Living the Cliché April 6, 2009

I think that one of the core values of my generation, or at least most of the people I grew up with, is originality. While we pretty much all want to belong, we also feel a strong need to be at least a little bit different. So I wouldn’t typically use phrases like “bundle of joy” without a noticeable dose of irony in my voice. Now, though, after I change Baby Ben’s diaper and swaddle him up real good, and he looks like a compact package of zen noticing and studying the world, I turn to Ania and say proudly, “Look at our little bundle of joy!”

There was an article in the Onion a long time ago – “Miracle of Birth Occurs for 83 Billionth Time“. When I first read it, I thought it was really funny and clever. Now, I’m a little offended, and find it kind of mean-spirited. Of course, it is 100% true and correct (and still funny), but to me it misses the point. The miracle isn’t so much that it happened generally, but that it happened to us. And for some reason, that feels incredibly special and unique. So maybe that is why I walk around, carrying Baby Ben like a football, telling people to “look at my little bundle of joy!” It just doesn’t feel like a cliché at all when it happens to you.

And so I’ve had all these moments where I am doing intensely mundane things but feeling really special and proud. Like the other day when I drove to Buy Buy Baby to buy a bunch of nipples for the bottles that came with the insanely expensive breast pump (you’d think they could throw in a few…). There I was, exhausted from sleeping the last three nights on the crappiest futon in the history of futons in the hospital room, trudging toward the check-out line with an arm-full of polymer nipples, and yet I felt like I was glowing. I stopped in front of a rack of bibs for 10 minutes, trying to decide which one best expressed the love and admiration my son must surely be reciprocating back to me (I settled on “MY DAD IS MY HERO” in camouflage, before snapping out of my trance and quickly moving along). I am no longer one of those people who is trying to fill up the baby registry with all manner of cute onesies and shock absorbing strollers. I am a dad who, even just a week in, has been in the trenches and feels like he now belongs to the club.