Solitary Man (and also two other people, I guess)

As a man, I value my alone time; as an academic, solitude is integral to my scholarship; and as a writer, you can’t be in here right now, I’m closing the door and putting a 25lb kettlebell in front of it, I’ll be out in a couple hours, bye!  There’s a Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee on which Jerry Seinfeld jokes his first words weren’t “mama” or “dada;’ rather, they were, “leave me alone!” I’ve never agreed with another human being more.  When I say, “I want to be left alone,” it’s a cry for help, and the help I need is for you to get lost. It’s a miracle I ever found a partner who understands. Thankfully, my wife values the work I produce in my alone time, so she's as understanding as a person can be when i tell her to scram. My isolation solution has been hampered considerably by the addition of baby. My baby is a brand new person who requires constant attention; more than that, she’s reliant on my wife and me to teach her everything. Since she would not exist on this planet without my choices and actions, I suppose I’m the one responsible for my daughter and her constant needs. I expected this relentlessness from parenthood; I did not expect, however, my daughter to be such a magnet for other people.  

Outside of an airplane, everybody loves a baby.  People smile at my daughter all the time. When she was still young enough she had to face backwards in her stroller, people would turn their heads just to get a glimpse of her as she walked by like she was a Kardashian or Henry Kissinger or something. Since the vast majority of my experience watching people turn their heads like this has been watching old men like Kissinger turn their heads to leer at young girls' like Kardashian's asses as they pass, it creeped me out anytime someone craned their neck to look at my daughter.  Get your own baby, psycho! 

The looks weren’t as bad as the conversations strangers tried to start about her. “How old?” “You getting any sleep?” “Is she crawling yet?” The same old hackneyed cliches, every single time, like they all went to the same Facebook page for tips about newborn smalltalk. I couldn’t put sugar in my coffee, pick up anything from the drugstore or go to the park without a litany of asinine form questions from total strangers. I’m sure they were being nice but they’d ask my baby, “Can I get a smile!” and the answer I found myself mumbling in my brain was I think the fuck not! I don't have what you need! [snake hiss, snake hiss] . My baby doesn’t feel as strongly, I guess, since most of the time she just smiled and brightened these strangers' days.

Turns out all those smiling strangers and their positivity and encouragement went right to my daughter’s head. Now she faces front in her stroller and people don’t have to turn to see her, her beaming face greets them like a shining beacon in a sea of lackluster human interaction, it lights up the road like a headlamp even in the middle of a sunny day.  It’s contagious, her smile, and she’s trying to give it to everyone! Maybe even me. Every person, every dog, every plant we pass gets a grin from my daughter. She recently started to wave and say “Hi!” to literally every living thing we see, animal, vegetable or complete and total stranger.  Her hope in waving to these people/ dogs/ lampposts is that they’ll wave back. The grumpier the person looks, the more vehemently my daughter waves her hand to try to get their attention. It’s disarming, to see a child wave, and I often see people’s hard faces soften when they look up from their phone or are broken from their daydream worrying by the smile and frantic wave of my amazing daughter.  They wave back, then smile at me and my face, strained in an awkward grin I'm obviously faking, sends ‘em right back to their phone or anxious wandering. But, other times, our eyes meet and we share a real smile, a warm hello, or a total stranger compliments me on my daughter, my proudest achievement in a life full of them, and it doesn't feel like hell is other people. it feels like my daughter is teaching me to be less of an asshole.

I don't believe in much but I truly believe people get kids who are uniquely suited to teach them a lesson. Whether the parents like it or not is another decision. I'm trying to be a good student. It would seem this lesson, about strangers and kindness, is one my kid is hell bent teaching me; though I don't remember signing up for this class. Maybe every stranger on the street isn’t some jerk who hasn’t disappointed me yet; maybe the jerk is me and the only thing that's disappointing is my hesitancy to just be nice and open with people. It’s easy to be curious and accepting about who my daughter will become but I’m still working on being curious and accepting about who she’s going to make me.