Escape From Baby Island

     Some years ago, when my wife and I had just begun dating, we traveled together to the island
of Bora-Bora in French Polynesia.

     I had wanted to visit Bora-Bora since I was a teenager, and was pleased to discover that
everything about the island exceeded my expectations. We spent our days snorkeling in the
cobalt-colored lagoon or drinking vanilla-flavored iced tea while wandering the shore. One night
– which happened to be my wife’s birthday – we were invited to dinner by the manager of our
hotel. Everything about the experience seemed magical: the freshness of the fish and vegetables
on our plates, the birthday gateau prepared by the chef, the way the waters of the lagoon seemed
to glow in the light of the moon and the torches flickering outside.

     Which is why we were surprised when the manager told us how difficult it was for him to
attract and retain workers on the island.

     “Oh yes,” he said, “it’s paradise, of course, and a wonderful place to visit. But living on an
island is not easy. Everything here is much more expensive than it would be on the mainland,
and everyone is isolated – from their family, their friends, events going on at home. After a
while, even paradise becomes a place people dream of escaping.”

     I’ve thought about our manager’s words many times over the past seventeen months, as my
wife and I have struggled to raise our son. Having a baby is, in many ways, like moving to a
tropical island. It is paradise – the most wonderful adventure I have ever experienced, and one
I would not trade or give up for the world. But it is also much more expensive, and many times
more isolating, than my wife or I could ever have anticipated.

     That’s not to say we were entirely unprepared. We’d had books, classes, friends who had
recently given birth and a steady stream of flyers from Babies ‘R’ Us clue us in to just how much
we would be contributing to the economic recovery in our baby’s name. Yet somehow I was not
ready for my first visit to a day care center, where I learned that the cost of providing child care
on a daily basis (the kind that we would need if my wife was to return to work) was my entire
salary. Not a percentage, not a proportion: the whole thing. Given that we regularly draw on my
salary for items such as the mortgage, gasoline and food, it seemed prudent for us to seek other
options.

     That sticker shock was nothing, however, compared to the extent to which having a child
would change the way we went about living our lives.

     Again, this shouldn’t have come as a complete shock. Everyone who has had children talks
about it as a life-changing experience. I had expected this would mean four – maybe six months,
tops – of sleepless nights, a few dress shirts permanently stained by baby blep and, you know,
having to put the needs of this child before my own for the rest of our lives.

     I hadn’t fully appreciated what that last statement would mean.

     A friend of mine, who is thinking about having children, recently asked me how the change
had affected my life.

     “Imagine two piles,” I said. “In one of them, put everything you like to do – from once-in-
a-while sorts of things, like hiking or going to concerts, to things you think about as being part
of your everyday routine, like going to the gym or watching television. In the other pile, put an
adorable little person who depends on you for everything and who becomes more wonderful, and
more like you, with each passing day.

     “Now choose,” I said. “Because you only get to have one of them. For a long, long time.”

     I recognize that this is not the case for many couples with children, particularly those who
can afford full-time child care or who have family living nearby. But it certainly has been
our experience. Taking care of a baby has made keeping up with the essential parts of life –
working, shopping for food, making our home at least somewhat habitable – very, very difficult.

     Doing anything else is next to impossible. My wife and I nearly wept tears of joy several
weeks ago when our son slept long enough for us to sit together on the couch and watch twenty
minutes of the TV show Supernatural. It didn’t matter that the twenty minutes came in the
middle of the program, or that we had no idea who the characters were or what they were doing.
We were doing something together that did not involve a screaming child or a poopy diaper, and
that felt at least as magical as anything we’d experienced on Bora-Bora.

     We have been lucky enough to retain some of our friends – for which we are immensely
grateful -- although our journey into parenthood has not been easy on them. Some of the reasons
for this are obvious: the fact that neither my wife nor I are capable any longer of remaining
awake past 9 p.m.; that everything in our house is now faintly redolent of pee; that our child
tends to throw blocks, with uncanny accuracy, at the heads of other children.

     Others are more subtle. Baby Island has its own language, customs and culture, which
outsiders may find difficult to understand. News from the mainland takes a long time to arrive,
and the world beyond our doorstep often feels very far away. It’s hard to believe there was
ever a time in my life when I willingly gave up sleep in order to attend a midnight showing of a
movie, or cried over the results of an election.

     I know on some level that the world has continued to turn while we have been raising our
son, and that sooner or later both he and we will have to rejoin that world.  Now, however,
when I am talking with friends or co-workers about the tragic but seemingly inevitable decline
of the euro, or this year’s Boston Red Sox, or the United States as a world power, I am secretly
thinking: Baby made poopy on the potty today OMG happy hands!

     My wife, on the other hand, would love to have the opportunity to talk to… well, anyone,
about anything not connected to our baby or babies in general.

     I may be busy (and, frankly, exhausted) at work, but at least I have the opportunity to
converse on a daily basis with people to whom I am not related to blood or marriage. By
contrast, my wife feels so isolated that I once invited a pair of missionaries to visit and explain
the Book of Mormon, just to give her someone to talk to. (Sadly, the Elders in question were
male, and therefore not allowed to visit the home of a married woman). If I sometimes feel
we live on an island, my wife seems to live in the upper room of a castle in the center of the
island – though castle is probably not the word she would use.

     It is also difficult for my wife – for any parent, really – to talk openly about the challenges
involved in raising a baby, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

     Consider the cat, for example. Most people, whether or not they have ever had a pet cat,
can appreciate that the creatures are simultaneously adorable and aggravating, and that those of
us who have welcomed a cat into our lives love them deeply, even if the manner in which they
shred our furniture, leave small dismembered bits of rodents where we are likely to find them
and urinate on the rug causes us to tear out what remains of our hair with despair.

     Admit, however, that you have ever found your child anything other than a heaven-sent
blessing – which, of course, he is – or parenthood anything other than the most rewarding time of
your life, and many people will look at you as though you were one of those small trophies with
which our cat presents us from time to time.

     Do we love our child? Absolutely. Are our lives richer and fuller since he came into the
world? Without question. Just the thought of the way he claps his little hands together when I
walk through the door at the end of a working day… or how he struggles to keep from smiling
when I push him on the swings – because swinging is serious business! – or the way he bounces
up and down when anyone asks him to dance makes me feel alive, and human, and happy.

     And yet… are there times when I would seriously consider giving up all of that joy and
wonder for the chance to see a movie… even a bad movie… even a truly awful movie starring
Adam Sandler… or to sleep in on a Sunday morning… or to sleep, period? Would saying yes
make me a monster? Could I say no, and still be human?

     That’s one of the reasons why my wife and I have hatched so many plans to escape from
Baby Island (without actually leaving the baby, of course). As with everything else related to
parenthood, this has turned out to be harder than we expected. This is due, in no small part, to
the fact that our son has the ability to sense whatever plans we have made and to fall asleep just
before we are about to execute them.

     Our library hosts Baby Story Time, a wonderful opportunity for babies and adults to interact
with their respective peers (and also, occasionally, to hear a story) every Monday afternoon.
Our son’s eyelids inevitably begin to droop half an hour before Story Time begins. He has slept
through play dates, birthday parties for adults and children, visits with his grandparents and
potential trips to parks, museums, restaurants and the zoo.

     Those of you without children may be asking, at this point, why we do not simply just pick
up the sleeping baby – who is, after all, still a baby and therefore portable – and carry on doing
whatever it was we planned to do. Those of you with children understand that we would sooner
attempt to transport a live nuclear weapon guarded by sleep-deprived badgers than disturb our
baby during what may very well be the only time he sleeps that day.

     Last September, on one of those wonderful warm days when the Bay Area pulls out all the
stops before letting go of summer for another year, I somehow got it into my head that I would
take the baby to San Francisco to see the sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf.

     It seemed like an easy enough thing to do. There is a ferry terminal about ten minutes from
our house, and a boat that travels to and from Fisherman’s Wharf once a day. Our son could not
handle a long journey by car (all those stories about babies falling asleep the moment they’re
buckled into a car seat? Lies. Dirty, filthy lies) but a voyage by sea, one that would allow him to
crawl around, listen to stories and throw blocks at the other passengers, seemed ideal.

     Day after day, week after week, I drove to the ferry terminal with my son. And day after
day, week after week, our son would sleep just long enough so that – by the time he was cleaned,
changed, dressed, fed, burped and wrapped up to go – we would arrive at the terminal in time
to see the boat pulling away from the dock. On those days, Baby Island felt very much like
Gilligan’s Island. Or Alcatraz.

     I’m not sure when things began to change. At some point I looked around and realized that
our town – which my wife and I had chosen largely because it was a quiet little burg with good
schools and people who seemed unlikely to murder us – was actually a pretty interesting place,
with lots of parks, long winding walkways by the water and a steady parade of activities that
were fun, if somewhat odd (our son seemed to enjoy both the annual Peddler’s Fair and his first
Civil War re-enactment, and I’m looking forward to our trip to the Camel Barns).

     I discovered that a morning spent watching my son go up and down the slide at one of our
parks (with an expression of grim determination, as if this were part of his training regimen for
NASA) was, if not quite as much fun as a trip to Six Flags or Fisherman’s Wharf, enjoyable in
an entirely different and often delightful way.

     Thanks to my son, I’ve learned that there are people in my town, whom I might otherwise
never have met, who are fascinating and funny and who moreover are making their way through their
own portions of the Baby Archipelago, who understand the significance of going poopy on the potty
and being able to watch an entire television program with their spouses.

     I have also become closer to my wife, in the way that people who live together on islands (or
who survive trench warfare, or an outbreak of the plague) do. I have a greater appreciation for
her strength, her compassion and her creativity, and I can see where our son gets his willpower.

     We finally did make it to Fisherman’s Wharf last October. I had expected to spend our
time there pointing things out to our son, showing him how funny and noisy and wonderful the
sea lions are, explaining to him that the reason they smelled so very, very badly was because
sometimes nature is like that. That happened, of course, but the part of the trip I remember was
watching him get excited about a sea gull that had settled on a piling just a few inches in front of
us, almost close enough for my son to touch. I had seen thousands of sea gulls before that day,
but that was the first time it had ever occurred to me that one could be beautiful.

     My parents lived on an island – Oahu – before I was born. It was where they met, where
they married each other, where they lived for a year before my father went off to war and my
father came home to New England. My parents said they never seriously considered going back
to live in Hawaii after that – too expensive, too far from the people they loved. Yet the island
never really lost its hold over them. My brother and I grew up listening to Don Ho and the
soundtrack to Blue Hawaii and stories about sunsets on the North Shore. When we visited Oahu
for the first time, it felt a little like going home.

     I know that my time on Baby Island may be drawing to a close. Our son is growing: older,
taller, smarter. He will eventually develop an interest in people and things outside the little
circle we have created for ourselves. He may even – God willing – sleep through the night at
least once before the age of five.  It seems strange to say that there may come a day when I am
nostalgic for my time on Baby Island. But I am starting to see how it might happen.