Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad by Dan Bucatinsky

anyone actually prep you for the fact that you have to pull your poor son’s foreskin back every time you change him, and slather the area with Vaseline to avoid a hideousphenomenon known as “reattachment”? That’s right. If you don’t lube it up three or four times a day, the foreskin can reattach and you have to bring the poor baby back to detach it again. I may be a little paranoid and somewhat defensive, but there’s no contest for the mortification the first time our nanny walked over to me, a gay man, while I was changing Jonah. She looked at me like I had lost my mind and managed to croak out, “Danny? What are you doing?”
    “Oh, well, there’s something called reattachment and it’s, um—there’s really only one way to avoid—well . . .” You know how much not fun it is to explain to the nannies and babysitters how you want them to give your kid a handie every time they change him? How come nobody told me about that?
    Or how about the time Eliza was only a year old and I brought her to someone’s holiday open house. The place was packed. And so was my daughter. The poor thing hadn’t pooped in three days. I had her in the Bjorn as I waited in the eggnog line when she started contorting her little face. Her cheeks got so red, it made the suit on the Santa-for-hire look washed out.
    I took Eliza upstairs and laid her on the bed after clearing an area on the mountain of coats. I prepared to change her diaper, only the diaper was clean! My poor kid was screaming as I saw a shiny head of poop at a complete standstill at the opening of her tush. She was crowning! But that baby wasn’t coming out. No traffic moving in either direction. I had no idea what my next move was supposed to be. Forgive me for not adding that to the list of things I Googled when I knew we were expecting a baby: “removing a zeppelin-sized turd out an infant’s ass.” Search!
    I left Eliza on the bed surrounded by coats and sneaked into the bathroom, where I combed the medicine chests for some Vaseline. Finally, I found some Preparation H. I squinted at the label to see if it would kill a kid to have a dab. After all, the stuff was supposed to “shrink swelling” and that seemed appropriate in this situation. I slathered it on my finger and went carefully into the cave to ease out the boulder. First one side. Then the other. And then pow . That thing flew out and onto someone’s Patagonia down jacket. I managed to clean it and the baby and replace her diaper with a clean one. At long last, it looked like the weight of the world was off her—okay, well, out of her. But really? I could’ve done without adding that whole experience to my life wallet.
    I received no fewer than six copies of What to Expect When You’re Expecting in baby gift baskets when the kids were born. The book is great but, as it turns out, somewhat limited. It was certainly of no use one bath time when Jonah was only one. Where’s the book What to Expect Will Float to the Surface When Your Kid Sneezes During Bath Time ?

 

chapter eight

Bam Bam
    S eeing Jonah, all three feet, forty-five pounds of him, with his little tough guy swagger, I am often transported back to the terror and panic of junior high school. The strident squeaks of kids’ sneakers running toward class, and the slamming of lockers. And the slamming of me inside those lockers. I still carry a lot of anxiety and insecurity from those days. For some reason, I’m fixated on the weeklong wrestling unit we had in gym class.
    The sight of those smelly blue wrestling mats lined up on the floor would put me in a state of “teacher, I want to go home.” We’d be paired up in size order. I was a shrimp and would always be thrown onto the mat with skinny, cross-eyed Warren Fink. He always seemed particularly bored by my tactic of dancing around the mat, avoiding contact. Eventually I would tire and Warren would come at me with a surge of focus and intensity, his crossed eye drifting even