Raising Cubby (5 page)

Cubby was born less than twenty minutes later. Unlike me, he came out in the normal way, with no need for scalpels or pliers. When I was born the doctor had grabbed my head with forceps and squashed it hard as he pulled me out. According to my mother, I emerged looking like an early Conehead. Seeing my misshapen skull, she thought I must have brain damage. The doctor told her I’d be fine, but she always thought that was why I ended up kind of different. Nothing like that happened to Cubby. The doctor dangled him by the feet, and he made a little yell of protest. Everyone smiled except for Cubby, though he wasn’t called Cubby yet. He just frowned and made squally noises.

One of the first things they did was put Cubby onto the scale. Six pounds, six-tenths of an ounce, or half the weight of Small Animal, our pet cat. I’d caught bigger bass when I was fourteen. He was a little bit shorter than my forearm, wet, and red. He was also bald, and roaring steadily. Everyone had smiled at the first howl, and his mom still looked happy, but after a few minutes of steady roar some of the hospital staff looked like they were starting to wonder where the off switch was located.

They swaddled our newborn son in a blanket and handed him to Little Bear, who admired him for a moment and then passed him
to me. Between us, he settled down. I wasn’t sure if the handoff was part of a ritual, but I thought not, because I knew Mom didn’t have any more baby experience than me. Ritual or not, I wanted to be sure the baby I brought home was the same one I was holding that very moment in the delivery room.

The truth was, I had a fear of baby swapping. Like most people, I had read news stories of baby exchanges (usually, but not always, accidental) with some sense of amusement. But now that I faced the possibility of a personal swap experience I did not find it funny at all. Prior to hatching time, I had studied the layout and operation of the standard baby spaces in hospitals. Armed with that knowledge, I’d made a plan.

The first and most important step was to get a positive ID on him. A nurse had slipped a name bracelet around his arm, but I knew that could be pulled off and swapped as fast as she’d put it on. I wanted something more personal and I was ready. When the doctor handed me our new hatchling, I quickly but discreetly wiped off his foot and tagged him with a Sharpie permanent marker. He was now the only baby anywhere with a little black triangle on his foot: a delta, the Greek symbol that signifies uncertainty and change. Whatever else he did, he would certainly bring us that.

With his ID assured, I smiled and handed him to his mom. We were safe. Even if other people carried him away for testing or evaluation, we could be sure of getting the same baby back.

The doctors and nurses looked at me a bit funny, but I didn’t care. I had not inspected the baby-holding facility at Cooley Dickinson Hospital before that night; for all I knew it was just a big open pen, like the Sunderland fish hatchery. There was no way you’d tell one fish from another without a slime-proof marker. I had looked at the other kids in the ward, and none of them were solidly tagged. Did baby swaps happen often? For all I knew, depraved nurses shuffled babies for entertainment. That was something I might do if I was a bored maternity nurse late at night. Once
when I was a teenager, a group of us did that with cars, swapping identical-looking red Toyotas and watching the confusion as their owners tried to figure out how their cars had mutated overnight. (We took advantage of the fact that the key to Doug’s dad’s Toyota fit a number of other vehicles.)

I have never trusted authority. To me, the idea the hospital would keep track of him was just ridiculous.

I was surprised to discover that few people shared my point of view. Some of them actually questioned my actions. “You wrote on your baby?” Their tone of voice suggested they could not believe I would mark my kid, but why not? At work I marked my tools to keep them from getting stolen. All I could figure was, those people had never looked at a sea of babies basking under baby warmers and tried to pick out the one that was theirs. Also, the nurses had given Little Bear some awfully powerful painkillers, and if Cubby was taken away and mixed in with other newborns, I doubted that she could recognize him either. The fact is, identifying a baby can be a lot more difficult than identifying someone older. I knew that intuitively. Babies don’t have many distinguishing marks; they are too young for scars and tattoos. Furthermore, they change fast. You can look at two newborns, one bald and the other speckled, and their hair might grow in to look exactly the same a week later. Given all that, marking a brand-new kid seemed like a no-brainer.

It is possible that I have a particular difficulty in recognizing people I have just met. Neurologist Oliver Sacks has that problem; he’s written about it in
The Mind’s Eye
and other books. My poor recognition capacity might have made me unusually fearful about identifying my own kid. Then again, maybe I am just wiser and more cautious than most. After all, the onus of baby recognition was entirely on me. There was no way the baby would know me from Adam, and even if he did, he couldn’t say so.

As it turned out, the markings were not really needed, because no one tried to take Cubby away from us. Mom held him tight as
they rolled her to a room where they could rest. After that, she retained possession of him until they were both released the following day. I had him in my sight all the way home, and within a week, when my mark wore off, I had gotten sufficiently familiar with him that I felt confident that I could recognize him anywhere. Thanks to my Sharpie, I have no regrets, and a strong sense of confidence in Cubby’s origins.

After our baby was born, I followed Little Bear to her room and sat with them as long as I could. Finally I had to go to sleep. I wished there was a place I could lie down too, but there wasn’t. I headed home to bed, excited and scared at the same time. I was thrilled at the thought of a new baby, but worried about my ability to be a good dad and the possibility that Cubby might be damaged or nonfunctional, or even that he wouldn’t survive.

My brother and my parents told me my fears were ridiculous and that Cubby would be just fine. I heard their words, but I was convinced they were just saying them to make me feel better. They were not in the room, looking at Cubby. Even if they had been, they had no knowledge of medicine or statistics, the two things that might have offered solid comfort to a logical guy like me.

I knew the odds of an ordinary, viable infant were in my favor, but I couldn’t help being worried. Psychologists call that thought pattern catastrophizing: imagining disaster at every turn of events. Today I know that’s an Aspergian trait. However, I didn’t know about Asperger’s back then; I just knew my new baby was one more thing to be worried about.

A few of my male friends offered advice based on their own experience as parents. “We all worry we won’t be good dads. All we can do is do our best.” That was a practical acknowledgment that I could accept.

The broken-baby fears were less easily allayed. My newborn baby didn’t talk, and I had no test data. In the electronics world, we called that flying blind, and sometimes our creations blew up when we did it. Yet I saw no alternative. One encouraging sign was visible in his mom: Her ulcers went away once he was born. As she got healthier, I felt better about Cubby’s chances.

Other people acted horrified when I expressed doubt that Cubby would remain alive and functional. Why? When someone goes to the hospital with a heart attack people wonder exactly the same thing, and they say the odds improve with every day of survival. I figured the same was true for a baby. Being born was surely as big a deal as having a heart attack, so every day a baby lived meant the odds for long-term survival increased.
What was horrible about that?
Other people’s attitudes seemed strange to me.

Then there was my basic insecurity—my inability to believe that he was really with us to stay. To combat those feelings, I began telling people about my new baby boy right away. For some reason, the act of describing Cubby to others made him seem less ethereal and more real to me.

Little Bear carried him around with her much of the time when he was new. He slept on top of her or next to her on the bed. Sometimes I would place him on the bed next to me and we’d both fall asleep. I was always afraid I’d roll over and suffocate him, but that never happened. Still, we knew he needed a place of his own. We didn’t have much money, so we lined a nice yellow laundry hamper with a soft blanket and he was in hog heaven.

One of the problems with babies is that they howl, at high volume and at inopportune times. If some of the accounts I’ve read are to be believed, an energetic baby can make sleep for the parents
just about impossible. Cubby wasn’t all that bad, but he sure had his moments. Most of the time, Little Bear would soothe him with nursing or rocking. When her techniques failed to work, I resorted to my own secret baby-management measures.

First I picked him up, bounced him a bit, and trotted him around the house. That often worked, but his mom always watched me and said, “Be careful with him. His little brain is fragile.” He didn’t seem all that fragile to me, but I was cautious anyway. He still had a soft spot on his head, and there was no telling how mushy the brains inside might be.

I wondered about things like that a lot. I didn’t want to make any mistakes with this dadhood thing. I knew some new dads had prior experience raising gerbils, hamsters, or snakes, and others had read lots of books or gone to classes. I hadn’t been able to do much at all, and now that he was here, I had to work twelve hours a day to keep my new business alive to support him. I tried remembering what my little brother had been like, but that was many years ago and it didn’t do much good now. So I just did the best I could.

Cubby would cling to me pretty well if I gave him a chance, but the rest of him was floppy. His head was the floppiest part of all. It seemed pretty big relative to the rest of him, and he usually had trouble holding it steady. When we rode in the car, it would bob around like those springy toys they sell, as we went over bumps or around corners. I could never tell if he was too little to hold himself steady or if he just let it roll because he liked the motion. I was that way myself at times. Bobbing and rocking has always been a comfort, and people used to say I looked like a bobblehead. Maybe he was the same.

I suggested that to Little Bear, but she dismissed it out of hand. “He hasn’t developed the muscles in his neck,” she said. I wondered where she got that particular idea, since she didn’t have any more parenting experience than me. I realized she must have been reading baby how-to manuals while I was away at work.

When bouncing Cubby around the house failed to settle him down, we moved to plan B: We went for a ride. That always worked. Cubby went right to sleep in the car. That made him a good traveler most of the time, and it inspired me to take him places. Wherever we went, he found new things to look at and interesting objects to stuff in his mouth.

The older he got, the farther we ranged. It was good for Cubby to see the world, I reasoned. He was going to have to learn his way around one day, and I figured he might as well start now. I told him the names of streets and described the interesting places we passed. Even though he didn’t answer, I knew he was paying attention. He sat there in his car seat, chewing placidly and watching the world go by.

I knew how important reading was, so I started showing Cubby words as soon as he was able to sit up in the seat. The words we saw were on billboards, on vehicles, and in the windows of gas stations. Anytime I saw a glowing sign with simple language I read it to my son. “Trucks,” I would say, as I pointed to the sign leading to the truck parking area at the local diner. In that way, he learned the language of commercialism. When he learned to talk, he began with what he heard in ads and what I read him from signs—words like
Bud, diesel, bathroom
, and
food
. I didn’t smoke or drink, and neither did he, but we knew all the language thanks to roadside America.

All babies love to chew, and he was no exception. He had pacifiers and traditional baby rings, but he wasn’t a picky chewer. He’d stick anything in his mouth at least once. If I let my fingers stray close he would even gnaw on me. When that happened, I would yell, and he snorted with delight. Obviously, he knew what he was doing.

“No bite!” I would tell him. Often as not, he would bite me again.

He would even attempt to eat metal if given the chance. He would also try and feed me the drool-covered objects of his attention,
something I found particularly revolting even though he was just being companionable.

I had loved the taste of wooden Tinker Toys when I was a kid. Wood is nice and chewy, with a definite flavor. Beavers love it. Cubby loved wood too. He found his in the form of Brio wooden trains and wooden track sections. They were perfect for a toddler—tasty enough to provide hours of enjoyment, yet tough enough to remain basically unmarked by his emerging baby teeth.