YO MAMA: A Father’s Day surprise
We were already in a rush, as was our default in those early parenting days. It was my husband’s first Father’s Day and we were taking our two-month-old son to dinner at my in-laws house. I still had to shower, get dressed, pack the diaper bag and — most importantly — stamp my son’s...
Valandos
We were already in a rush, as was our default in those early parenting days. It was my husband’s first Father’s Day and we were taking our two-month-old son to dinner at my in-laws house. I still had to shower, get dressed, pack the diaper bag and — most importantly — stamp my son’s feet in black paint to make the obligatory Happy Father’s Day card.
I had gone through various stages throughout the past week of deciding to make the stupid card, not make it, and make it again. I had an overwhelming fear of missing out; there was only one first father’s day to commemorate.
My prototype was something I found during a late night foray through Google images while my son nursed himself back to sleep. It was a print of each baby foot, heels together, with the resulting shape resembling a heart. Cringey-cute. The accompanying, sappy text read: “From the top of my head to the tips of my toes, I love you daddy.” I would probably leave that part out.
I had the child-safe paint, the card stock and the wet wipes. I had the baby (that was the hard part). I was ready to create a masterpiece that would be treasured for years to come, and would, in all likelihood, reduce my husband to tears of nostalgia whenever he gazed upon it.
Away I went applying black paint to my son’s feet with a small paintbrush. I had him on a towel in the bathroom. So far so good. It must have tickled a bit, because every once in a while he would pull away a bit and smile. Bob Marley’s One Love was playing in the background. I felt like we were really bonding, really working collaboratively on this memento for dad.
I grabbed the card stock and, with cautious optimism, brought it up to my son’s foot. I felt that somehow, miraculously, this DIY project was going to be a massive success.
But the print was just a big messy blob. It looked horrible, like a hobbit-child had sloppily wiped his muddy foot on it. There were no delightfully delicate wrinkle lines, no perfectly formed, pebble-sized toes. It was worse than a four-year-old’s finger painting. My husband would look at it in ten years and have zero clue what it was.
This was fine though; I had a couple back-up pieces of card stock at the ready. I collected little prints on all of them, but none of them were recognizable as baby feet. In a panic, I made little prints on the backsides of my papers too, trying desperately to get even one salvageable image. The kid had started kicking and whining. Pretty soon I was surrounded by what looked like dozens of cast-off Rorschach ink-blots.
“Umm, is everything OK in here?” I heard my husband ask from the doorway.
“Just another Pinterest fail,” I said dismally, handing him an alien-looking print that had nine toe prints on one foot.
“I love it,” he said. It was an unspoken truth that he was now dutifully bound to keep this ugly thing in a box somewhere for all of eternity or risk hurting my feelings, which he would never do.
“Why don’t you boys have a nice Father’s Day soak in the tub together while I get this all cleaned up,” I said.
My heart melted as I watched them in the bath, my tiny son held afloat on the raft made by my husband’s hands and forearms. Our son was all smiles and big, wet eyelashes. I took a mental picture of that moment and threw my hideous prints in the trash.
All of a sudden, the water started bubbling all around my son like he was in a jacuzzi tub. He’d let out a huge fart. We broke out laughing. Then I noticed that the water had turned mustard yellow. It was seeping out in a big, nuclear waste-looking cloud. The kid had pooped in the tub. Not just a small poop, either, but a fecal emission of epic proportions for such a small human being. My husband looked like he was going to barf.
“Happy Father’s Day!” I said.
As it turned out, both of his Father’s Day surprises were a great big mess. But they did make for an awfully memorable day. In all my fear of missing out on the perfect Father’s Day keepsake, I had missed what was right in front of me: this beautiful, hilarious, unpredictable mess of raising a son together, poop in the tub and all.
— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.
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