Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien

slow writer—I feared I’d come to resent the minutes and hours and days spent changing diapers and singing silly bedtime lullabies.

      Meredith and I managed to work it out.

      In that Cambridge bar, and in the weeks afterward, the realization began to stir in me that I too yearned for a happy, normal family life, even if I remained terrified of failing. There were no promises, exactly. But there was a prospect. Three years went by, and Meredith and I got married, and our son was conceived, and now I sit here in the dark, rocking my precious, life-hating Timmy to sleep, singing an unprintable new edition of “Row, Row.”

      The miracle hasn’t panned out. In some ways things seem more hopeless than ever. Although “Row, Row” will eventually put Timmy to sleep, he continues to wake up screaming after a half hour or so, often after only a few minutes. He can’t tolerate his crib. He looks pale and angry. He’ll often cry while he eats, and without exception he cries immediately after he eats. The crying has become infectious. Meredith is crying—a lot. I’ve cried. All three of us are ragged with fatigue. If this is normal, normal isn’t normal.

      A dear and very generous friend named Anne Dolan has flown in from Paris to help out, mainly to spell us as we try to stitch our psyches back together. For three days and two nights, Anne endured exactly what we have been enduring. But on the third night—the night before last—she shook Meredith awake and explained that she was helpless, that she couldn’t take it anymore, and that our son would not and could not and probably never would cease crying.

      And so once again we call the doctor’s office. Once again we hear the dreaded word “colic.” Once again we are informed of the astonishing news that “babies cry.” Once again we receive advice: babies need to be held. And the opposite advice: put him in his crib, shut the door, and let him cry himself to sleep. Once again we get instructions to check for diaper rash, to bathe him in lukewarm water, and—for the quadrillionth time—to place him in a basket atop the clothes dryer.

      Alas, I’m back to “Row, Row.”

      Not only am I exhausted beyond exhaustion, but I’ve also exhausted all possible combinations of dirty rhymes. I’ve turned to politics. By daylight, mostly in my head, I invent catchy verses that will carry me through the coming hours of night. I begin by seeking out a fruitful rhyming pattern, then later I devote myself to the overall artistry. Bush—tush. Rice—advice. Rumsfeld—beheld. Cheney—rainy. First names, I’ve discovered, are much easier. I have fun with George and Don. I have a shitload of fun with Dick. Condoleezza has proven difficult, but like my poetically minded friends, I have no scruples about cheating with near rhymes. Often, to keep things interesting, and also in the interest of poetic richness, I’ll combine my two genres, the political lyric blending into the dirty lyric, a hybrid that may represent a profligate new genre unto itself. My masterpiece is a version of “Row, Row” that I sang to Timmy just last night, a version in which every word but one must be redacted. It goes like this:

      Bleep, bleep, bleep Dick’s bleep,

      Bleepily bleep bleep bleep,

      Bleepily, bleepily, bleepily, bleepily,

      Bleep Dick’s bleeping bleep.

      I am going mad, of course, but Timmy doesn’t notice.

      For a few blessed minutes he sleeps.

      And perhaps one day, if he survives his life-is-but-a-nightmare infancy, he will thank his father for this solid foundation in modern dirty-mouthed political discourse.

      Two and a half weeks pass. Things have changed but not for the better. Our friend Anne Dolan fled back to Paris last Thursday. Timmy has lost a quarter pound of body weight. He blinks away tears as he eats; he chews more than he sucks; he vomits; he hisses at us; he hisses and he shrieks both at once.

      Day before yesterday we received new advice from our pediatric nurse. We were instructed to secure the boy in his car seat, bundle him “loosely but warmly,” and drive until he settles down.

      We’ve been driving by day and driving by night. We’ve clocked one hundred and sixty-eight miles.

      For all but nine of those miles, Timmy has hissed and shrieked.

      The hissing in particular, but especially in combination with the shrieking, has a wild-animal sound—an essential and irreducible beastliness—that chills me. It chills Meredith, too. We’ll sometimes glance at each other, neither of us uttering a word, and in that glance we’ll read each other’s terror. Meredith, I’m almost certain, lies awake wondering if our beloved baby boy has inherited the afflictions of her two disturbed sisters. The hissing and the shrieking reproduce the bedlam of a psychiatric ward in Connecticut in which her older sister has resided since Meredith was in tenth grade.

      Inevitably, given what we know of genetics, the blaming has revved up a notch. The guilt has thickened.

      I worry not just about Timmy, but equally so about Meredith.

      I don’t think she can handle much more.

      Though I try not to let on, I’m also concerned about the limits of my own tolerance. As I sing “Row, Row” in the dark, my thoughts seem to rattle around without content, or without objective and realistic content. I fantasize sometimes. I pretend none of this is happening. I pretend I’m teaching history to my son as I sing about John Wilkes Booth going merrily down the stream.

      This morning I found Meredith sitting outside Timmy’s bedroom. She was trembling with … I don’t know what. She was trembling with all that has been and all that still is.

      I had seen her weep before, but never like this.

      Behind the closed bedroom door, Timmy was shrieking.

      I didn’t decide anything; I just did it—loaded all three of us into the car and drove to an emergency room.

      Seven hours later we departed with three prescriptions: Xanax for Meredith, Xanax for me, and a drug called Prilosec for Timmy. Our son was found to be suffering from acid reflux disease. His case was severe. We were informed that acid reflux can be difficult to diagnose, especially among infants, who are unable to articulate where things hurt or how things hurt or why things hurt or even that things hurt. They can cry. They can shriek and hiss. We learned today, along with a great deal else, that insomnia is a common symptom of acid reflux; we learned that the condition is caused by a relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter, which in turn permits stomach acids to drain into the esophagus; we learned that those acids can produce intense pain, especially in the sensitive tissues of a baby; we learned that the word “colic” (sometimes called “infantile colic”) is descriptive of a set of symptoms (frequency of crying, duration of crying) but is not a diagnosis of organic cause; we learned that we were not to blame; we learned that Timmy hated only the terrible pain, not the world.

      All that was today.

      Now it’s 11:17 p.m., and the house is bizarrely silent. The Prilosec did its magic—not instantly, but very nearly so.

      The Xanax also worked. Meredith has been sleeping since late afternoon. I’m feeling extremely fine.

      Until two hours ago I had been sitting in the dark with Timmy, even though he no longer needs me. He too is feeling fine. He sleeps peacefully. He is in his crib. In a few minutes I’ll get some sleep myself, but for now, as I scribble down these few words, I’m content to sit here listening to the all-is-well hum of our baby monitor, its soothing electric buzz coming from some unpopulated and distant galaxy. I’m riding the jet stream of Xanax, true, but I’m also feeling a kind of nostalgia, the sort of backward-looking, tongue-probing