Reading is not my strong suit. Sports pages, no problem. A good novel, at least 1 per year. A self-help manual for how to be better at my job, no chance. A 200-page guide on how to be a parent, are you kidding?
About 6 months before the first guy was born, Amazon started shipping us every parenting book under the sun. My wife read them. Me...not so much. I'm sure Spock is right and the whispering baby lady is always right, but I don't have the energy for this. I don't learn this way. I wait for the pain and then react.
About the same time, I was forced to go to a birthing class. It was some 8 week class that could have been compacted into a 3 week class. Definitely a bit better if you want me to pay attention. Besides the out-of-date videos, ONE thing sticks in my mind. Teacher passed around some board with a bunch of holes showing us the difference between 1cm and 10cm dilated. That was cool and scary. Size of a bagel. And not one of those mini ones. Wow. Truth is I don't really remember anything else, but didn't need to. When my wife's water broke and met her at the hospital, I learned that the class was a total waste of time. You want her to get the damn epidural and then have the doctors and nurses take over. No matter what I did, there's no way that I could possibly screw up birthing.
Now that the boys are a bit older, I'm still lost but I don't really care. No books are going to help me. No class is going to change my ways. Unless you can come up with a bagel board-like way for me to learn, it just won't happen. So when I'm not doing it the "right" way, just know that I know you are right even if I don't admit it.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
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