Middle-aged Couple Gets Nine-pound Device Exquisitely Designed to Provoke Suffering in Nearby Adults

After years of procrastination, I began writing a history of my son Eric. A middle-aged couple triumphantly brought its first child into the world and lived to tell about it. I wrote it near Christmas time, and it was our own miracle of birth and beginning. In the process we came into possession of a nine-pound device exquisitely designed to provoke suffering in nearby adults.

Gotta Have the Right Philosophy of Parenting


Any baby is a massive workload. Twins would have been suicide material for me. Since we only had one arrive at first, and that turned out to be all, we came up with a philosophy of parenting that doubled the job.

Eric came when we were both in our mid-thirties. Like many intense, earnest creatures around age 30, my dear wife Sherry had had time to study life and get it pretty well figured out. She had worked so hard to be grown up, had scrutinized the ins and out of life, and had arrived at ANSWERS. Me, too. I was a thirty-year-old know-it-all if one ever walked the planet. Sherry used to call me her “righteous autocrat” because I had my mind so made up about so many things. Other than that I was really liberal and generous and voted for Jimmy Carter.
More than I, Sherry had pondered nest-building and nurturing, and came up with firm convictions about how to do it. A couple of years into my marriage, I saw that, if something involved home or family, Sherry could give a little, but in most things it had to be done her way or die. She had read books explaining that, every time a baby was left helpless to cry, this screwed it up more emotionally for the rest of its life. This meant that, the second the baby started to fuss, you put your life on hold until it was soothed.

Unlike my wife, I had not duplicated the research labors of Benjamin Spock in my spare time, but minimal stress for the baby made sense to me. Naturally this meant maximal stress for the parents.
In those days I was quick to embrace ideas that made life harder rather than easier. My favorite sport was distance running, a form of suffering incarnate. If I had to go up two floors in a building, I refused to ride the elevator. I wanted a challenge, I wanted commitment, I wanted, in short, to suffer and feel like my life reached a higher plane because of it.
I had come into possession of a nine-pound device exquisitely designed to provoke suffering in nearby adults. It had a wide range of features that caused pain in their backs, in their noses, and in their pocketbooks.
This “suck-sleep-poop-and yell” device also provoked love and delight in said adults, in grand quantities. This delight helped them live in denial of just how much they were suffering, for a few months or a few years, anyway.