On the birth of Tobias Ezekiel Zapfletts

So, Jalyss and I had a baby a few weeks ago. I'm still struggling with how to get that fact across to people who don't know. It seems quite gauche to just drop it into conversation. There aren't a whole lot of avenues that particular thread can go down after you've unleashed the verbal one-upmanship of having produced a child.

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.

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.

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.

On Everything That I Haven't Written About Over The Last Six Months

Jalyss and I have now been married a little over ten months. That means we've passed the marker of when we could have had our first baby, which is important to note when you're a young Christian couple in America. Forget cleanliness because fecundity, here at least, is next to Godliness.

In fact, when people meet you and find out you're newly married, they immediately start looking for the baby. "How many babies you had?" is their way of measuring the time you've been married. So now we measure all units of time in terms of how many children we could have had, with actual calendar anniversaries being of significantly lesser importance.

This is all just a long winded way of saying that we're not pregnant yet. Definitively. Jalyss took a pregnancy test on Father's Day, just so I could see whether I needed people to make a fuss of me.

This kind of fertility update is exactly what I imagine most people are interested in about our life, but just in case you were actually hoping for more than a gestational confirmation that we're still without any additions to the family, here's what else has been happening.

Jalyss and I continue to compete to see who can work the most jobs. For a long time she was winning, as I couldn't work legally in the US. I got around that by doing some babysitting and writing reviews of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; a show with too much punctuation in its title, and too little characterisation or plot in its episodes. Neither of these roles made me the primary breadwinner, as I only earned $2 a article.

Fortunately I am now able to work and the jobs arms-race has really taken off, as we now have three jobs each. I work part-time at a local independent coffee shop, the delightful Mocha Monkey, where my main role seems to be confusing customers who think that I'm Australian. I've just started working two days a week at The Blessing House, which is hard to actually describe other than to say it's someone who has opened her home so that anyone can come in and relax there at any time of the day, and they need volunteers which I'm helping them find.

Finally, I work overnights at a crisis centre for disabled young-adults with behavioral problems. My first day there involved me being locked in the office by other staff to prevent a client from attacking me, so it's got the sort of whimsy that means you can't predict what will happen day-to-day, and frequently don't want to try. Usually, however, it's not that exciting; I'm there solely to support the main members of staff should there be a behavioural or medical emergency, so I go downstairs and sleep in the games room, which is a fair-sized space whose homeliness is undermined by the persistent stench of urine (a consequence of working in a place where people combine their responses to stress, displays of anger, and favorite activity into one ongoing attempt to find exciting new places to piss).

We've started to build some great new friendships with a few local couples which has served us well as through them we've got hold of an air-conditioning unit. This is essential, as I am already starting to wilt from Minnesota's summer. As fierce as their winter is, their less talked about summer is proving more of a burden for someone who is unused to temperatures in the double digits. Actually, it turns out that A/C has an exciting history in Minnesota, as the worlds first in-home unit was installed in Minneapolis in 1914. Of course, there's also the horrible correlation between the rise of air-conditioning and Southern Republican presidencies which is startlingly direct.

The VISA process continues, as glacial as ever. Entire civilisations have risen, fallen and risen again (although, it should be noted, not here in America) in the time it's taken for my four month VISA approval to happen, but I've finally been accepted as a 'Conditional Permanent Resident', an oxymoronic statement which says I'm able to live here indefinitely unless they decide I can't.

This is great news though because it means we are hopefully going to be able to come back and visit the UK this December. I couldn't leave until my VISA was at this point (or rather, I could leave, but I couldn't reenter). I'm looking forward to a real English Christmas; i.e. one without any snow.

On Zapfletts

When my kids grow up I've decided I'm going to talk to them about the decisions I made about getting married. I have what I feel are good pieces of advice for them, mainly around exactly what 'tulle' is, and the coma inducing pointlessness of spending loads of money on chairs for the service. But above all there are two decision that I'm going to want to be able to point to without any hesitation and say that these were good things.

The first is in my choice of wife. I hope that she's their mother, because otherwise it's an awkward conversation to be starting with them. I hope that she's around still, I hope that they see her not just as their mother, but as a person. I want them to know Jalyss not just as a role, like their teachers or their pet, but as the individual she is. I hope they'll know her as someone I love and respect, who makes me happy, pushes me, teaches me, steadies and comforts me, and who can cook up a mean homemade pizza.

The second thing though is that I want them to know that they are part of a family that wanted them, values and loves them for who they are, and that they will be respected and cherished whatever they do. Unless they're a vampire, because then they're on their own.

I'm being quite serious here. If they ever start living in a coffin, adopting a range of, admittedly rad, capes with high collars, and rise only at dusk to go and feed on the still warm blood of virginal 19th century women as part of a dubious allegory for sexual awakening, I am disinheriting the heck out of them.

I have very strong feelings about vampires, you guys.

But, so long as they steer clear of vampirism, I also want them to know that they are part of a family that spans two continents and three immediate family names. Because as well as being a Willetts and a Zapf, they will also be a Zapfletts.

I've always been pretty adamant that I didn't want Jalyss taking my name. Much like asking permission from her father to marry, I see it as an outdated way of codifying women as property. My wife isn't an object, she isn't defined by me or her father.

Giving her surname up to take mine is denying her the agency to exist as a being separate from myself or her father. To me it suggests that her identity is conditional upon whichever man has responsibility for her, and whilst that works fine in a society or culture which denies women their own identity and agency, I didn't really want the first act of our marriage to be the transfer of ownership from Jalyss' father to me.

Jalyss, whilst not wanting to take my name, would have been quite happy to hyphenate her surname or just keep Zapf.

But I want us to share a name, to be a team, so having us just keep our own names didn't seem a good option. I want us to be linked by that thread of commonality, the unequivocal connectedness of having a shared identity.

I'm going to be honest here; writing this. I find myself getting uncomfortably close to expressing myself in such a way as to make it seem like it was solely my decision that Jalyss change her name. Which would be a betrayal of much of the sentiment behind the name change, as it means her actions were still based on my desire to not have her becomes Mrs Willetts. And so whilst it may look like this is just a groovy, granola eating left wing version of the same white, cis, male privilege showing through, I'd like to really make it clear that this was not the case of me simply coercing Jalyss into taking a new name so I could get my way.

I love Jalyss' maiden name, mainly, it has to be admitted, because it sounds like the noise of a futuristic weapon discharging into the vacuum of space.  So we wanted to maintain it, but I was also really keen that we do so through a gesture; a resolving commitment to one another that as we got married we each became part of a new family.

From Zapf and Willetts came Zapfletts,

Because that, for me, is what marriage is; a commitment to a new family. It's what Jalyss and I are, or at least what I hope we are. And part of that is sharing not just our lives, experiences, joy, frustration, money, passions, hobbies, illnesses, annoyances and mundanities with one another, but setting ourselves apart and distinguishing ourselves by name.

When I married Jalyss I did so knowing that it meant leaving behind a lot of what I had grown up with. I left my culture, my country, my job, friends and family. And I did so to form a new life, and a new family. It won't be the same as the life I had before, and my family will be new too. I've gained brothers and sisters in Jalyss' siblings.

And I've gained a wife, too.

But there's a part of me that also sees myself as having lost something, as well. I won't get to see my nephew grow up. I won't be there for birthdays, holidays, or weekends. I won't get to hang out with my Dad and watch the football, or go out for a cup of tea with my Mom after work. I won't get to irritate my Sister, or hang out with my cousins.

So, part of marrying Jalyss is me getting the opportunity to extend what it means to have a family, and who my family are. I love the grand gesture, and the radical deed. And the most obvious commitment we could make to one another, and to our new family replacing our old, is for a name change that represents that. From the distant, separate lines of Zapfs and Willetts', a brand new one. A joining of two families that creates a third.

I love that. What better way of signalling this new union, this new family than a distinct new break. And what better way of defining ourselves than a new name; one which speaks of where we came from whilst also placing us together.

And so, Zapfletts. I'm looking forward to explaining that to my kids.