyway, it's been almost eight weeks now. I didn't quite see how we'd get to increments of "months" after those first sleepless nights, but now time seems to go by really quickly.

[There should probably be a transition of some sort here, but my brain isn't working correctly.]

Remember that the Fourth Trimester exists because a baby's brain has to be underdeveloped enough to exit through the human pelvis. So for three months, babies are no smarter than a puppy (Jen and I had a long debate today about whether a puppy was smarter than a newborn) — it seems like they only eat and sleep, with some crying, peeing and pooping mixed in there. Jen calls this the houseplant stage. I've also heard people compare babies to sacks of sugar. Really, they seem a lot like those infant simulators, which I suppose is a testament to infant simulators, in that you only need to figure out whether a baby is hungry, gassy or wet.

But the payoff is bigger. In exchange for three or more months of a brain no more complicated than a computerized doll or a canine, babies become fully formed human beings. And that's the ultimate fuck you to dog owners: Where your "baby" will never get past crapping on the sidewalk and eating slop out of a bowl, mine might become the leader of the free world. Not to mention that babies smell a lot sweeter. Suckers.

There's something fun about this interim Fourth Trimester between fetus and human, and that's that as a parent you get real amped up and excited about welcoming this new being into consciousness. It's why you see parents freak out about seeing a baby smile for the first time, much much less a child's first words. There's a delayed gratification at work that probably mirrors the sense of delayed gratification that society tries to instill (or drill) into children. I imagine it probably also gives fathers time to get really psyched to care for a child (mothers seem to have this instinctual care thing as soon as a child is born).

Or maybe I'm just projecting all my feelings about fatherhood onto an imperfectly sketched out concept of anthropology.

I liked the nine-month gestation period because it helped me "get used" to the idea that our lives were about to change. By the time Animal was born, I had mentally prepared for this new part of life. I see something similar going on with this Fourth Trimester time. This is the time to Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! in terms of cursing and off-color talk. This is the time to be amazed by how a human brain develops. This is the time to figure out how to be patient and loving and understanding. This is the time to build a routine in terms of child care.

And the beauty of this time is that as far as we can tell, Monkey has no fucking clue what's going on. Which means we can make mistakes, figure stuff out, screw up — all within reason, of course. The one thing you don't want to do is welcome your child's first pangs of consciousness with a phrase like "Motherfucking cocksucker, show me your tits!" With any luck, by the time the Fourth Trimester winds down, you'll be goo-gee-gaw-hawing like you're supposed to when your child's brain suddenly betrays a flash of understanding.

I didn't really believe Jen when she kept saying that Squeak was smiling — I thought we heard somewhere along the way that smiling is an involuntary reaction with very young newborns — but now I see what I'm sure are smiles and evidence that he's starting to mimic our facial expressions. Either it's that or it's an example of confirmation bias — since we're probably smiling most of the time anyway.

And then there's Squeak's intense interest in light fixtures. A lot of things are "Aww!" inspiring about newborns, but the one that really gets me is how much he seems to love looking at lights. When his face isn't pressed up against Jen's chest or asleep against mine in the carrier, he's probably looking intently at these lights. It's so simple that it makes me gooey every time I see him do it. Why gooey? I don't totally know but I think it probably has something to do with the fact that someday, probably very soon, he won't have nearly enough stuff to occupy himself with and he'll be easily bored, cranky or fickle in his interests — just like everyone is as soon as we figure out how ridiculous and small those who clamor for our attention really are.

And then you have a newborn and you can make funny faces at him for literally hours because you have faith that every little gesture matters, or will soon matter. Somehow you're now hardwired to focus hold your attention. It's weird how that happens.

If You Have Kids, Prepare To Shed Them Now . . .

So we read Christopher Hitchens' Hitch-22 for book club last month. It was my choice, this being right after Hitchens died, so I used him as a theme (the other possible choices were a Martin Amis book — not this one — and an Ian McEwan book, those writers being two of Hitchens' favorites).

I think it's funny to respond to his writing by saying whether I "liked" it or not — I can imagine him not wanting to respond to writing like it's a pop song you "like" or "don't like." Which is to say, "I liked it." (Or, "What did you think?" "It was good." "Anything else?" "No. It was good.")

Not everyone "liked" it as much — Goober thought he was too pompous and celebrated the fact that he put it down after 400 pages. All of us couldn't believe that he read all the way to page 400 and refused to read the last 22 pages. Goober shrugged, "It felt pretty good, actually."

Maybe it's just because the last seven weeks have been an endless string of sleep-deprived days and our newborn is such a feature of our lives, but I was pretty surprised that Hitchens talked so little about his family. I was convinced he wasn't going to at all, but he sort of addresses it in the fifteenth chapter (not until page 330), when he basically says that he was a shitty father. It's kind of brutal to read him talk about it: "There are days when it gives my inexpressible pain, and I know that such days of remorse also lie in my future." The language sounds like how cancer victim talks about daily pains and aches; it's interesting to think that when he wrote this he was probably living with the cancer that killed him only a year or two later.

You start to wonder about his family because so much of the book focuses on his colleagues — whole chapters about Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Edward Said — and nothing about, say, his wife. I don't even know her name — I think it's Carol, but I'm not positive — I don't believe we were ever formally introduced over the course of the 422 pages.

I shouldn't say "colleagues" because Hitchens counted them all as "friends." He had so many friends — Susan Sontag, James Fenton, half of the boldface names listed in the index — that you start to second-guess your own choice in friends. Should I be camping with Charlie Rose? Did I miss out not inviting Nick Kristof to our holiday party? But by the end of the book you don't get a sense that he had friends outside of the supercharged intellectual atmosphere in which he worked.

Sure, all of us have work friends, but something's amiss when you devote more of your memoir to Paul Wolfowitz than your own brother. Nothing against Paul Wolfowitz, but your own brother, you know? Not to mention your wife and daughter — who is still only hazily sketched out — at least I think he has a daughter.

That said, you're probably not reading Christopher Hitchens to hear about his family — which is to say, obviously most people are going to be more curious about Martin Amis getting a handjob than other stuff — but the thing becomes a little strange after a while.

(Post-script Google: So I'm just now seeing this and this, both of which put a lot of his family life in perspective.)

Of course there was an arc to the book — simply stated, Hitchens' "break" with "the Left" and how that happened — and there was a motif he returned to, what he called "keeping two sets of books." And maybe one's kids aren't easily shoehorned into a "two sets of book" motif. So in some ways it's refreshing to read a memoir that's not too "personal," but the feeling you get over the course of the book that there isn't a personal part of Hitchens — I can't believe that's true, or that that's the impression he'd want to leave people. At some point when talking about how the Left lost him, he derides the concept that the "personal is political," but Hitch-22 sort of tweaks that somewhat in that there's no "personal" to speak of. It's at least notable, if not kind of — like I keep saying — strange.

There's something to this book that's painful in parts. The "remorse" about being a bad dad (that's as opposed to "regret," which he thinks should be reserved for something you haven't actually done). The other part is the dramatic irony imbued in the book — you know that he's dying (or in fact dead) while the writer himself had no idea; at the same time, he often talks about his death (and in fact uses it as a lens to open the book). (He addresses his cancer in a preface to the paperback version.) One moment comes when he talks about his dad dying of esophageal cancer, which is the same kind he contracted. You read that and you're kind of like, dude . . .

There is one point in Hitch-22 where the fourth wall breaks down. It comes at the end of the chapter on Iraq, which is one of the issues that set him apart later in his career. As such, it's an obvious thing to write about — people want to know, right? — but it's not until he brings up the story of the guy who volunteered to serve in Iraq in part because of Hitchens' writing where the personal and political intersect. So much of his career seems so suited to debate club — if not an actual debate then topics that don't seem to go beyond the intellectual bubble he mastered — that it's notable when this soldier's death penetrates all that and Hitchens is forced to own up to his role. The moment is pretty devastating (wasn't I just making fun of this word the other day?), and only slightly compromised by his tell-don't-show warning that "if you have tears, prepare to shed them now . . ."

To go back to the kids — there's another part where he talks about how having children sets the stage for your own funeral. I can't actually find the exact part, but the idea is that children are the first inkling of your own mortality. Maybe that's why he didn't want to think about them! I think I understand what he's getting at — Animal made me consider what I see as a sort of through line for my family history. But death? Seems a little severe, no?

Of course, once he said that it bummed me out. It reminds me of a friend back in high school who liked Jim Morrison enough to read his book of poetry. I couldn't abide Jim Morrison's poetry, so I made him show me one poem that didn't read like high school English class. He pointed to the one Jim Morrison wrote about his cock, something about the death of his cock, followed by a short defense of the sex-death simulacrum. And I was just kind of like, "Sex and death? Huh?"

Which is to say, leave it to Hitchens to make me start to see how I'm getting ready to die. Dick.

Passing The First Test Of Fatherhood: Returning Home On One's Own Volition

I had to go into "the city" for a work meeting this evening. I haven't been in Manhattan for over seven weeks, since before Animal was born.

The good news is that it still looks the same. This is what I saw when I popped out of the subway at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street:

It wasn't until this past Friday that we even left the neighborhood, when we took Squeak on his first subway ride. Part of our reticence is not knowing what we would do if things went wrong along the way — How to change a diaper without a changing table? What if he won't take a bottle? — and part of it was not knowing where to go in the first place. I don't know about going to a restaurant yet, for example. So we've been at home, learning how to manage fussiness in our bathrobes and with an ample supply of baby wipes at hand.

Leaving the meeting — which lasted less than two hours, mind you — I had this feeling, or a conflicted feeling. I clearly couldn't just hang out and walk around or go see a movie (early on I joked about heading out to see a movie) or smoke crack down at the riverfront. At the same time, I wanted to get back to see how Jen and Monkey were getting on. I wasn't worried about them — Jen has an advantage in that she is able to serve him food on demand — but we haven't really been separated from each other for more than a half-hour since we had come home.

But a tiny part of me thought that it might be fun to take a little stroll somewhere. It was like Rabbit, Run except I didn't have a car . . . and I wasn't going to run anywhere . . . and I didn't really want to run anywhere . . . and without Rabbit's annoying "drama" . . . and . . . maybe it really wasn't like an Updike novel at all, come to think of it. I looked at the intersection, marveled at how nimble and fearless the gentlemen making a wide turn onto Sixth Avenue on skateboards were, feared a little bit for the bicyclists riding in the dark and ducked into the subway entrance. My sojourn lasted all of a block, meaning directly from the restaurant to the subway.

What I did do was somehow end up on the L platform when a Brooklyn-bound train was rolling into the station, which worked out well in that I could take it one stop over to Union Square and switch to the N or the Q. It was funny to be on the L among so many people who I'm sure didn't have a two-month-old. They looked so . . . well rested — and this was after work even. Of course nothing puts your life in focus like realizing that some of your fellow passengers could easily be 15 years younger than you. Fifteen years? How did that happen? And do I look 15 years older than them? As Goober would say, "Take it to heart."

Jen and Monkey were doing fine when I got home, though I was slightly happy to hear Jen sound a little bit relieved that I was home.