Family Man: Fear and Parenting

But now, Saturday thrills have a new description: rushed family meals, bone-rattling screams and calls to the paramedics.

Let’s rewind that last part and explain. It’s a recent Saturday night at the house of our friends Julie and David. Everyone gets along famously. The moms complain about the dads. The dads watch football. The kids tear the house apart, pitting the girls against the boys with the littlest ones on the sidelines, crying to be included. The parents try to pretend that this is fun, smiling through clenched teeth and yearning to go to bed by 8:30 p.m. – three hours before the once requisite Saturday Night Live.

Around 8:30, we attempt to wind down. I get Benjamin through a “flash” bath, then work on my overtired toddler. At 14 months, Jacob likes to stand in a slippery tub and fling toys with reckless abandon. He wriggles from my reach five times, laughing mockingly like a swashbuckler in an Errol Flynn film. But I finally grapple-hook him, braving waves of bawling, and wash his pudgy physique in the available watermelon-scented body wash.

His crying escalates as I lay him in a bedroom to dress him. With the instincts of a mother pterodactyl sensing her fledgling’s imminent demise at the claws of a velociraptor, my wife rushes into the room to ask, “What are you doing to him?”

“He’s tired!” I retort, my voice rising above the now powerful wailing. In Alias fashion, she bends down to help me defuse the time bomb by taking one side of the diaper while I tape the other. Jacob kicks and flails his arms, shrieking in what sounds like pain mixed with too much snot.