Welcome Changes

(Copyright 2008 by Valentine J. Brkich. First printed in the April edition of The Point magazine, Wexford, Pa.)

Recently, my baby daughter began speaking. I think her exact words were “Bwha, bwha, bwha, bwha…spppppppufffffffff,” with plenty of spit bubbles included. It’s not exactly the Gettysburg Address, but if you ask me, it’s pretty impressive for someone who’s never even heard of the alphabet.

I try to communicate with her by imitating her unique language, but she usually just stares back at me with that do-I-know-you look on her face. Plus, I can never really get the spit bubbles right. It’s funny, I’m never embarrassed about how I sound when I’m “talking” with my baby in her strange infant tongue. Strangers can be watching and I’ll still babble incoherently and make faces that only a 4th-grader can truly appreciate. But that’s what happens when you become a parent; you lose every last ounce of self-respect.

It’s amazing how much you really do change when you become a parent.

For example, often when I’m changing my baby’s diaper, she’ll pee on my hands. In years past, if anyone would’ve peed on my hands, I would’ve sprinted to the nearest sink and scrubbed them raw. Now, they get peed on all the time and, amazingly, it doesn’t bother me. That is, as long as it’s my daughter who’s doing the peeing.

Lately, we discovered that we can make our baby smile just by looking at her and going “buh, buh, buh, buh, buh.” Don’t ask me how we figured this out. Now we’re constantly buh-buh-buh-ing wherever we go, and we couldn’t care less who sees us. In other words, we’ve completely lost our minds.

Becoming a father has changed me in some positive ways, too. For one, I’m much more patient than I used to be.

For instance, when the baby wakes up and realizes she’s lost her pacifier or “binky” (technical term), she does what she does best: she cries. And so, either I or my wife (usually my wife) will get out of bed, stumble to the nursery and re-insert said binky into the baby’s mouth. Sometimes this does the trick. Sometimes, however, after just a few seconds, she spits out the binky again, which in turn triggers the crying. Then, it’s my turn to “zombie walk” to the nursery and re-insert the binky. This cycle continues until either the baby falls asleep or until her crying escalates to blood-curdling screaming.

Normally, if you asked me to get up over and over to do the same thing again and again, I would simply scoff at your request and return to my precious slumber. But as a parent, either you get up over and over to replace the binky or, instead of getting a few hours’ sleep, you get zilch. I’ve suggested using duct-tape to keep the binky from falling out of the baby’s mouth. My wife, of course, is against it. What is it with women and duct-tape anyways?

Yes, when you become a parent, change is inevitable. You just have to learn to bend and not break, as they say. Or as my daughter says, “Bwha, bwha…spppppppufffffffff.”