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SALT LAKE CITY — I tried to space the baby-shower house cleaning out over a week so the kids wouldn’t freak and go into meltdown mode — which happened before the last family get together.
They called me a meanie-head and got all worked up, so that when I even hinted at light dusting or getting the chickens out of the family room, they screamed, “Mom! He’s doing it again!”
Not surprisingly, I got to clean up alone.
I wanted the house to be spiffy when family, mostly my in-laws, came for Myelda’s baby shower. “The shower was lame” is OK for me to read on Facebook the next day as long as it is followed by “but you could see your face in the clean and shiny floor!”
I admit to a moment of panic the night before the shower. I had one of my kids call their grandma to beg her to bring her Greek wedding cookies because I thought I was going to be short of food.
After all, the baby shower advice I had received was to have a lot of food and alcohol available. With the pregnancy — and my religion — booze was out and raspberry lemonade was in.
Dad, through no fault of his own and with no losing of a bet involved, is responsible for his daughter's baby shower. This fiasco will be told in three parts. Read more...
This baby shower doesn't seem any harder to sponsor than any other Cheney family event — except for the time when Uncle Kent married a woman who changed both her religion and her preference for meat three days before the wedding. Read more...
However, the food was fine, the meatballs were a hit, and no one noticed the wet paint on the walls in the living room. At least no one mentioned it.
Once my wife and I figured out how to focus my daughter’s baby shower on my daughter instead of the new grandson, things seemed to fall into place quickly.
My wife, when pregnant with Myelda, had several Chicago street kids she worked with and had become close to in a residential treatment center write letters to Myelda as a newborn. We decided my wife would read some of these letters of advice to Myelda at the shower.
One letter, written in multicolored markers, said, “Dear (Myelda) The reason I am writing is to tell you that life isn’t easy, which you may have figured out already. What goes down will come up, and if you ever have to run out of your house in the middle of the night because it is on fire, please remember your teddy bear.”
Some letters were funny, some were touching. Some were outright sad. But they all, either outright or through omission, cried the importance of family.
After reading a few to the baby shower-ers, my wife handed out nice stationery so they could write their own letters to Myelda and her unborn child as advise. We will wrap them up like my wife did with the letters from her own shower and give them to our daughter to keep.
Someday my grandchild, whose name sounds like bug killer spray, will read them and know he was loved right from the start. Maybe Myelda will get something out of them as well.
Afterwards, a friend of ours said she went home and wrote some of the advice down in her own notebook so she could read later and remember how to be a better mother. And with that, I realized why I wanted to be the one to throw the shower for Myelda in the first place.
So we didn’t play the games I had heard about — the chewing gum art and the measuring of Myelda’s belly circumference and betting on the outcome. There was less frivolity and more feeling — as least from what I could tell from my position hiding in the kitchen pretending to be a DJ.
Afterwards, a friend of ours said she went home and wrote some of the advice down in her own notebook so she could read later and remember how to be a better mother.
And with that, I realized why I wanted to be the one to throw the shower for Myelda in the first place. It wasn’t for the novelty, to check it off a bucket list, or the “anything you can do I can do.”
I came into the dad thing later in life and I sort of cheated. I married a woman who had four kids. Though I was there for the birth of the last one, I skipped a lot of the dad things that other guys don’t even think about — stuff that makes connections between a dad and his kids. In order to be a better person and husband, I think that first I need to be a better parent. Not a stepdad even.
I want to be a better dad.
I don’t think we fathers need, necessarily, to throw baby showers or knit booties or do any number of things mothers do so well. We are dads after all. We have a few innate abilities of our own we can focus on to let our kids know we love them and to let their mothers know that we cherish them. And every dad’s list of strengths will be different and wildly important.
Just don’t make me do a bachelorette party.
Davidson Cheney writes, often humorously, at davisoncheneymegadad.blogspot.com.
