From deep within my brain, I can pull up a memory of my parents teaching me how to tie my shoes. Something, I believe, about bunny ears. I also have a vague recollection of being shown how to button a shirt. Years later, my dad showed me how to tie a Windsor knot. And now that I'm a parent, my mom and dad are still teaching me how to dress.
That sentence didn't come out the way I intended. I meant that they're teaching me how to dress my two daughters. Especially in the earliest of our first baby Isabelle's days, we would have the same conversation every visit: "She must be freezing. You're letting her wear that?" my mom would ask. "No, of course not," I'd stammer, looking down at our 3-month-old. "Your real granddaughter is in the car, dressed much, much warmer. Oh my God, whose baby is this?"
Actually, I wish I could think that fast on my feet. Usually, I just stammer something incoherent as my dad runs to turn up the thermostat and my mom hands me a newspaper clipping about a baby who recently developed frostbite because her father was carting her around in too few layers.
Now, I should say right here, before my mom relegates me to the kiddie table next Thanksgiving, that my mother and father are wonderful parents and grandparents. I love them very much, and whenever my wife, Susan, and I visit them with our girls, there's usually little -- if any -- tension. But then, every once in a while, it happens: I'll go for a visit without Susan, and my parents will ambush me. Just like in the movies, when a poor clod is whacked over the head with a shovel, I never see it coming.
Because they have a great relationship with Susan and want to keep it that way, my parents package their advice for us and deliver it to me. Especially my mom. Sleeping habits, eating habits, burping, proper ventilation in the house, germs, allergies, and pet safety...if it's even mildly baby-related, my mother has given me advice on it over the course of Isabelle's and our second daughter Lorelei's young lives. My mom has been in the nursing field for more than 30 years, so she's aware that there's danger out there -- maybe too aware. For instance, I once had an allergic reaction to a guinea pig when I was a boy, and so now anytime the girls get a sniffle, my mother eyes our pets -- one dog and four cats at last count -- with suspicion. And Isabelle's thin hair, she kept insisting, was due to bad nutrition, something our pediatrician disputed.
There was also one long stretch when Isabelle would wake up in the middle of the night and refuse to sleep for hours. My mother called me almost every day for months, asking how the baby had done the night before. I appreciated her concern, but I guess old habits die hard. Like probably most guys out there (Ray Romano made a fortune from a sitcom based on this subject), I still like pleasing my parents, and if I admitted that Isabelle had woken up again during the night, my mom's voice would crack. She always sounded wounded, like she had discovered me in the kitchen, rifling through her purse.Eventually, just to make her happy, I would lie and tell her that Isabelle had slept fine (I know, I know -- I'm going to be sitting at that little table the rest of my life).
Geoff Williams is a Babytalk contributing editor.
