The Death Part

Why “Death & Parenting?” Well, at the risk of showing you how your sausage gets made: Originally, I’d suggested writing a True/Slant column about either death or parenting. But over beers with stalwart True/Slant editor Coates Bateman, the notion took of combining the two. The topics are related, obviously. One is about the beginning of life, the fostering of new life, the other about the end of life. But more than that even, I see parenting as, in fact, the beginning of death. When the kid was born, part of the mind-blowing realization about how profoundly my life had changed came in the understanding that I was now, for the first time, living less for myself than for another person. Not only did I feel like I would give up my life to save this other person’s life, I would give up my health so that this other person could thrive. The new person, the kid, in some way that I felt almost immediately, would leech my life force. I would grow weaker so he could grow stronger. I don’t mean this to sound bitter or overly morbid. It’s only as it should be. Physically, biologically, we grow to our peak, we reproduce, and from there, it’s all decline—hopefully a long, slow one. Like David Bowie said in “Young Americans”: “We live for just these twenty years, then we have to die for the fifty more.” By his calculations, I was well into my dying by the time I had my kid. But, you know, Bowie’s totally morbid.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’ve come up with a list of ways that parenthood can lead directly to death. But first, check out this amazing video of Bowie playing “Young Americans” on the Dick Cavett Show in 1974.

Oh, and also, at the same time that parenthood kills you, it makes you want to live more. It’s like a cruel O’Henry story. As I’ve mentioned here before, I was much more okay with the prospect of my own death before the kid was born. Now I feel very invested in living long enough to see him do things like graduate from high school, get married, maybe even have a kid of his own. Or, at the very least, become a rap star or professional tennis player at age 14 and support his parents’ luxurious early retirement.

Okay. The list. Ways that parenthood can lead to death:

1) Stress

The kid ate a scorpion a couple days ago. It was a dead scorpion, and embedded in a lollipop his mom had brought back with her from a business trip to New Mexico. And, according to the website of the company that made it, it was a special kind of scorpion that had been bred for consumption and so was without venom. But still, watching the kid crunch through the candy shell and bite off a piece of what I knew to be a long, sharp stinger, I was struck by the thought of just how stupid it would be to poison your child with a novelty food item. One with a very visible arachnid inside that happens to be a world-renowned symbol of deadliness. I felt my pulse quicken, and thought of the cholesterol level that was a little high my last check up, but that I haven’t made time to do anything about or return to the doctor to check again for two years, mostly because of the rigors of parenting, and I said to Emily, “This is going to kill me. I am going to have a heart attack.”

2) Obesity

One of the reasons, I’m sure, that my cholesterol levels are high is that I eat an extra meal a day (“fourthmeal,” I suppose, to use the term with which Taco-Bell is hurting our country) in finishing the kid’s leftovers. I have a thing against wasting food, for some reason (the reason may be that I was raised in the era of mothers guilting their children into eating with stories of the people starving in Cambodia, but it also maybe be that I’m a slovenly glutton.) So when I unpack the kid’s lunchbox at the end of the day, and there’s a wilted, twelve-hour-old half of a salami and cheese sandwich in there, it does not reach the garbage can where it belongs. The kid is not a great eater. He’s picky, and what he does like, besides dessert, is generally processed carbohydrates or saturated fats covered in salt, soy sauce, ketchup or a mix of all three. He never eats very much of it, whatever it is, and much of it is disgusting, but whatever he doesn’t eat of his dinner, I do. Then we put him to bed and I eat my own dinner.

3) Lack of sleep

Did you read last week about the recent Italian study that found that getting less than six hours of sleep a night was “linked to early death?” I did. And I didn’t much enjoy it, to tell you the truth. I am not a great sleeper. Oftentimes, if I get into bed before one or two o’clock in the morning, I’ll be tossing and turning for an hour before conking out. So I usually stay up pretty late. Before having a kid, I would make up the hours by sleeping late in the morning. I’ve never had a job I needed to be at before ten, so it was no problem. Over the past five years, of course, it’s very rare that I’m in bed past seven. But I haven’t adjusted on the front end. So I average around five hours of sleep a night. Am I tired all the time? Yes. But I don’t know a lot of parents who say otherwise. I drink a lot of coffee. Which I guess I should now replace with the magic anti-aging pills that are being developed that will supposedly let people live for a hundred years.

4) Involuntary manslaughter

The kid has the sharpest elbows in the world, and has not yet learned that other humans beings are different from the armrests of chairs or couches or anything else you might prop yourself up in the get a better view of the book or television. The sharp elbow usually finds its purchase in my solar plexis or adam’s apple or carotid artery.

5) Something wicked this way comes

Needless to say, I love my kid and I think he’s the best kid in the world. I think he’s psychologically healthy, too. He’s never had a problem as far as hitting other kids or biting or anything. Still, some of the fantasies he conjures when he’s playing alien monsters or robots or whatever are truly disturbing. He’ll make some horrible face, clench his teeth, strike some karate pose and hold it rigid til he’s quivering. Then he’ll hiss something like, “I’m burning your eyes with lava!” I don’t know where he gets it. We’re basically pacifists, his mom and I. Some of the pictures he draws, too—demonic creatures with severely down-pointing eye-brows and fangs, shooting lightning bolts out of their hands. It’s like Jeremy from that Pearl Jam song. There’s some sick, violent shit going on in that little five-year-old brain. And some mornings I wake up and he’s standing next to my bed, staring at me, leaning in close, like three inches my face, poking my cheek with his finger. So I’m less than one hundred percent sure that I won’t wake up to the smell of chloroform one night, and realize that I can’t move my arms or legs, because I’ve been injected with a neuromuscular paralyses drug that will then leave me horribly conscious but utterly helpless to stop him as he kills me to make a cape out of my skin.