Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood Read Online Free PDF Page A

do was put her on a pillow! Child: solved!
    I closed the door and the baby began screaming instantly. I went back in and tried putting a pacifier in her mouth, but she was crying and shaking her head back and forth and her mouth became a moving target. There was audible evidence of a mouth present, but goddamn if I could find it. I took a finger and scoured her face in the dim light for a set of lips, then managed to sneak the pacifier in. She spit it right back out. Babies aren’t stupid. They know what you’re trying to pull. They don’t want you taking shortcuts.
    I picked the girl up and changed her diaper again. She immediately threw up onto the changing pad, so now I had to engage in bodily fluid triage, trying to figure out if the shit should be wiped up first or the spit-up. I chose the shit, changing her diaper first and then giving her a new outfit. But she wouldn’t stop going nuts. Maybe she needed food. Maybe she needed to make up for the milk she’d just spit up. I know I always like eating right after vomiting.
    “Do you want more to eat? Is that what you want?”
    WAHHHHHHHHHH!
    I got her more to eat.
    I went to the bathroom and filled up a new bottle. At this point, I was failing in my efforts to remain half-asleep. I did my best to remain partially comatose so that, whenever this ordeal was over, I would fall right back asleep. But that hope was dashed now. I was legitimately awake. I took the baby down to the TV room and fed it while watching a Food Network show on mute, holding the bottle awkwardly, like when a child feeds a baby goat at the petting zoo. She wasn’t interested in the milk. I stood up and walked around with her to calm her down, but she kept right on crying. I grabbed another pacifier and wiggled it around in her mouth, as if to anchor it in the back of her throat. She spit it out, so I put it back in again and held her close to my chest so that spitting out the pacifier was physically impossible. My spine was quietly falling apart. I had already had two operations on my back, the second one coming two weeks before the baby was born. My then-pregnant wife saw me lying on the hospital gurney before my operation and was like, “It’s supposed to be ME on that thing, you bastard.” My back was not yet equipped to handle the yeoman’s work of carrying a baby around constantly, but the baby clearly didn’t give a shit about my troubles. “Please fall asleep,” I begged her. “Please, please, please. I’ll do anything. I promise I’ll never try to sing to you again
.
”
    But she just went on crying. I mouthed a quiet
fuck it
, took her back into the nursery, and put her in the crib, still crying. You aren’t supposed to let a baby cry out the night until they’re much older, around three to six months. Leaving a crying two-month-old is thoughtless, selfish, and cruel. But again, I was very tired.
    I left.
    I went back to the bedroom and didn’t bother to turn the monitor back on. My thinking was:
If a baby is crying and no one can hear it, is it
really
upset?
I thought not. My wife, who was supposed to be sleeping, was quick to let me know she didn’t share my viewpoint. I don’t know how she managed to wake up after
not
hearing something, but there you have it.
    “You have to turn the monitor back on.”
    “No way. I’m not turning that thing back on.”
    “Fine. Then I’ll get the baby.”
    She got up and started walking out.
    “Wait!” I said. “Does this count as your shift? Because this totally shouldn’t count as your shift.”
    “Go to bed, Drew.”
    And I did. I slid into bed and it felt as if the bed were embracing me, as if I were nestled in the palm of some greater supernatural being. So soft and warm, I wanted to die inside of it. Nothing could pull me away. My wife was with the child now, but they were far away, in some other universe where things are loud and turbulent and nothing like the land of purple unicorns that I was entering. I became a