My Baby Likes to Goose Step

Oy vey...

I’m two weeks into being a dad, and the most common questions I get are the variations on whether or not I miss sleep. It’s almost always other men who ask this question. They usually ask it like Max Fischer in Rushmore asking Herman Blume “Were you in the shit” in Vietnam, as if I’m about to enter into a world of horror straight out of the mind of Stephen King or something. Some of them say it with a chuckle, telling me things like “Enjoy never sleeping again,” while others will reflect on their beautiful memories of early fatherhood, then shake their head and go, “Man, I don’t miss being up all night with that kid.” Meanwhile, the moms share tips with each other on how to make it feel like somebody isn’t sticking a bunch of little pins in their nipples and various ways to not feel lonely in the first weeks of “Eat. Sleep. Poop. Repeat.” The whole division of labor thing comes clearly into focus once you’ve had a child. My wife carried the baby, pushed the baby out, and now she’s got to spend her days letting the kid feed from her every few hours, counting down the days until she can start wearing normal clothes and having some sort of life again. I change diapers and do a few other things to keep the house going. I’ve got a long laundry list of chores that includes doing the laundry, but this whole new father thing isn’t the Clockwork Orange experiment other men made it out to be. The lack of sleep isn’t so bad—it’s my legs that are killing me from all the goose-stepping around like Col. Klink playing Mr. Mom.

I got a healthy baby. That was all I wanted. Everything else, I figured, we’d hash out along the way. And so far, the kid has been really easy to work with. Sure, she loves to eat, but so do I. I can’t blame her if she’s inherited my appetite. She doesn’t cry all the time, but when she does, I’ve learned quickly that the little girl has an impressive set of pipes for her. She seems to settle down relatively quickly most of the time, but there’s also this predatory thing where she knows Emily and I are at the end of our energy supply, and that’s when she strikes. She just goes off, demanding more milk, a nap, her diapers changed, or some other thing she can’t explain to us in any other way besides her howl. And the other night, when the howling didn’t stop, and we were at that place every new parent eventually comes to where we begin to panic because we have no clue what’s happening—Oh my god she won’t stop crying—should we call 911? Am I ruining her entire future? Are we awful parents???—Emily mentioned she read something on a forum where a woman said the only thing that calmed her baby down was when her husband held the child in his arms and marched around the house like he did in the army. One person after the other in the comments said things like, “OMG, that’s all that works for my baby,” over and over, but buried in the middle of all that was one person claiming they needed to do something more specific. They goose-stepped around the house and it put the baby right to sleep.

“Lies,” I said as I picked my child up and started marching her around the house. I imagined I was in one of the training scenes in Full Metal Jacket, except gently singing “Left. Left. Right. Left” like a lullaby.

I got nothing except more screaming, so I started bouncing her a little as we walked. Nada. My child was not impressed. In fact, I’d say she was downright pissed given that I’m the only person she knows right now besides her mother, and at least my wife has something to offer when it comes to feeding time. I looked over to Emily. I could see it in her eyes she needed a break, even for a few extra minutes. It was the least I could do for her given how much she’s gone through the last nine months, I reasoned as I kicked my right leg forward, then the left. Right, left. Right, left. Like a very out-of-shape can-can girl, I found myself mimicking the march I’d seen in countless documentaries and over-acted dramas. I thought about how my dad, the son of Holocaust survivors, used to always talk in a high-pitched German accent, which I later learned was his “Hitler voice,” whenever somebody in a Mercedes or Volkswagon cut him off. Then I started thinking about how I was six or seven when my mother took me to see a memorial dedicated to victims of the Shoah and explained to me—possibly at too early an age—why I didn’t have that big of a family like some of the other kids around me. I was teeter-totting between feeling like I was making fun of something and feeling bad about it until I realized I had started singing “Springtime for Hitler and Germany. Deutschland is happy and gay. We're marching to a faster pace. Look out, here comes the master race,” without even realizing it. Even better, my baby had fallen asleep.

I’m still learning soothing techniques. Everybody tells you their trick, but then doctors and doulas are quick to remind you that you’re the only one who knows your baby. Right now, I find that she likes Brian Eno’s ambient stuff and Max Richter’s reworking of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and the wee hours of the morning are spent listening to old Ram Dass talks and a podcast my friend Jami told me about called “This Jungian Life.” I’m more of a Freud guy, but you can’t beat the chill tones of three Junghead analysts talking about their boy on near-death experiences or his connection to the Kabbalah. My baby seems to have good taste, although I recognize she’s only been living in our world for two weeks so everything is new and weird. I get it. I also get the marching thing, the way my body moves and how it probably comes close to reminding her of the sensation of where she spent the last nine months. I just wish it wasn’t so, you know, Germany circa 1938. So to counter it, I’ve just kept singing songs from The Producers, tossing in some Sound of Music and also making up anthems on the fly that sound regal and tough but are actually about my baby taking poops. I’ve also been researching other military paces, getting her into the French Foreign Legion march while playing the Band & Choir version of “Le Boudin” for her. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try the RAF march. Maybe she’s more of a British girl. Anything is better than this goose-step.

Some reading material

I’ve been reading a lot when I’m not teaching my baby new army marches. That’s really where I’m at right now, and I hope you won’t mind me sharing a few things I liked recently.

Old Boesky after the fall is a look.

Ivan Boesky died this week. Upon hearing the news, I immediately went and re-read the 1993 Vanity Fair article “Hunting for Ivan Boesky.” I love the opening so much, where the writer walks into the disgraced Wall Street titan’s post-prison home in San Diego: “his bedroom swims in silent morning sunshine, the only trace of its notorious occupant a pack of Marlboros at the bedside and a framed quotation on the Holocaust from Simon Wiesenthal sitting on the floor beneath a table. “I did not forget you,” it says.”

Go see the Morris Katz exhibition: I can’t really go anywhere right now, but I’d be at the exhibit at Yivo right now if I could.

Hacks Homes: Tyler Watamanuk continues to be one of my favorite people when it comes to anything design-oriented. His latest at Dirt looks at the various homes on Hacks, which I think is the best show on TV right now.

Moby and the shape of things to come: Play came out 25 years ago. Does anybody even remember what it was like a quarter-century ago? Well, children, it was a much different world. A bald man named Moby put out an album that was literally everywhere, and Ed Gillett at The Quietus looks at how it’s been everything from “the epitome of late-capitalist muzak, infamously licensed for commercial use more than any album before or since; a thread connecting America’s post-industrial present to its rural past, through its extensive sampling of African-American folk music; and the butt of more than its fair share of jokes, a naff reminder of millennial chill-out sounds,” and how it influenced everything that came after for better or worse.