tear pressure

Nobody seems to talk about it.

One friend (pastor, father of four) says it doesn’t bother him. Another (engineer, father of two) claims he doesn’t even hear it.

So maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just happen to have a hole in my soul, a little leak that lets in my baby’s frantic screams and traps them, where they swirl and compound and escalate until I’m roaring on the inside. Roaring: it’s all I can do to keep from pitching the breakfast table through the bump-out window.

Do other fathers feel this? I hear pat-on-your-back jokes about sleep deprivation and what babies do to a couple’s sex life, but that’s all. No one ever said a newborn would make me struggle with anger.

The first lesson I learned about fatherhood was that my son is stronger than me. I barely make it through the five hours every Monday night that I’m on solo duty. No matter how well I prepare myself – afternoon nap, low expectations, calm breathing – his tirades boil my blood. And there’s no outlasting him, since the angrier he becomes, the stronger he gets.

Why can’t he fall asleep without shredding his vocal chords? Are all babies like him? Is he broken?

His screaming makes no sense, but it wouldn’t be an issue if it didn’t draw out of my body physiological responses beyond my control. My breathing becomes shallow; my body heats up; my jaw clenches into fists on either side; my arms squeeze him in a tighter hold. None of this is conscious – it’s only when I start removing layers of clothing to cool off (often right down to my boxers) that I recognize what’s happening. Then it’s time to force myself to relax and start the breathing exercises.

Little wonder that some people shake babies: it’s simply the next step (albeit a criminal one) in a line of escalating physical responses. If it wasn’t my baby – if I were an au paire or daycare worker, without a vested interest in the future well-being of the child – and if I hadn’t learned about breathing techniques, or didn’t feel free to strip down to my underwear – I’d end up shaking a baby too.

How wise for the Bible to tell fathers not to exasperate their children – a command I now see in a turn-the-other-cheek light, since there’s a whole lot of exasperating going on in the other direction.

For a book that reports on so much begetting, the Bible’s strangely silent on all the stress that begetting begets.

* * * * *

It’s not his fault, of course. I know that … consciously. Convincing my subconscious is a different matter.

In my pre-fatherhood days I believed differently. I’d look at a frantic, screaming newborn and think there was no better example of original sin. Anyone who spoke of perfection and unspoiled innocence was obviously a humanist zealot in denial of newborns’ utter selfishness. Babies want what they want, and they make the lives of everyone around them a tortuous hell until they get it.

But now I’ve seen, too many times, my son looking sweetly into my eyes while shunting into his britches a raucous spray of feces, and I know that he is categorically unaware. He burps and pees, farts and hiccups without anticipation, reflection or control. No self-conscious person would urinate in his own face. He’s done it four times without a lick of shame.

So babies don’t cry because they’re sinful – they cry because they can’t rein in their impulses. Any adult lacking self-control would behave the same way. Case in point: a friend (doctor, father of two) told me that he never cries, ever – except for the sole occasion when, coming out of surgery, groggy with anesthesia, he wept for the better part of half an hour, forcefully, as if grieving for the pain of the entire human race. “I don’t know where it all came from,” he said. “It’s not like I’m depressed or have emotional scars or anything. I’ve always been pretty happy with my life.” And yet once the anesthesia released his conscious hold on himself, the floodgates opened to some hidden, completely subconscious sorrow.

I wonder if we’re all like that. Growing into adulthood, we learn to choke our emotions by wrapping ourselves in steel, layer after layer, until we’re fortified as a pressure tank. The petty grievances of life assail us and we clench our little sorrows close, trapping them inside where they build. A bit of emotion may escape here or there, of course, but otherwise we’re contained, stable, mature. Only a severe blow – a death in the family, a cheating spouse – can pierce our hulls and make us lose control.

Either that, or we succumb to a campaign of attrition, a steady barrage that erodes our steel layers one by one. Which is why, after three sleepless nights amid the fears and joys of childbirth, after my son’s circumcision I broke down in frame-wracking sobs.

* * * * *

Frame-wracking sobs happen to be a daily routine for my baby. His particular specialty is frame-wracking screams, which he serves up with the force and passion of a person being flayed alive. His unspoiled innocence is the pure and free expression of his emotions, unfettered by social custom, unfettered even by his own past. Not ten seconds after a hearty red-faced squall, he can cackle at a toy or hum as he eats. The past, as he smiles through wet eyes, is gone. When no feeling goes unexpressed, no pressure ever builds. He is the perfect transcendentalist, living solely in the moment.

Not me. Once my son calms down or begins eating or falls asleep, every ounce of restraint I’ve mustered to resist tossing him out the window still flexes within me. The desire to kick through a door doesn’t just switch off and disappear. At times, after handing him off to my wife, I have punched the floor, kicked cardboard boxes, blasted epithets at the world. (I imagine that’s what my screaming son would be doing, were he my size.)

“Maybe we should buy me a punching bag,” I suggested one night. It wasn’t a joke – obviously I was in need of a healthy, non-destructive outlet.

My wife, due to her female persuasion, didn’t get it. “Why not just work on your anger? Why do you have to break something?” It’s an easy question for her to ask – she has two magic buttons that calm our son easily. Besides, she rides his nuclear tantrums with such cool resolve that I suspect breastfeeding hormones are related to those mood-enhancing aromatherapy scents.

Still, I took her question at face value, pondering it for several minutes before answering. “It’s like stretching a rubber band to shoot at someone,” I said. “You pull it wider and wider and wider, until it’s under all that tension, cocked and ready to shoot. What’s easier to do at that point: let fly, or ease it in until it’s slack?”

A friend of mine (physicist, father of three) put it more eloquently. When I told him I wasn’t cut out to be a dad, he explained that our brains are hard-wired to respond to an infant crying. The sound is impossible for us to ignore – and that’s a good thing, in that it prevents us from channel surfing instead of interacting with our kids. But when no interaction manages to help, when every possible solution has been exhausted and the child still shrieks at peak frustration, our brains can’t alter their programming and ignore the signal to respond. No act suffices; the stimulus escalates; we feel even more compelled to act; no act suffices. Fundamentally, it’s a lack of control.

And as everyone knows, men don’t do well when it comes to a lack of control.

* * * * *

Understanding that doesn’t negate the aggravation of it all.

One of my resolutions has been to acknowledge my emotions, rather than stuffing them into some smiley sack of happy parenthood. Denial helps nothing. My wife spent the first two months denying that our baby was fussy, out of the concern that I wouldn’t love a fussy child. To be fair to her, my anger issues weren’t something either of us anticipated, and they worried her. But the result? Two months of me wondering if I was insane, unable to handle what fathers around the world have been handling for millennia.

I still feel that way, and worry about the years to come. If I find parenthood difficult now, when my son can’t control his impulses, how will I deal with a toddler who willfully disobeys me? Or a teenager who speaks back in disrespect?

They say that a father is a reflection of God, our Heavenly Father. My son’s first impressions of God will come from his relationship with me. And what is my poor example poised to teach? At times, when sleeplessness aches like a migraine and the entire parenting experience seems more negative than not, my paternal love corrodes into downright hostility. What kind of father am I?

Ironically, the reason my wife and I decided to step into parenthood was because we’d sensed that we were becoming inward-focused and shallow. We wanted a kid to make us grow beyond ourselves; we wanted to taste something of God’s love for us through our love for our child.

Ha! Little did I know I’d be exposed as even more selfish, impatient, hard-hearted and hopeless than I’d ever suspected.

Maybe – at least, I hope – that’s the first step of the journey into parenthood: recognizing how far it is you have to go.

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copyright © 2005, michael w. hobson