8 Seconds

Hemingway famously said that "there are only three sports, bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are games." I would like to add a fourth to the list: child rearing.

I have come to see the raising of a child as a kind of rodeo sport, a surrealist and prolonged sort of bull riding which starts with the breaking of the waters and ends with the breaking of the mind. Aside from the length of the ride (8 seconds vs. a lifetime) the differences are mostly cosmetic: bull riders start their charge ringed by chiseled men in identical Stetsons, baby rearers start theirs ringed by frumpy women in identical blue scrubs; bulls go charging and snorting into the ring, babies go kicking and wailing into the night, every night, starting at 3 a.m. and ending at 6:30, when they are finally awake for good, and the parents, bleary-eyed and exhausted, are free to glare at their merrily chirping little calf with some groggy mixture of mirth and resentment; bulls are judged by their surliness, babies by their sweetness. The structures of these games are identical: in both case, it is the raw power of the beast that makes for the sport, and in both case, the sportsman hangs on by a thin chord, contorts himself reflexively, leaves one hand grasping for clouds. How odd that Hemingway, with his three children, failed to see the sportsmanlike dimensions of this activity! Is it possible that we have divergent notions of child rearing?

Benjamin has reached a problem stage. In practical terms, all this means is that his parent suddenly find themselves chin deep in deadlines, and Bensoosco, for all his seemingly cheery demeanor and bonhommie and who-could-ask-for-a-better-baby veneer, doesn't give a shit. He gets up at 3 a.m., and 4 a.m., and 5 a.m., on the hour, every hour, sometimes to grumble, sometimes to eat, sometimes just to say hello and drift happily back to sleep. His nap schedule is a disaster: some days its down at 9:30, others it's 11, sometimes for an hour and a half, sometimes for half an hour. Nothing throws a thesis-driven, deadline racing parent like hearing the telltale wail ten minutes after settling into her writing desk. Often he'll take a bottle, but just as often he refuses, point blank, no, absolutely not, get that thing out of my mouth you horrible creature you. The latter usually happens with the nanny, of course, and the result is total meltdown, a chorus of wails, stress, distraction: all productivity is syphoned off into Operation Save the Baby.

So we go flailing on into the ring, our one hand thrown to the heavens, our other clutching for life, our bodies writhing, our muscles clenched. We the baby riders rise and dodge, buckle, recover, struggle to lock with the rhythms of our beast, while off in another world, the bull rearers, their eight measly seconds elapsed, lie exhausted and triumphant on the ground, their work done, their ride over. We look at them, surpress a slight sportsmanly sneer: what are doing on the ground there, buddy? Look at us. 15552000 seconds down, 1261440000 to go. You call that a sport?