Listen to the article, read by Yours Truly.
“MOMMY!”
My son yells from his room. In our room, my wife sleeps in her bed, and our baby boy, Levi, lies sucking on his pacifier in his pack-and-play.
“MOMMY!”
My 5-year-old yells from his room. The alarm clock, in a green glow above the dresser, shows 6:15 AM. My eyes flutter open as Levi, the 10-month-old, starts to whimper, cry, sit up in a yoga position of downward dog, and cry louder for us to get him up.
“MOMMY!”
Time goes on without any regard for people who live by it. 6:20, 6:30, 6:40… My wife groans from her bed. My back hurts. My stomach hurts. Sleep clings to my psyche like a succubus with long sharp claws and I want to sleep with Sleep like I used to before my human alarm clock.
“MOMMY!”
Reality starts to fill the room like carbon monoxide. It’s suffocating. Time to get up, a voice whispers in my head. Or was it my wife? I can’t. I moan from my bed and say, “Can we both get up?” I know that if I have to go take care of the screaming 5-year-old, the soft and gentle 2-year-old girl, and the baby, I’ll go crazy. I’ll yell and scream and fight like a child, having a bare-knuckled intellectually losing battle with a kid who still wears diapers overnight. I’ll want to gouge my eyes out to get him to stop yelling. I need help.
My wife groans again and rolls out of bed. When baby Levi sees her, his cries go up to 11, and starts shrieking. Menny, the 5 year old, knocks at our door. I can reach the door knob while still grasping the pillows like a forgotten lover and my words are laced with poison as I seethe, “Get back in your bed.”
He throws himself on the floor—the classic temper tantrum. I have those, too, but they usually involve yelling or cursing or staying up too late binge-watching and eating. A 5-year-old just throws his little body to the ground and cries some more. The finishing touch is the drool that escapes his gaping mouth as he yells. I wonder where he learned that from.
Sleep loses her battle with Reality, and I can slide on my pants and yesterday’s shirt (don’t forget the wool religious garment you have to wear, CA) and float out to the living room like Angelica Houston in The Addams Family. Quick, smooth, zombie-like.
My daughter is already on the couch, my wife is already grabbing yogurt pouches, and Menny is screaming from the room. I wonder if this is his way of being a rooster. A call to the morning that he has arisen and all must beckon to the 21st century alarm clock. No more rising by the sun, but rather, rising by the son.
This shit is hard, I think. Whoever said raising kids was fun? Recently, during Passover, a friend of mine said he took off the whole week from work. I also did that. I own Behind the Beard Media, a production company and marketing agency. My friend is a butcher. I asked him if it was hard during the week, if they did any activities, how he handled the mornings, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
His look was confused, shocked, alien. “I love hanging with my kids. I get to spend all day with them. It’s great.”
His words hit like a Bruce Lee kick to the chest. Do other people actually enjoy spending all that time with screaming little maniacs? I love my kids, but after a while, it feels like a sledgehammer is coaxing me for dinner.
SLAM. Pick up the crying baby.
SLAM. Fight with the five-year-old.
SLAM. Catch your daughter by her toe so she doesn’t fall out of her chair.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
Reality is a smooth criminal because I have no idea what he is talking about. If my wife and I spend hours upon hours with our kids with no breaks and no sitting down and no help we go ballistic. It’s like World War 3 and 4 all rolled up in one. Hiroshima’s got nothing on the Green residence when the bombs drop in our small 2-bedroom apartment.
This is where Reality’s second cousin creeps her deliberate drudgery into the picture. Doubt, the princess of Fear, sulks around the corner. She whispers indulgences in my ear and asks if I know what I’m doing. She licks my ear and says things like I am a loser, a failure, a mess, a shitty husband, father, and a jew. I have no strength to stand up to her sometimes. She is seductive and persuasive.
This shit is hard, I think. Where do I go from here? People say deep breathing, tapping pressure points on my skull or collarbone, taking a walk, or distracting myself are all good tools. You try deep breathing when the baby’s nose is running faster than my 40, the two-year-old is practicing juggling with a bowlful of blueberries, and the oldest of the wild bunch is cawing with such ferociousness that I hear our upstairs number get up much earlier than usual.
It’s a losing battle if I fight with guns. It’s a war that will keep on keepin’ on if I can’t get the driver some caffeine to stay awake. This shit is hard and it only gets harder when I fight. When I fight, they fight. And it’s the fighting that takes strength out of me. It takes my energy like an alien slurping my brain from my nose and I’m left holding an empty sack of what I used to be when I knew what I was doing.
My arsenal is more subtle than hand grenades and RPGs. I have to call upon an inner voice that mostly wants to kick me when I’m down and uppercut my chin when I’m not looking. I have to find the part of me that is connected to a higher sense of existence, a higher sense of purpose, a higher sense of being. This isn’t some woo-woo BS, this is the true Reality. I can decide how I feel about struggle. I can decide how I feel about a situation G-d has given me. It’s not with kicking and screaming and hair pulling and spittle that I will become the man I’ve dreamed of becoming since I was a slobbery boy–it’s with a perspective that skews challenges into opportunities.
Somehow, this is the point of life. Somehow, this is man’s greatest accomplishment. Make copies of yourself and raise them to be a contributing member of society. What’s the difference between my son screaming for his mother in the throes of the morning stretching her sunny arms and me writing into the existential void of the Internet?
The difference I see is that I don’t disturb everyone in the house before the sun peeks its hands and eyes around the trees and clouds. Other than that, we both share the same intention; we just express it differently.
I am awake, my son screams from his room.
I am here, he yells at the top of his lungs.
I am alive, his tears and drool sputter.
From that vantage point, we are the same. My son, the 5-year-old with an overnight diaper, is no longer different from me. We are one and the same. I’ve just graduated to wearing underwear overnight—no more, no less.
Cover Photo by Allen Taylor on Unsplash