I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [14]
Having spent as much time as I have with a colicky baby, I am not so quick to judge a young mother who might snap and somehow hurt or even kill her child.
It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. I am not a monster. And I’m not saying it isn’t wrong.
Let me repeat myself: IT’S WRONNNNNNNN-GGGGG !
But I was a well-educated twenty-six-year-old who certainly had a grasp of right and wrong. And I had help: when my wife came home from work, she took over the primary care of the baby. But we all know from reading the papers that there are young single moms who find themselves trapped with an infant who is breaking them. And after hours and hours and hours, where there is no escape for them, some of them snap.
It’s not right. I know that, and so do you. But I just have a small understanding of how it could happen. And it’s a tragedy.
One thing I did notice about myself in my brief stint at child-rearing is that I never developed any real communication skills with the infant—or with any infant, for that matter. I felt like an utter idiot when I gee-geed or gaa-gaaed or goo-gooed. “Did you see the itty butterfly? Pretty. The itty-bitty pretty butterfly. Did you?” Of course he didn’t. HE WAS TOO BUSY BAWLING HIS EYES OUT!
Sorry. I know it’s probably the right thing to do, to talk to a baby as if he can actually understand you, I just wasn’t any good at it. I’d talk to the kid, but I was never fully committed to it. And I knew he wasn’t really listening. I have the same problem today when I try to talk to God.
Coincidence? You tell me.
We can move on now.
I am sure that this experience has a lot to do with the way I view parenthood today. The first shrink I spent time with after the blood tests came back and the dust settled and I knew I wasn’t a father, said I’d never get over it. That wasn’t good news. And it certainly didn’t help to know that. I just really wanted to know how I could ever trust my taste in women again. So I was looking for a little more encouragement—or at least a bit of positive bullshit—from someone who was actually getting paid to help me. (And shouldn’t that be a course for shrinks before they graduate? Better Bullshit 101? It might be the most useful course future psychiatrists could ever take.)
The fact still remained that until I did (as they so insanely put it) “the right thing” and married my pregnant girlfriend, parenthood wasn’t at the top of my list of goals for my life.
And what exactly is “the right thing”? And for whom exactly is it “right”? Her? Maybe. The baby? For a while. Me? Not so much. I guess two out of three means you’ve got a winner. I would love to know how successful doing “the right thing” has been across the centuries. Are there any stats on this? Maybe the “right thing” isn’t so right. There’s a reason they call it a shotgun wedding. Someone is taking a bullet, for sure. It could be the mom, the pop, or the baby, or any combo platter.
One thing I do know is I don’t believe in “the right thing” anymore. You do the thing where the least amount of damage is inflicted on that helpless infant. And getting married may be the worst thing you can do.
But then again, you can understand, I am a little jaded.
And so I lie there in my warm bed, on a day that I don’t really celebrate, and I feel alone. “Where is my lovely wife and my adoring children?” I think. Have I made a horrible mistake? Have I taken the wrong path in the Robert Frost poem? Two roads diverged in a yellow wood? And what the fuck does “diverged” mean? Will I never know these great joys of life? Is it too late?
“Nonsense, Lewis,” I think. “You’re still young by today’s standards. You can do it. You don’t have to be alone. All you’ve got to do, Lewis, is fall in love, get married, and have a child, so by the time you’re seventy-five you can play catch with him. So that when you miss the kid’s fastball and it drills into your chest, crushing your sternum and throwing you against the metal patio furniture, shattering your pelvis, you can die happily, content in the knowledge that you were