By Ron Mattocks

If anyone has any doubts about how to raise a baby, they are living in the right day and age. It seems there are more resources, studies and products available for expecting couples than ever before. This is a far cry from my parent’s time when Dr. Spock covered all the baby care bases, and my mom treated rashes caused by my reusable diapers with a grayish cancer-causing cream while dad smoked Marlboros a few feet away. In the years that followed, awareness for a baby’s wellbeing increased, and being the hipsters they were, my parents kept up with the trends. In preparation for my sister’s arrival, for example, they slapped a thick coat of oil-base paint on my old crib to cover the chipped up lead-based layer I had gnawed on while teething. And toddlers would no longer be permitted to stand on the front seat of dad’s truck as I had; instead, my sisters would be securely strapped into something referred to as an “infant car seat,” a contraption that, as I recall, resembled a torture devise from SAW III.

Ah how things change. Aloe-laced disposable diapers are now carted off by the ton to huge landfills; babies chug down formula from BPA bottles; and car seats actually entertain riders with a rave-worthy array of blinking lights to help speed up the onset of ADD. Yet, as a soon-to-be father eleven years ago, such concerns were beyond my scope of comprehension. All I understood was that a baby was on the way. Beyond that, I was that guy who always turned to his wife in all baby-related matters. Gentlemen, this is a course of action I do not recommend. At some point in the pregnancy your partner will seek retribution for her discomfort; so to remain ignorant about childbirth turns you into one fat juicy target. And because I relied solely on my boys’ mom as my resource, I was the juiciest.

With my first son, she forced me to atone for my sin by watching her suffer through an excruciating thirty-six hour labor. Seeing her in such agony induced a guilt further compounded by the room’s TV being permanently set to Lifetime.

Unlike son number one, the length of the labor with son number two went much quicker except that the little guy didn’t want to come out. When his heartbeat dropped, it was decided to go in after him. Yeah, do that, I remember thinking just as the doctor brandished what looked to be an oversized set of metal salad tongs. Having grown up around farms, I’ve seen things even the Discovery Channel won’t air, but nothing compared to what I was about to witness next. Through some anatomical anomaly combined with voodoo witchcraft, that doctor shoved those ominous-looking salad tongs up inside a barely five-foot tall woman and then proceeded to pull out a baby.

By son number three, I considered myself a seasoned veteran of the delivery room, but that didn’t stop his mother from pulling one more stunt, this time holding off until the last minute before leaving for the hospital. To this day, I’m not sure if Good Housekeeping was sponsoring some sort of contest to see who could pop out a kid in the shortest amount of time after tying on a hospital gown, but if they were, then they would’ve had their winner.

“So you delivered your baby already,” the doctor said walking into the room after all the excitement.

Yeah, and guess what, Doc? I delivered something too right after my wife went from, “we’ve got time,” to “GET THERE NOW!”  in the space of five seconds.

Those days of my newborn ineptitude are long over, and will remain so thanks to a vasectomy. Still, I’m occasionally asked for advice by fathers-to-be. One story I usually share involves my middle son who had trouble sleeping due to stomach reflux, something I had always associated with portly, middle-aged men who OD’d on spicy Italian food, not babies.

One night my son’s crying woke me up, and I went to comfort him even though I was entirely unsure what sort of mommy miracle to perform once there. My first reaction, though, was to pick him up and rest his head on my shoulder in order to keep the reflux down. Then I started patting his back and rocking in the chair. Minutes later he was asleep, and it was a routine that continued for many nights afterward. I had no plan then, yet my improvisational parenting lead to an increased sense of trust in my mad baby skills. The point I try to make with these dads-to-be is that despite the wealth of information available to us, like a mother’s intuition, dads should learn to trust their guts too.

©HBG0410