Becoming Papa

In observance of Father’s Day, here’s an excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions – “Becoming Papa.”

I never saw myself being a parent until I became one. Now, I can’t imagine being anything else. I’m sure that sounds cliche (especially to people who aren’t parents), but it’s the truth.

The path to parenthood was a direct one for me, with no twisting turns or detours along the road. Back in 2008, as soon as Brittany and I started dating and became serious, I got to meet Trey for the first time. (Which took a few months because she had to run a background check on me like I was some kind of monster in suburbanite camouflage.)

He’d just turned two a few weeks earlier, and I showed up to her apartment for dinner and a movie. I was nervous. She was nervous. Trey was two, so he probably wasn’t.

I picked up some food from a place called Chicken Express (which I’m convinced is the Los Pollos Hermanos of the Gulf Coast. I just haven’t been able to prove it. Yet.) on my way, and showed up bearing chicken strips and frozen custard. She introduced me to Trey, I played a little game with him that combined the wonders of peek-a-boo with me making a derp face and going, “Blah, blah, blah” at him every time I’d pop out. It’s a game every toddler I’ve ever met loves, so I came prepared. (He also referred to me as Blah-Blah for the next several months.)

We ate dinner, Trey devoured his frozen custard, and then it was movie time. Brittany popped Charlotte’s Web in the DVD player and sat down with Trey on the couch. Unsure of my position in all this, I elected to sit on the floor.

About five minutes in, Trey had already crawled down and into my lap, where he stayed for the rest of the movie. We played some more “Blah, blah, blah” and did silly things, and by the time we got to the That’s some pig part, I was done. I knew I was in it for the long haul, and marrying Brittany was a certainty. It was something that had already happened, somewhere out at a specific point in space-time. We just hadn’t gotten there yet.

But we would.

Falling in love with both Brittany and Trey is the best decision I never made because it just sort of happened. I didn’t have much say in it, one way or the other.

Of course, while meeting Trey made me an instant parent, it took a little while to learn the ropes. Which was something made very clear to me later that same night, after Brittany tucked him in and told him night-night.

He said he was thirsty and asked for a drink, so she sent me into the little kitchen of her apartment to pour him a sippy cup of juice. (Spoilers: There was more to it than that.)

I nodded and headed off to do my part, but since I didn’t immediately see the apple juice hiding behind a jug of milk when I opened her refrigerator, I just grabbed the first juice I saw: V8 Splash.

I poured some straight into the sippy cup, screwed the lid on tight, then headed back to his room, confident in a job well done.

About twenty minutes later, his walls were covered in V8 vomit.

Turns out, you don’t just give straight juice to a two-year-old – and that’s when we’re talking plain old apple juice. You dilute it first, so the kid’s basically just drinking water that tastes like an apple might have, at some point, taken a brief swim in it. (You know, like with LaCroix.)

What you definitely do not do is give the kid pure, concentrated V8 Splash. Oh, sure. His eyes will get huge as he gulps it down like he’s just discovered mainlining heroin or something, but there will be Consequences later. And you’ll never get the smell out. Not really.

Lesson learned.

Later, after we were happily married and living together like married couples do, Brittany went to work and left me home alone with Trey for the first time.

She should not have done this.

We were fine for the first few hours, playing silly games and watching cartoons and whatnot, but then the Incident happened.

I’d changed his diaper before. Or maybe it was a pull-up. I can’t remember. At any rate, I’d cleaned up poop before. It’s one of the first things you learn to do as a parent, right after developing the highly specialized skill of being able to fall asleep standing up with your head wedged in the corner of a room while your feet are uniquely positioned to keep you from falling down whenever you lose consciousness. Still, I was not prepared for what happened.

To call the arcane horror than manifested that day poop is doing a disservice to ancient unseen nightmares since the dawn of time. It was Lovecraftian.

Or maybe tar. It was probably just tar. Like, he got into a jar of tar someone had carelessly left just lying around, ate it like it was Nutella, and now it was coming out the other end.

And sticking to everything. The…stuff that came out of this child’s poopin’ hole instantly hardened the second it touched anything. His butt cheeks. His legs. The floor. The wall. His hands, for inexplicable reasons. Probably the ceiling too, but I was too afraid to check.

I called Brittany immediately.
She didn’t answer.
I texted Brittany immediately after that.
She responded.
“lolololololololol“

I was clearly on my own.

The first weapon I chose in my epic battle with this excremental terror was the mighty Baby Wipe. If you’re not a parent, you probably don’t know how magical these things are, but you can trust me when I tell you they can clean anything. You can go ahead and scrap 95% of whatever cleaning products you’re wasting your money on right now and just invest in a few packs of baby wipes. They get the job done.

Usually.

This time, however, things would not be so simple. The poop just laughed at my efforts. I tried adding a little old-fashioned elbow grease to the mix, but this proved too intense for Trey’s delicate skin and he let me know that I should never try it again under any circumstances.

Stopping just short of grabbing a hammer and a flathead screwdriver to try and chisel the poop spakle from his tender baby flesh, I decided that trying a gentler approach would be the better idea.

We headed into the bathtub.

I warmed up the water, he hopped in the tub, and I went to work with a washcloth.

The poop resisted.

In the end, it took the combined effort of soap, the aforementioned washcloth, and our massaging shower head on its maximum setting to even begin to dislodge the stuff.

Eventually, I managed to get him cleaned up, dried off, and redressed. But the smell?

The smell lingered.

****

I didn’t officially become Papa until a couple of years after first meeting Trey. I never wanted to tell him what to call me, so I just let it work itself out. At first, he called me Blah-Blah. After that, he called me Kris-Kris for a little while, then moved on to Daddy Kris. However, his dad wasn’t comfortable with that, so he asked Brittany to do something about it, which is how I eventually became Papa.

Trey has always referred to Brittany as Mama, so when she was talking with him one day and trying to find a new name to call me, she eventually suggested Papa and it stuck. He liked it because it rhymed with Mama, and I liked it because it wasn’t typical. I’m a big fan of not being typical.

And that’s the story of how I became Papa, except that there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Papa is just a name. Becoming a father was something else entirely. I was 33 when Brittany and I met, and 34 when we got married. I had an instant family the second I said, “I do.” And I’ve never regretted a single moment after that. (This is not entirely true. While I don’t regret a single moment spent with my wife and child, I still make a lot of really stupid life choices.)

It has been difficult being a stepdad, though. Not because of Trey or anything. Brittany won the lottery when she had him. He’s objectively the best kid ever, and I’ll have words with anyone who says any different.

The struggle has always been with maintaining my place as just a stepdad, and never overstepping my line into actual dad territory. I got attached to the little guy that very first night while we were watching “the pig movie.” We had an instant bond that nothing can ever break – but there have been challenges.

The issue with what Trey calls me ever being an issue in the first place was one. Differences of opinion in how to raise him, values, beliefs, etc… all these things are a negotiation in mixed families. Little things that might’ve been easily worked out between Mom and Dad when they were married have a tendency to become massive hills everyone wants to die on, and it’s hard to know the right way to resolve all the tiny (and not so tiny) conflicts that arise from time to time.

As a stepparent, there’s not much I can do to influence things either way. Or, at least, there’s not much I feel like I can do. Some things just have to be worked out by the parents, while the steps are there to provide moral support.

We’re not real parents, after all.

This is because stepparents get a bad rap. In pop culture and fairy tales, we’re usually evil, heartless meanies who either care nothing for our stepchildren, or have the annoying habit of trying to bake them into pies all the time. In sitcoms on network television, we’re bumbling fools and inconsistent sources of unsteady drama. We’re the extra bits tacked onto the three points of the Mom, Dad and Child triangle that make it stick out at embarrassing angles all the other shapes point at and laugh. In short, we’re not worth very much to anybody.

That’s the stereotype, anyway.

In truth, being a stepdad or stepmom is noble sort of thing, if you tilt your head just right and squint a little. After all, stepparents choose to add our stepchildren to our lives, rather than roll the DNA dice and hope they land on seven. (Assuming that’s a good thing. I don’t really understand how Craps works.) We usually aren’t around for the baby days, so we accept our stepchildren as they already are: partially formed, at whatever age they are when we meet them.

If we do things right, we take our place in a kind of familial pyramid, where the four points of Mom and Dad, and Stepmom and Stepdad make up the base of a pyramid that supports the kiddo capstone at the top. I suspect that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. It’s been well over a decade for me, and I’m still trying to figure all this out.

Your mileage may vary.

(Update – Father’s Day, 2022: This piece was originally written several years ago, and many things have changed as we navigate the uncharted, teenage waters upon the seemingly endless Sea of Perpetual Angst. While the most important things have stayed the same, the he/him references to Trey would be they/them references to Lily, if I’d written it today.

It occurs to me now that Father’s Day happening during Pride Month is no small thing, and it likely serves as a difficult time for far too many in the LGBTQ+ community who don’t have supportive dads. I’m glad to say Lily does — two, in fact, along with two moms — but many children of less than accepting parents may find the day a struggle to get through.

I don’t have any words that will make it any easier to bear, but know that you will get through it. Just like you’ve already made it through countless hardships to get to where you are today. If you’re reading this, you’re still here. That means every day is a new victory, despite how things can feel sometimes. Just keep going, and who knows? One day, your dad may come around. And if he doesn’t, you can always find a new one. If I’ve learned anything from being a stepparent, it’s that family doesn’t have to be limited to accidents of birth. Family can be whatever we decide it is, with its members being whoever we choose to let into our lives. 🏳️‍🌈

Happy Father’s Day and Happy Pride, kids. Keep going.)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(If you enjoyed this excerpt from A Lifetime of Questionable Decisions, why not buy the book and impress all your friends with how fun you are at parties? All the cool kids are buying it. Don’t you want to be cool, too?)

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NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

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