Stuff they never warned you about in Lamaze class

Any moment now, I expect them to come bursting through our door – the Infant Retrieval Police, ready to snatch our baby and revoke our Parenting Passports. A tight group of them, armed with blankets and bottles, ready to expose us as incompetent impostors. Not parents at all.

Ever since my wife gave birth to Isobel Garceau, and we have been charged with taking care of her every need at every waking moment, I’ve had this nagging sense that, as new parents, we’re total hacks. Do all new parents go through this, believing they’re the first ever in history to be baffled by their baby?

My wife and I aren’t the only ones who feel this way, but this is no big comfort. "You’ll get used to it," the veteran parents tell us with a grin – these are people who have apparently developed amnesia about that dark period of their lives when they went sleepless for months on end, lurching around like shell-shocked zombies. "After the first one, it’s easier!" the others chime in brightly, making us feel like suckers: So why didn’t we just start with the second one? D-ohh!

This was never adequately explained to us before – the sense of utter cluelessness parents experience in the face of a newborn. Sure, you see movies documenting how awkward it is to change a diaper or hold a child, and it’s cute and funny. But that usually lasts only two hours. This is 24/7.

Take diaper duty. Admittedly I’m new at this, but I’m sure it doesn’t take most parents 40 minutes to accomplish the changing of a diaper. We hover over her flailing form, check the fasteners, the wipes, the fresh diaper, the rubber mat… remove the blanket to avoid contamination, lift the legs to snatch away the soiled nappy, wipe and toss, wipe and toss… all of this carried out with all the grueling, sweat-drenched horror of the Omaha Beach invasion.

Speaking of Omaha Beach, our nerves are getting as strung out as a shaky G.I. awaiting his jump-off. What ever happened to our nerve endings? They used to have a little stretch in ‘em, a little play, a little resilience. Now they’re tighter than Carmen Electra’s thong.

And baby books? Forget about it. After consuming racks of baby material, we’ve decided that either no two babies are alike, thus all the contradictory information on baby care, or nobody knows a damn thing about how a baby’s brain works.

There’s all kinds of misleading information in books, stuff that new parents should be warned about. Like the claim that "you will soon be able to distinguish your baby’s various cries." As if one cry is finely tuned to "hunger" while another is pitched just so to indicate "change the diaper." This is hogwash. There is no difference. There is only ONE baby cry, and it comes in at several volume levels: Loud, Shrill and Nerve-Jangling.

Or what about the DESPERATE LIE that "newborns sleep up to 18 hours a day"? Was this just tossed in by Dr. Spock to give new parents renewed courage? Or was it meant to perplex parents whose kid sacks out an average six minutes per day (but never while they themselves are sleeping)?

Likewise, no one ever told us that newborns should never, EVER be given a bottle if you plan to breast-feed them. This is because an easy-suck bottle is the equivalent of crack to a newborn, and will result in their going off the breast and straight to the hard stuff. The problem is the bottle is too quick, too satisfying. Babies need to work to produce breast milk. Otherwise it’s just like being at Club Med.

Of course, this pattern is reversed after a few weeks, when the baby needs to be forcibly wrenched away from the teat and won’t even look at a plastic nipple to spit at it. So much for baby-book logic.

As parents in the Philippines, we have decided to embark on what is regarded as a foolhardy experiment: we are attempting to raise our baby without a yaya. Of course, we have the much-needed and essential help of family members, people willing to baby-sit and shop for us and do our laundry and lighten our load for a couple hours per day. But as for the basic baby regimen – feeding, burping, changing – we have elected to do this ourselves.

Part of the reason is my built-in American sense of self-reliance. I scoffed at the hiring of strangers to look after my child. In the States, I would intone piously, people look after their own kids – except, of course, for the six hours a day that they’re dropped off at day-care centers. And look at how well-adjusted those kids are!

In truth, after several weeks of adjusting to a newborn’s schedule, we’re starting to hedge on the yaya proclamation a bit. Maybe just someone who’s willing to change diapers… or carry her around several hours a day…

It doesn’t help that as parents we still feel utterly clueless, less knowledgeable about baby care than ever. In this sleep-deprived state, you begin imagining that anybody is more qualified at parenting than you are. The taho vendor ringing his bell up and down your street every morning – he’d probably make a pretty decent yaya, given the chance. In fact, if one of us could run down the stairs fast enough, we might even test that theory…

And it’s when you both reach this state of exasperation – when you’ve slowly whittled down your life activities to the core, ridding yourselves of TV and movies, adjusting yourselves to balmy, un-air-conditioned air at night so the baby can sleep – that you start looking for signs. Something to cling to for hope.

"Ozzy Osbourne!" I gesture wildly at the TV, my eyes red-rimmed and baggage-saddled. My wife looks over at me warily. "Look! He’s a dad! He did it!" Now here’s a guy who took more acid than Dr. Timothy Leary and chewed off the heads of live rodents onstage. And he made it through the newborn stage somehow, raising two kids who, while not exactly normal, don’t seem especially damaged.

My wife points out that Ozzy probably wasn’t conscious enough during the past few decades to be a full-service dad. "His wife Sharon probably raised them. I would bet on it."

Yes, I concede. Yes. But still. Ozzy Osbourne. If Ozzy can do it…