Perhaps my lowest point to date, as a father, came this past Tuesday afternoon, when I put a baby bottle into a pot of boiling water to sterilize it, went into the guest room to work for a while, and just forgot about it—remembering it only when, about an hour and a half later, enough water evaporated that the bottle began melting against the bottom of the pot and the house began to fill with smoke.
Disaster was averted. The smoke hadn’t yet migrated to the bedroom, where Jess and Jolie were napping, so they really only had to endure a few seconds of it while they hurried outside. And nothing but the bottle was burning, so there wasn’t any damage to the house (though the smell of burnt plastic lingers even now, almost a week later, so it’s possible that we may have to spend some coin to purge the odor).
There’s no question, however, that my carelessness endangered my wife and daughter, that I failed in my paramount duty as a man—to protect my loved ones (did I just write “paramount duty as a man”? jeez) . Not only that, but I was so stunned by what I’d done, and so worried that I’d permanently done damage to Jolie (I imagined the toxic plastic particles coating the walls of her lungs and the dendrites of her brain, slowly pickling her) that I wasn’t able, until Friday, to even take the simple step of calling the doctor’s office to find out whether there was anything to worry about.
The nurse assured me that unless Jolie was forced to inhale the heavy smoke for a while, which she wasn’t, then she was fine, which was a huge relief. But man, the fact that I even had to be asking such a question was pretty mortifying.
And it’s not just the details of what happened, it’s that that kind of carelessness, that kind of absent-mindedness, is a real problem for me. I forget appointments. I miss exits on the highway because I’m in the middle of making what I believe is an interesting point to the person in the passenger seat. I forget to change my underwear after soiling myself, etc.
When I only had to take care of myself, it was a quirk, even an endearing one (intellectuals are absent-minded after all, just like Einstein). Now that I’m responsible for two other people, it’s not so endearing. It’s dangerous, and I don’t really know what to do to fix it, which is scary.
The best I can do is to keep trying to do better—to not take refuge in the role of the absent-minded intellectual, which is one of the classic escape hatches men use to justify delegating the detail work to their wives—but that’s not a very reassuring thing to tell my daughter as the house is burning down around us.
