How Becoming a Parent Healed Me by Kurt G. Schmidt

During a lengthy Caesarean section in which Dr. Vivian complained about cutting through too much old scar tissue from my wife’s four previous surgeries, including two ectopic pregnancies, she said, “Shelley, don’t come to me for your next Caesarean.” After more mumbling and sighing, Dr. Vivian finally delivered a boy named Jesse. A nurse cleaned the baby, covered him with a soft blanket and a knit cap, and placed him in my arms. The moment seemed magical and spiritual, as though holding a baby were the most powerful emotion on Earth.

Until then, my traumatic childhood had caused me to forge a life for forty-seven years with as few complications as possible. But I knew Jesse’s birth was forcing me into a more inclusive life. I would be responsible for raising this child for twenty years.

A couple of years after his birth, I began writing an annual Christmas letter about life with Jesse. Friends said they looked forward to stories portraying him as my adversary and teacher.

One story involved the most frequently asked question in a young child’s vocabulary: “Are we there yet?” This question and similar ones put most parents on edge.

On any trip that lasted over thirty minutes, Jesse always asked, “When we gonna be there?” Had I known I would hear this question thousands of times within the confines of our bug-splattered Camry station wagon, I might have worn earplugs. This was the question Shelley and I kept hearing on our drive from New Hampshire to Virginia. Jesse was strapped into his car seat in the back with his favorite books, stuffed animals, and a snack bag on the seat beside him. He could read, eat, snooze, sing, enjoy the view, and talk to the animals. Why did a baby sleep the entire trip, whereas a three-and-a-half-year-old had to keep negotiating the time of arrival?

Helen Forman writes in Frontiers in Psychology, “We may reason about and carry out transactions involving events and activities in terms of standardized clock-time. Children, however, do not have access to this tool as their skills in time-keeping by means of clock-time are limited…How long is an hour? How much of a certain activity can fit within an hour or 20 minutes? What do I have to do now in order to be ready to leave for school in 10 minutes? These are the sort of temporal tasks children struggle with and for which they will need support from parents and teachers for many years.”

Periodically, Jesse repeated the same refrain. “Are we there yet?”

I said, “We’ve still got a long way to go.”

“How long?”

“Three hundred miles.”

“How long does that take?”

“About seven hours.”

“Are we almost there?”

“No. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

“I wanna get down.”

“You have to stay in your car seat.”

“I wanna get down.”

So we screeched into every rest area and let him run on the grass. Then we strapped him in again. He seemed incredulous that each of these stops was not the journey’s end.

Jesse thought Virginia’s Chincoteague Island was a fine destination as long as we were flying kites on the beach, building sandcastles, or running into the surf to cool off from the heat. But when I eased the Toyota wagon along a dirt road to a nature pond with wading birds, Jesse reversed course and refused to leave his car seat. When I asked him if he would like to run around for a few minutes while Shelley and I viewed some shore birds, it never occurred to me that the word birds was anathema to him or that the term minutes meant nothing at all.

“Don’t you want to see the beautiful birds?”

“No.”

Perhaps we could negotiate. Maybe a tool for avian surveillance. “We’ll let you look through the binoculars.”

“Why do we have to stop here?”

“Because Mommy and I want to look at the birds.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Do you want to get out and run around for a few minutes?”

“No.”

So Shelley and I exited the car, moved away about twenty yards, and focused on egrets, blue herons, and swans. I glanced back at the car. Jesse stared away from us. Shelley said his blood sugar was probably low, that he probably just needed something to eat. I said, “It’s hard to enjoy the birds and the beauty of the pond while he’s brooding in the car.”

“Maybe we can come back when he’s in a better mood.”

“He doesn’t like bird-watching.”

“I’m afraid there’s not enough action in it for him.”

I thought his need for action was the reason tired parents like us became cranky clumps. But I wanted to stay calm and learn what joyful patience felt like.

As he approached four years of age, his tactics changed, resulting in phrases such as, “Hey, Mom [or Dad], let’s compromise.” This did not mean he had softened his demands, but rather he’d discovered a more effective way of attaining them. On Labor Day, when the three of us set off to climb Mt. Monadnock together (four-and-a-half miles round trip), Shelley and I decided Jesse couldn’t make it to the top and back without gassing out and crying for one of us to carry him the rest of the way down. So if all went well, we’d climb just to the timberline, have lunch on the rock ledges there, and return. That’s when I made the mistake of saying, “We’re not going all the way to the top today. It’s a little too far.”

Jesse said, “I’m going to the top.”

I said, “It’s a little too far. We’ll just go to the timberline.”

“I wanna go to the top.”

“You’ll get too tired. Mommy and I don’t want to have to carry you down.”

“I won’t get tired.

“You will. It takes a long time to get there.”

“I’m going to the top.” He then climbed faster, as if to show his energy level.

I became tired of his mantra and my futile attempts to reason with him. I shut my mouth and climbed. The way he was jumping from rock to rock, maybe he’d skin his knee. We could use that as an excuse to turn around. But I really didn’t want that either. I thought about the problem. Deciding maybe psychological manipulation would work, I said, “We’ll probably make it to Top One today, but not Top Two.”

Jesse jumped to another rock. “Okay, Daddy. We’ll go to Top One.”

Eventually, we climbed a steep section of rocks called Jacob’s Ladder and stepped onto the ledges above the timberline. I said, “This is Top One. Let’s have lunch.” And so we did — a family picnic near a few other hikers who had chosen this time to rest at Top One. Perhaps it was the presence of resting hikers that gave Top One its authenticity. Maybe it was just the word top that stuck in Jesse’s mind. Certainly, the ledges appeared to be the top of something.

As usual, that night I sat on Jesse’s bed for seventeen minutes after I’d finished reading him a story. Why seventeen? It was originally fifteen minutes, but he kept negotiating for “just two more minutes,” so it became seventeen. Sometimes he used that time to bring up any anxieties. As for me, I came to realize the importance of those seventeen minutes, which became a time when Jesse and I could express deep feelings that formed our spiritual connection.

Five-year-olds carry viruses anathema to the adult body and were bound to kill me sooner than later. In the autumn when he turned five, Jesse became ill. Shelley said, “Something’s going around at day care. All the kids have it.” Within seven days, I always had “it” too—only twice as bad as Jesse and Shelley. I suffered repeatedly from life-threatening forms of the snotty-child virus, including sinus infections and bouts of pneumonia. An immunologist jabbed immunizations into both my arms. On a TV report, I saw health workers wearing special suits to protect against the latest virus, and I thought I might have worn one of those, but the immunizations seemed to stop the virus rampage. The pneumonia vaccination was supposed to be good for a lifetime, but there were no such guarantees about the mysterious forms of the child’s virus.

As I sat on Jesse’s bed one night after reading to him, he negotiated, as always, that I stay to help ward off what he claimed were “bad thoughts.” This time, he had death on his mind. “Daddy, when are you going to die?” 

I hated questions like that, mainly because it was like asking when the cherries from our backyard cherry tree were going to drop. “I don’t know. I hope I won’t die before I’m a hundred.”

“Maybe a hundred and nine.” He’d just seen a TV report about a person who died at that age.

When Jesse became sick again, beginning early one week with a fever that persisted (up and down, sometimes over 104), Shelley drove him to his pediatrician, who said it was probably just “something that’s going around.”  But two days later, his fever was still too high.

“Probably bronchitis,” Doctor Freeman said on the phone. Bring him in again.

I’d never taken him to the doctor, but Shelley’s facial expression said it was the next item on her menu of what dads should learn to do, time for me to overcome my anxiety about certain social situations and deal now with the child virus. In the car, Jesse kept telling me how much I’d like Doctor Freeman. “I’ll bet you can hardly wait to meet him,” he said.

I didn’t respond that this was an erroneous assumption, and I was exceedingly anxious in the waiting room with bedraggled mothers and sniffling children. I could die here. But once inside the examining room, I was at ease with the elderly doctor. When Jesse’s examination was over, Nurse Rosemary gave him a lollipop. Doctor Freeman asked us to meet him in his office after Jesse got his shirt on. They left. Jesse examined the lollipop wrapper. “I don’t like this flavor. I want to get a different one.”

As a father who avoided conflicts about lollipops and almost any other potential dispute, I said, “Oh, that one’s just fine.”

“I want a different one.”  

“That one’s just fine. Put on your sweatshirt. Where are your boots?”

He shrugged. Apparently, he’d kicked them off in the reception area. “I don’t want this one,” he persisted. “I really want a different flavor.”

I scowled and escorted him across the hall to the office, where the doctor was writing a prescription. The minute we walked in, Jesse said, “Doctor Freeman, I’m going to exchange this lollipop for a different flavor,” and he went directly to the lollipop box on the doctor’s shelf.

“Rosemary tries to get rid of those flavors nobody wants,” Doctor Freeman told him, “but you were too smart for her.”

I decided it was best to let the principal parties do their own negotiating, but I was irritated that Jesse was testing my limits in a setting where I had few options.

I had read that setting limits for a boy this age was like building a wall. You think he understands that the wall cannot be moved, but the boy will push forever to move the wall. If he moves it an inch, then he’ll try for another inch. Whenever I became tired of holding Jesse’s wall in place, the F-word rushed to my lips, forcing me to swallow it before its resonance proved I was unfit to raise a small child who knew how to negotiate.

I suppose every newborn child is a blessing whose personality is disguised until parents are ready to see it. I think I was content then that Jesse was teaching me how to be an insightful dad. What I didn’t know then was that he was teaching me to heal myself.