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| Tobias Ezekiel "Chames" Zapfletts |
Consequently, I'm leading with the news. "Hi, I'm James, and I've just had a baby." Of course, that in and of itself isn't ever truly enough for people, because then you have to give them his vital statistics. He's a boy, he weighed 6lb 12oz, and he was 19.5 inches long. He's currently 12 days old. At some point I assume that people will stop requiring all these bits of minutiae for us to be able to move ahead with what I actually want to talk about. I'm not sure what age he has to be before they stop caring about his birth inseam, or the girth of his infant head. It doesn't currently happen to me, so I do know that somewhere between being two weeks and twenty nine years old, there's a cut off point at which it's impolite to ask about how much someone weighs and how long it took his mother to eject him.
The thing is that these statistics aren't even the salient details of what make him a person. Even at this point, where he's a very simple pooping potato creature, he has some easily discernible things that are so much more relevant than his weight, or length, or depth.
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| I am not a series of accurate but ultimately irrelevant personal numbers. |
The things that are actually interesting about him, the things that I wish people would ask, can't really be catalogued like that. They're things like the fact that he'll only cry at night when he needs to do a really giant poo, or that he gets the hiccups every time he eats. He clearly favors lying on one side of his body, and will suckle on anything that gets too close to his mouth. You can't distill that down to digits, nor would you want to, but those give a more accurate reflection about him than anything people ever ask.
The first time that I got away from him to go outside and run, I found myself wondering what he was doing. Which is nuts, because he currently doesn't do anything. When you see videos of foals, or sea turtles, or whatever, being born they don't seem to have the same built-in defectiveness of a new-born baby human. They're up and about in, like, days. Max. Meanwhile Toby alternates between sleeping, eating and pooing and will do only this for months to come. Sometimes, if he's feeling really advanced, he will do two of these at the same time, but even that seems more accidental than planned, and while he's evidently pleased with himself when he manages it there's no real sense that he could do it again next time he wanted to.
Jalyss shared with me an article about the first three months, where it spoke about how it's essentially a fourth trimester, just his head is too big to allow him to escape the womb if he stays in, so he continues to develop outside as he would in utero. This makes an awful lot of sense to me. He is functionally useless, with an enforced dependency put onto his mother and I.
Our purpose has been reduced to parenthood. We no longer have roles, identities, pasttimes that aren't focussed on this small goblin that's lying on his back in our living room, repeatedly and agressively pooing himself for attention. We are purely ambulatory food and comfort givers, our existence is only for his benefit, to meet his needs. There is no James, only Dad.
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| Coincidentally, these are the exact expression our sleep deprived faces now make, thanks to our own tiny Gozer. |
Instead of lying awake trying to think up new jokes that I can wake Jalyss up to listen to, which up until now has been my standard nightly routine, I spend my time attempting to discern the difference between the grunts that means the baby continues to be alive, and those that means he's in distress. It's an inherently stressful task, which makes it the perfect pastime for those brief few hours between being awake because you're putting him to bed, and being awake because he's enraged that he doesn't have a nipple in his mouth right this instant, Mom.
And yet there's a real sense of tranquil euphoria about it. Sure, that comes from the fact that Jalyss is pumping out a pharmaceutical level of pheromones to trick the two of us into looking after our progeny, a sedentary lump of frequently evil smelling flesh. As you can imagine, being doped up on post-natal hormones, we couldn't be, like, happier, man. We know that, like soup left too long to simmer, we've been reduced down to our purest, most necessary functions in order that we take care of him, and we just aren't at all bothered.
You'll notice, of course, that this suggests some kind of negativity towards the adiposeal being we now share our home with. This is a pure defence mechanism, because if I were to start trying to list the things he does that are so delightfully adorable, or the exciting new skills we imagine he learns each day, or the gorgeous little outfit that he just looks so precious in, if I tried to catalogue these, I'd turn into that most annoying of creatures - the Online New Parent. I'm already aware that my facebook feed is full of the baby. While I'm sure people are happy, there comes a point at which I have to accept that my friends aren't actually friends with me so they can see where Toby pooped today. Of course it's a big deal, it's dominating my life right now, but I'd like to be able to divorce myself to some extent from the appearance that all I care about is Toby.
Because that wouldn't be true. I still care deeply about a great many things, and lots of things are happening in my life currently. Writing up a post about how truly terrific Toby has turned out is the start of a slippery slope. It's the reason why Batman doesn't just kill the joker; it'd be too easy, and pretty soon his Instagram account is just pictures of him with other villains he's offed. Here's Batman at the abandoned botanical gardens, with dead Posion Ivy. Here's Batman at the zoo, posing next to the Penguin's corpse. Here's a selfie of Batman in front of a blazing Arkham Asylum, and if you look closely you can see his enemies trapped inside, beating in vain on the reinforced windows, while he pulls a duck face.
Once you do that, there's no way back. So this will, probably, be the only blog I write about the baby, and I'm not even going to touch upon the birth experience, mainly because it's a Thing That We Will Not Speak Of, other than to say that you don't truly know your wife until you've watched her force a living being out of herself, and that at one point my emotions overcame me and for a brief moment I was overcome by very, very masculine tears.
For this post only then, here's Toby. He's 19.5 inches long, weighed 6lb 12oz at birth, and is 12 days old today.
