A Guide in the Jungle: A Writer's Letter to His Young Son

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By Daniel Barrios

Dear Hijo,

It’s been sixteen months since I became your father, though those who aren’t parents might say a year and five months. Before I was a parent, I would have.

I’ve become wiser since your birth, but my wisdom did not fall on my lap. I married your mother just after I graduated college with a bachelor’s in Creative Writing. Yikes. I was twenty-four and my ambition landed me a job in education. So much for the bohemian writer’s life. We welcomed you a week shy of our first wedding anniversary. You weighed in at a healthy six pounds and ten ounces. This was pre-COVID-19, and there were no masks worn, except for the medical professionals. The hospital did not provide me with scrubs. As I watched you being brought into the world in my college sweater and former man-bun, I asked myself two things: How will you look to the world? And how will I look with you to the world?

The first question was gratified the minute you arrived. There was a beautiful pungent scent that filled the delivery room. Unlike anything I’ve smelled before. After that smell, I knew I was your dad. You looked like both of us. Her wide eyes. My round nose. Her soft skin. My devious smile. This was blissful confirmation that you were our baby, and we were your padres. The only issue rested in my second question. How did we look as young parents with a baby boy? Did we look like mature twenty-five-year-old adults who knew what they were doing? Or did we look like another young couple who didn’t use a condom, a couple of sinvergüenzas?

Did I have to look a certain way to be a father? And what way was that? Height? I’m certainly no Tyrion Lannister. I’m also not a six-foot gigante. I’m somewhere in the middle. A place where my own high school students sometimes wondered who the teacher was, but tall enough to reach the high shelves in the kitchen for your mom (yes, on my tiptoes but nonetheless). A blessing and a curse. Did my youthful and stature disqualify me from society’s consensus of what fatherhood should be?

Perhaps I shouldn’t care how society views me. Or your mom. Or you. It would be on thing if society was fair and how someone looks didn’t affect how they’re treated. It’s too bad that type of society doesn’t exist. If you believe people don’t judge you based on the way you look, you are as ignorant as the dog who begs for his master’s bones while his own bowl is full of fresh meat.

In a Twitter thread on a goofily masculinized baby “manual” for dads in which infant care is compared to vehicle maintenance from my school peer and Assignment online editor Aaron Calvin, he points out that “the bar for dads is so extremely low, it really sucks.”

I couldn't agree more. Fathers in our society are somehow stigmatized as not being able to care for their newborns the way mothers can. In the manual Calvin references, babies are described like cars so that men can understand how to care for them. It’s silly, but this is a step in the right direction, a great resource.

Que resource?

What about the dads who didn’t receive a baby manual? How are they supposed to navigate the unknown terrain of parenthood? The same way they do anything else: By doing it.

Nothing about being your father has been easy. In graduate school, the workshops don’t teach you how to nurse an overexerted baby on the cusps of turning purple to sleep. They don’t teach you that swaddling and rocking and shushing will not work, as the manual claims, as ways to calm a cranky baby. Babies aren’t one size fits all. Formulas and juices and whole milk won’t work all the time either. You were unpredictable until you weren’t. 

The manual advises to go for walks. The one thing the manual doesn’t say is that if you live in a sketchy neighborhood, you probably don’t want to walk. And if I wasn’t raised in the 10303 zip code, I wouldn’t walk around past 8pm at night either. However, we bundled and shrouded and covered you in your stroller and walked you to sleep every night because there was no other way. The narrow sidewalks and passers-by smoking joints didn't phase me, your mom, or you. After a steady ten-minute loop in the neighborhood, we heard your snores harmonizing with the North Shore’s gusty winds. That’s how we put you to sleep.

Another method the manual suggests is going for a drive. A spectacular idea! What about the parents who do not have enough money for a car and depend on the city bus like your great-grandparents did their entire lives on Staten Island? How do those parents go for a drive when some of them were taking cabs back to public housing from picking up milk and apple juice with limited WIC benefits? Your great-grandparents never owned their own car and did not have the luxury of snoozing your grandfather on the highway when he was a fussy baby. 

“Parenting really just unlocks a whole new level of bizarre interactions with our messed up world,” Calvin said.

I’m starting to understand why your mom and I didn’t get one of those baby manuals. I mean, I don’t want one anyway. I don’t care for cars and see them simply as a way to get from point A to point B. You were born in the same hospital as me. You are Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and American. When you come of age, my only wish is that you become comfortable enough with who you are to accept your role in society. My role will hopefully serve as a guide in the jungle.

As I reflect on my own shortcomings, I know I’m always learning how to live in this society, accepting my role while learning its definitions. A millennial who had to choose between a wedding or a house. Mom and I made photos of the wedding for you. We’ve got uncle Yordan eating everything. Your mom’s parents are singing and dancing. Your dad with a devious smile and a blue suit. We are still saving for our future house, trying to create some semblance of an American Dream.

My russet skin does not dictate who I am or what I will become but our family’s culture does to some extent. As you settle into your own skin, and understand where your father came from, do be consumed with anger at this unjust world as I once was. Instead, Hijo, let’s rejoice. When you were born, I had questions. As we grew older, I began to think less about my questions and more about what your questions will be.

Con amor,

Always and Forever,

Papi

Daniel Barrios is a writer from Staten Island, NY. He’s currently studying fiction at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program.

Three Words

by Mike Helsher

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"Honey… my water broke."

I’m floating, dreaming, I think.  Something heavy seeps into my nose, sinks down into my stomach. The words swim between my ears, come together behind my eyes—they snap open. I slide my hand over toward my wife. The sheets are damp. There's a smell of roots and early springtime in the bedroom.

“I'm having a contraction," Karen says.

I turn the bedside light on. She’s sitting up, holding her bulbous belly. Her face is twisted. But before I can freak out, she recovers, smiles wide-eyed. She’s glowing. I blink my eyes. I’m not fully awake yet.

"Can you make it to the hospital?" I ask, imagining myself delivering a baby in the car on the side of the road.

"I think so, but we should go," Karen says.

I wake up Jessie. Technically, she’s my step-daughter, but I’m the only father she knows, and she’s my only daughter. She’s four. I tell her she’s about to be a big sister. Karen gets her dressed. I pack bags, put everything in the car.

Karen calls the Portsmouth hospital. They tell her to come right in. She calls her mother to ask if she can watch Jessie. She’ll meet us at the hospital. It’s is a forty-minute drive from Barrington, an eternity that tugs on my innards like a pending hurricane.

I’m doing 75-mph in a 40-mph zone, imagining I get pulled over for speeding and then escorted by the police, sirens wailing, as they should be.

We arrive safely at the emergency room. Karen gets wheeled into the maternity ward. Jessie goes with her grandmother. An eerie calm, the eye of the storm, passes through me. I hope I can remember all the coaching I practiced in the months prior.

The last few minutes take longer than the previous four hours of labor. My coaching skills are worn out. Contractions are only minutes apart, but there’s no progress. The nurse asks Karen to try squatting. I help her into position. She arches her sweaty head over, pushes, screams, squeezes my hand so hard it hurt.

“We’re having a baby!” the nurse who had been with us all night yells over the intercom. I look down to see my son’s head crowning. It looks deformed. There’s some blood. I look away, help Karen lay on her back.

Another nurse enters the room. “The doctor is asleep downstairs, she’ll be right up,” she says. I want to murder them both.

The doctor rushes into the room a few minutes later. “Oh boy,” she says, after surveying my son’s head. “Hold on. I’m going to have to make an incision.” A nurse hands her a scalpel. I close my eyes, lean over and try to say some encouraging words to Karen. I’m crying. My hand hurts.

Another big push and… "Oh, my God!" exclaims one of the nurses, as Jakob makes his entry into the world, with a screech that rattles me to the marrow. The doctor lays him on Karen’s chest. He’s squirming, bloody, and slimy. His head seems normal. I think I might be dreaming again.

The doctor asks me to cut the umbilical cord. I’m squeamish, but I do it. She holds up the dripping placenta, gives me a lecture on the wonders of the embryonic sac.

Another nurse comes into the room. “Oh My God!” she says. Now I think he’s deformed again, because of the bug-eyed look on her face. “I’m just going to clean him up.” She wraps our son up, whisks him off to another room, where I hear gasps and shrieks.

"Is there something wrong with him?" I ask the doctor.

"Oh no," she says, “he looks fine. They’re all placing bets on his weight, is all."

While the doctor is tending to Karen, a nurse comes in and hands me a brand-new baby boy. "Nine pounds, fourteen ounces,” she says. “Everything looks good. Congratulations!"

It’s 6:30 AM, September 19, 1997. He’s ten minutes old. The sun is coming up outside, shining through the cracks in the window blinds. I pull him close to my heart. Three words well up in me in a way they never had before.

"I love you."

Touching Betelgeuse

by Mike Helsher

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I was waiting for Bella, my blenheim-colored Cavalier King Charles spaniel, to find the perfect place to poop. She circled one way, then the other, walked to another corner of the yard and circled again. Most nights, especially if it was cold, I’d get pissed at her for taking twenty minutes to do something that in the end, takes about ten seconds. I’d yell at her even though I knew she was deaf.

But on this October night in 2010, it wasn’t cold. I waited with unusual patience in the front yard of what I liked to call of my Thoreau shack, a tiny house I was renting in Flagstaff, AZ. White aspens had speckled the driveway with yellow leaves. The air was cool and crisp.

I’d just come home from an astronomy class at the local community college, where I learned that if Betelgeuse, a red-giant in the constellation of Orion, were to replace our sun, it would fill out to the orbit of Jupiter. My mind was in overdrive, looking up, trying to fathom the size of the universe, and my tiny place in it.

On a clear night in Flagstaff you can count on being able to see the Milky Way, thanks to the “Flagstaff Dark Sky Coalition” and the near 7,000-foot altitude. I marveled at the dim glow from the cloud of stars spread across the black sky, the endless distance. I thought about how an apple would be as big as the earth, if each of its atoms were the size of a grain of sand. “The sun is but a morning star,” the last words in Walden came to mind. I reached my pointer finger up, stretched my imagination across 645.5 million light years, and gently touched Betelgeuse.

I felt the twinkling of a star in my chest. It spread to the outer layers of my skin. And I felt connected.

The day my son was born the nurse placed his swaddled body in my arms. Tears streamed down my face and I said, “I love you,” before I could think, like I’d never said it, of felt it before.

This moment wasn’t like that. In fact, it was the antithesis of it, just a quiet sense of myself, connected, in an enormous universe.

I’ve tried all sorts of paths to enlightenment over the years and never gotten there. But there I was, outside my Thoreau shack in Flagstaff, AZ, on a cool fall evening in 2010, touching Betelgeuse, while my dog was taking a dump, and there it happened.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. Is it that it?” I said to myself, as Bella did her end-of-the-ritual dance, proudly tearing up the grass with all four paws.

Nothing much has changed, but I don’t yell at Bella nearly as much.

Beyond the Pale

in ,

by John Vercher

Laurie broke my heart. She didn’t mean to. I know that now. I’m sure I knew it then. But still.

My parents transferred me to the public high school after four years in two separate parochial schools. This is to say I knew no one. The first day seemed interminable. Class after class, I extended my hand to introduce myself and met with hard stares and warnings to not get caught in the parking lot alone when the bell rang at the end of the day. That all happened before lunch. Noon came, and I exited the food line, tray in hand and looked out across throngs of unfamiliar faces. They glared back. I weaved my way through the tables in the hopes that someone would slide a chair out for me instead of pushing the empty ones in. I ate alone and wished the day away.

Alphabetical seating arrangements left Laurie and me in the last seats of our respective rows of Algebra I. Blonde bangs hovered above her forehead, a waterfall that flowed out from the sawtoothed strands of her crimped hair. Before class began, she laughed with her friends and her braces glinted in the glow of the fluorescents overhead. Her laugh lines almost, but not quite concealed a mole next to her nose, a beauty mark, perfect in its imperfection. The second bell rang and as the students finished their murmurs and turned forward, she glanced back at me.

I opened to a random page in my book and hoped she hadn’t seen me. I felt her look away. Certain I was in the clear, I went to resume my stare.

She’d been watching me. This day was looking up.

The curtains pulled back and the movie trailer of our relationship played on the screen of my mind’s eye. Berlin sang “Take My Breath Away” over footage of me as I scrawled my first note to her. Will you go with me? Check yes or no. Sorry So Short. Cut to our own table at lunch. Cut to holding hands in the hallway. Cut to prom. As I stared off into space, I caught movement in my periphery. She looked at me again. This time neither of us looked away. My glasses, thick enough to see the future, had slid down my oil-slicked nose, and I pushed them back up. I finger combed at the duckling soft hair on my upper lip, smiled my gap-toothed smile (my braces wouldn’t come for another year) and just when I thought I the day couldn’t end any better, she went ahead and said it.

“You have a really nice tan,” she whispered.

The movie reel sputtered. The celluloid melted. The film broke.

* * *

In the countless times I’ve thought about that day, I haven’t figured out what I honestly expected Laurie to say. The truth is, I never expected her to say anything, at least not to someone like me; someone who collected comic books, played with action figures a little longer than he should have, and spent lost weekends with Sonic the Hedgehog and King Hippo. Someone whose clothes were less cool than his glasses, and with a complexion that resembled the terrain of a topographical map. I never thought about the fact that I had brown skin, a wide nose, and straight hair. I was a biracial geek before it was hip to be either. No wonder Laurie stared. To be fair, I shared her confusion, about what I was and about who I was. And though my struggles with identity had begun long before that day, Laurie still ended up my first.

With one statement, Laurie became the first person to make me realize that there was something else about me that people, particularly girls, would see before they noticed the barely-there moustache or my questionable fashion sense. That afternoon was my big bang, the event from which all other questions of my identity sprung forth. It was the beginning of a high wire act, on which I walked with a constant teeter, only able to take a step before I re-assessed my footing, before I found a balance between what I liked and what I was supposed to like. How I talked and how I was supposed to talk. Who I loved and whom I was supposed to love. As if being thirteen weren’t hard enough.

* * *

“I kind of have it all the time,” I said.

“Are you Italian?”

“Nope.”

“Spanish?”

I shook my head. She cocked hers with tight-lipped confusion. Her bangs didn’t move.

“So…what are you?”

“I’m black,” I said.

“Both parents?” she asked.

Laurie had exclaimed it with such surprise that a few students ahead of us turned. My face went hot, embarrassed at their watching, humiliated by her disbelief. My throat felt dry and I managed a nod.

“Huh,” she said, and turned back around.

* * *

My sons are three and one. My wife is white. Beyond the pale of her skin, my oldest boy looks little like her. He shares my wide nose, my gapped teeth, and my straight hair. My one year old has my wife’s features and her complexion. The frequency with which I’ve thought about that afternoon increased exponentially since I first found out we were pregnant.

My three year old might meet his own Laurie. She won’t stare at his skin color. She won’t list all the possible races and ethnicities she thinks he could be (because that’s a thing to do), and she won’t bark in disbelief when he names the only one she didn’t guess. They’ll pass notes, hold hands and maybe he’ll even bring her home to meet his folks. That’s when the questions will start, both his and hers. She won’t understand why I look so different. He won’t understand why it matters.

I know what to teach my sons about who they are, but not about who the world expects them to be. I want to infect them with mine and their mother’s rampant idealism, with the notion that we all crawled from the same soup, that we are all human beings but I know that doing so leaves them vulnerable to pain. I know that as much as we don’t want it to matter, despite the declarations that we live in a post-racial America, it does matter. I want my sons to understand the struggle, but I don’t want them to experience it. And I don’t know if that’s right.

I know that Laurie didn’t mean anything by what she said. I do know that even at our young ages, the fact that she thought it was okay to ask those questions isn’t okay, that it’s representative of a problem ever present almost thirty years later. I also know that while I want my boys to know why Daddy is nervous when he gets pulled over, they won’t ever have to be. I know that while I’ll be concerned when they’re out late with their friends, I won’t be worried because their pants are a little baggy or they wore a hoodie that night. I won’t be worried about these things, because while they look like me, they don’t look enough like me. For that I am glad.

And because I am glad, I am ashamed.

John Vercher is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University's MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. His piece, "Homewood," won the 2014 Assignment Student Contest, and can be seen in Issue #1.