Because, the truth is, he’s not really a baby any more, although the truth-value is pretty strongly correlated to how one defines babyhood. He still wears diapers, sleeps in a crib, eats in a high chair, can’t speak in complete sentences, and other fairly prototypically babyish things. But he’s starting to get actively annoyed by diapers and the forced changing thereof, and he can lower himself out of a grownup bed without crashing and face-planting (usually), and he feeds himself semi-independently (sometimes even using age-appropriate utensils), and he’s adding new words to his vocabulary every day (“hat” and “eyes” are a couple of the latest). He runs around like crazy, but sometimes he plays quietly by himself with some intense concentration. He’s developing a sense of humor. He’s mimicking more and more – not just sounds but whole behavior dynamics, like when he’s carrying a bowl of goldfish crackers and the dog comes sniffing toward him hoping for dropped treats, and the little guy holds a hand out warningly and says “No!” He has a mind of his own, a will which is expressing itself more and more every day, a personality which is less a matter of interpretation and more a simply evident fact. He is becoming a little kid, and some days it seems like he’s already there. Not a baby, in any case.
Not all the evidence is warm and fuzzy and life-affirming, of course. Earlier this week, at daycare, one of the other children bit the little guy’s hand. And if I do say so myself, I was proud of both myself and my wife for how we handled the incident, which was basically by nodding and shrugging and accepting it as one of those things that inevitably happens when you put a bunch of rugrats in a confined space over a long period of time. Between the ages of one and two, children do an incredible amount of discovery, both self- and of the world around them, and it’s fascinating to watch, but it can also be incredibly frustrating to the child. Freakouts ensue. My wife and I know the daycare providers are doing everything in their power (which of course has reasonable limits) to minimize the impacts of other children’s freakouts on our child. And the little guy shook off the chomping like a trooper, though to be fair it didn’t break the skin, barely left little pink impressions for that matter. (Apparently he cried a little, then while being comforted asked for “cars” – hey, the kid knows what he likes and how to make himself feel better.) I think my wife and I would have been more upset if our little guy were the one doing the biting. That would open the floodgates for all our insecurities about parenting, being role models, teaching values, nature versus nurture and a thousand other points of obsession. But being bitten? Happens. We’re not contemplating switching daycares or wishing hateful Twilight Zone comeuppance on the aggressor-child’s clearly derelict parents. It’s an imperfect world and unpleasant things occur without warning or reason. We minimize them as best we can, and failing that roll with them as best we can, too.
Which is not something I think we would have been so sanguine about a year ago, when we were still in the throes of constant low-grade “How do we make sure he keeps breathing all night?” panic. Our bouncing boy is not an infant any more, and we’re not the parents of an infant any more, which might sound redundant but really signifies multiple arcs of growth.
Regarding the subject of this post, “Cat’s in the Cradle” is one of those songs that falls into a musical genre which my wife and I mostly agree on a fundamental fascination with: the painfully earnest. (see also: most early Simon & Garfunkel) Personally, I can track my responses to the song through several phases, going back nearly as far as I can remember; my parents weren’t huge Harry Chapin fans per se, but they listened to radio stations that were likely as not to play the single. As a little kid, the song stopped being just another bit of melodic noise right around the time that I was old enough to listen to the words of story-songs and appreciate the cleverness of an ironic ending. When I got a little older, into the teenage know-it-all years, the primary thing I got out of the lyrics was that the father pretty much deserved what he ended up with. (It goes without saying that this is heavily shaded by my own ambivalent relationship with my father during those teen years … but I’ll say it anyway.) With young adulthood it became impossible to hear the song as anything other than mawkish and maudlin and a little overwrought. (The excessive cover version by future state fair headliners Ugly Kid Joe did little to dispel this.) It became a cheap punchline, and conveniently enough the same thing seemed to happen culturally as well, or it might have been something that I said once in a while to poke fun at lamentations of time’s passing but which no one else got. Fortunately for me, everyone knows that “Cat’s in the Cradle” is about fathers and sons and misplaced priorities and unsalvageable regrets, and the reference rarely goes amiss.
Then, of course, I had a kid. And that fact in and of itself doesn’t make the song any less painfully earnest, or any harder to mock. It just makes my response more complicated, because I can see the inherent truth and the absurdity side by side. And, let it never be forgotten, I do like things that are complicated. I still use “Cat’s in the Cradle” as a punchline, or at the very least as a humorous expletive. My wife and I will be talking about how fast the little guy is growing up, and how far we’ve all come, and I will feel myself getting emotional about it, and I will yell “Cat’s in the Cradle! Cat’s in the Cradle!” until we’re both laughing, which is a nice way to defuse the intensity of the situation, but is also, equally, a way to encapsulate those intense emotions and allow myself to feel them, and also, still equally, a way to remind myself that it really is possible to blink and miss your own son’s childhood, which would be a stunningly rotten thing to allow to happen.
The path I’ve laid out for myself, the life I want to live, involves feeling everything possible without ever getting bogged down by any of it. That is not easy. It involves a lot of internalized intensity that has to be popped quickly when it gets bigger than me, which usually involves making fun of myself. Sometimes a dumb folk song (coincidentally released the year I was born) helps me do that, and I have to admit I’m grateful for that.
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