Oh… aren’t babies always full of surprises? The good ones, the bad ones, and the smelly ones. I mean, they’ve got to do at least some things to keep us on our toes, right? Otherwise, parenting would just be too easy.
My daughter has also been hard at work sprinkling delightful surprises in our lives with varying degrees of shock factor. I know she means well. Raising a child can easily turn into a monotonic grind of endless routines. Neither of us wants that, so here we are.
Bathing a Cat
One of her first works of art happened when she was around a month old. We were still getting acquainted with the various tasks of keeping her alive and healthy, one of them being bathing. Although bathing was touted as the go-to ritual to calm a baby before bedtime in all the articles I read and classes I watched, our kid, had quite the opposite experience.
Perhaps I was just bad at it, or perhaps my daughter could smell my nerves, but the moment she touched the water, her muscles tensed up and her eyes widened. Before long, she would burst into tears and flail her limbs about, which of course made the whole drill even worse. It was like bathing a cat.
But practice makes perfect, right? During one of those early practices, I held her in the towel, uttered a prayer under my breath, and placed her in the tub. Immediately, there was that existential crisis in her eyes again. It wasn’t a promising start, but I pushed through clumsily nevertheless as she cried and struggled. After all, that was nothing I hadn’t seen before, until it was.
River of Gold
In my peripheral vision, I suddenly noticed a tinge of gold flowing around her leg region. As I struggled to comprehend what just happened, it slowly gathered into a swirling pool of brown, then I finally realized what was going on. That was when my life flashed before my eyes.
No, not really, but close. I mean, I had a lot of practice with handling this kind of thing on land. But an aquatic environment was a completely different story. Staring at the ever-growing watercolor, I struggled to wrap my head around the situation, or anything around that situation for that matter. My brain churned through multiple scenarios to search for an “elegant solution”, but all of them involved a lot more innocent linens than I started with.
Meanwhile, from my wife’s point of view, I looked basically catatonic for almost a minute. She kindly offered to help but I didn’t even know where to begin. A few sacrificial towels, a new tub of water, another round of bathing, and a laundry cycle later, the calm eventually returned to our house. To me, it was just a blur.
Scarred for Life?
I don’t think I was clinically traumatized by that incident, but I still get chills when I see that bathtub. Every time I bathe my daughter now, I essentially carry her in the front and paranoia on my back. If she hasn’t pooped during that day, I simply refuse to bathe her. My wife, being the amazingly understanding woman she is, now takes on the lion’s share of bathing duty.
Even so, I don’t want to excuse myself from this task altogether just because of a trauma. Occasionally, I take the opportunity to see if I can overcome the anxiety and bathe my child gleefully as normal parents do. Most of the time, we both come out of the bathroom unscathed, thankfully. Then came that day.
I thought the past was behind me and I could finally lather, rinse, and repeat without my heart rate going through the roof. Just when I was getting ready for that sigh of relief, I saw a tiny fountain impishly welling up from the water’s surface. My mind turned blank again while I got lost in this little “entertainment”. When the show was over, I had nothing left but a smile of resignation. “Okay, one of each, I guess.”
As soon as I looked up to see how she was doing, there went that big, wide, toothless smile of hers again. I couldn’t help but burst into laughter because I was literally witnessing a microcosm of parenthood unfolding before my eyes. Besides, none of my anxiety or unease stood a chance against her signature smile.
“Alright, sweetie. Let’s try this again.”
~ Du