Ask me Anything about Milk Ducts

Baby showers are not for men. I cannot repeat this often enough. It’s not proper etiquette to invite men, but people now do it anyway.

I have been invited to these things, but I don’t like it. I would rather send gifts and stay home. The novel practice of dragging men to baby showers seems to be part of the left’s effort to turn men into women, and besides, what could be more boring for a normal man than to watch a woman pull things like onesies and wipe warmers out of boxes?

Yes, it’s boring. I’ll repeat it. Heterosexual men, meaning normal men without demonic mental conditions that make them effeminate and cause them to envy women, will sit and nod with approval while a huge lady shows the guests the stuffed toys and bibs she just received, but most of us would much rather be somewhere else receiving thank you’s by text message.

In the old days, meaning, say, 15 years ago when there were only two genders, men were excluded from baby showers just as we are excluded from bachelorette parties. Everyone understood that we didn’t want to go and that we would spoil the atmosphere. Then came feminism, and suddenly, men were obligated to attend.

I don’t like baby showers. Trump needs to ban men from baby showers by executive order. But I have been to two lactation consultations as well as a meeting for breastfeeding mothers, and these things were my idea. I went to these things out of necessity, not because I wanted to be a cool chestfeeding dad who shares his wife’s underwear drawer.

Breastfeeding turned out to be incredibly complicated, and my wife and I are orphans with no female relatives anywhere near us. We lacked the usual advice sources. We needed people who were actually paid to study breastfeeding, and we also needed to talk to women who had been through it.

Thank God no trannies showed up at the meeting. Thank God our consultant and the women running the meeting aren’t drag queens. I don’t have to Google; I can assure you without checking that there are homosexual men teaching breastfeeding and forcing everyone involved to use terms like “lactating person” and “chestfeeder.”

My area doesn’t have much appeal for sexual deviants other than lesbians and gays who are drawn to horses. We don’t have perversion parades, and public sodomy involving people wearing only body paint and glitter is not something we have to deal with. Christians predominate here. I guess that’s why it has been our good fortune to be spared involvement with weirdos during the pregnancy and postpartum experience. We only had one male nurse, and he seemed normal.

The meeting was small, and I was the only man there. Most men of breeding age have to work on weekdays, and it’s not exactly unheard of for men who have free time to abandon the women they inseminate, even in our Christian area.

One young lady at the meeting was still pregnant. Smart girl. Smart for the most part, anyway. She was alone, and from the language she used, it was obvious she was not married to the sperm donor. Nonetheless, she mentioned Ocala’s biggest megachurch. She’s a megachurch member who lives in sin and who would presumably go to hell instantly if she died during childbirth. Imagine carrying your child to term and then going to hell before you ever saw him.

I have been to the church she mentioned. The pastor is an idiot; a motivational speaker who is a stranger to the Holy Spirit. I took my dad to the church, thinking there might be someone there who could help him, but the pastor, whose apt last name is Gilligan, preached a sermon on pagan meditation, calling it “mindfulness.”

This girl is trying to do the right thing, but the man who is supposed to lead her to Yeshua and the Holy Spirit is teaching nonsense and lining his pockets. He profits from keeping her condemned. He’s like a barrier contraceptive that prevents people from reaching God. Satan’s last line of defense against salvation.

Out in the non-Christian world, there are drug dealers, entertainers, liberal teachers, government employees and others who fight Christianity, and people have to deal with them all the time. Then they enter churches looking for relief, and they and run into goalkeepers posing as pastors.

We would be better off if God killed preachers who keep people from being saved.

They’re like Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. They claim they’re giving you the God of the Bible, but they’re really building up walls of kooky doctrine within you, to make it harder for him to enter.

Anyway, I have never had any desire to learn about breastfeeding, but now I feel like I could write a book. I envy dads who have not had the problems I’ve had. The normal thing is to pay the bills, hold the baby, make things easy for the mother, and let her deal with every aspect of feeding. It should not be necessary for a man to study breastfeeding or go to consultations. Unfortunately, we didn’t think to send my wife to classes when she was pregnant, and we got some bad advice that left us with problems that were hard to fix. I don’t think they would have been fixed had I not jumped in.

Now I have to jump out. I have to resume doing my job. I have to look after our business and property. Our son had to be weaned off formula, and my wife has to be weaned off excessive help. Sooner or later, she will have to drive to buy diapers without me. She will have to go days without handing me a bottle. I have enjoyed taking her and our son to doctors’ appointments, but she’ll have to get used to handling these things on her own the majority of the time.

Over the last month, I have been trained to be with my family constantly and to be involved in everything. Newborns are extremely demanding, and my wife didn’t have a sister or mother to stay with us and help. But he’s not going to need 8 feedings per day forever, and eventually, a diaper will last half a day instead of 5 minutes to three hours.

I don’t have much of anyone to advise me, so I am working to figure it out. How much of this stuff should I be doing this month? How about the month after that?

My wife hasn’t been inside a store since she gave birth. She barely goes outside. I do all the shopping. I get gas. This has been fine up till now, but no normal mother in America lives this way after the first month. She hasn’t had her hair fixed in about 6 weeks.

She was a mess after delivery, but that was weeks ago, and now she has no problem doing laundry or mopping the floor. She does these things without being asked. I’m not badgering an injured woman to do chores. She doesn’t need to be housebound any more. She can drive now.

I have realized I need to adjust my role as time passes and the baby grows.

I’m always going to be involved. I won’t be like my own father, who left the delivery waiting room to play pinball with his friends. I will know the names of my son’s teachers (probably my wife and me). I will hang out with him instead of leaving the house on weekends before he gets up so I can play golf. I will talk to him a lot and pass wisdom on. I will teach him how to do things. I will pray over him and speak blessings over him. But I’m not going to be his other mom.

Our roles are already different. Mom said he couldn’t be allowed to cry alone; I said he would get over it. Mom treats him like a delicate porcelain figurine; I stick my fingers in his ears, jiggle him around, and let him wrestle with my hands. Mom puts him in his special baby tub when he’s a mess; I use the utility sink.

She goes a little too far. I go a little too far. Together, we find the right course.

When he’s whiny and he cries for no reason, Mom reassures him. I tell him, “No one cares. No one is listening. Holler more. Your foot is still going in the romper.” I know he doesn’t understand, but it helps me with my attitude, and eventually, he will learn English, and I will have to say the same things from time to time.

Mom makes him feel safe, and we both make him feel loved, but I also challenge him. I put demands on him. Not big ones. I make him lie on his stomach for 5 minutes at a time. I leave him on his activity mat for half an hour instead of treating him like a growth on my belly that can’t be removed. I won’t let him have fast nipples on his bottles because he has to prefer his mother to a piece of plastic.

I’m not just his drill instructor. I’m also the one who pushes for skin-to-skin time and breastfeeding; things he loves. When I see my wife with a bottle in her hand, I make her explain and defend her decision. I remind her that being tired is not a good reason to use a bottle. I’m tired, too, but if he needs two diapers in 15 minutes, and it’s my turn, he gets them. If he needs something from the store, and I just got back from there, I get in the car and go.

She doesn’t resent me when I push her in the right direction. She keeps telling me how right I was to tell her to do this or that. She didn’t want to have the second breastfeeding consultation, but she was very, very happy on the way home, because the consultation made a huge difference. She didn’t want to go to the meeting, but she loved it, and she learned a lot. On the other hand, she feels terrible guilt for not listening to me about formula.

This is how leadership is. You’re unpopular at first, and then when you turn out to be right, everyone thanks you, and unless you’re lucky, they try to take the credit. You have to get used to ignoring the resistance, because it almost always turns into gratitude. It’s not pleasant to have someone fight you and even shame you when you’re trying to help them, but you have to remember, during the times of resistance, that the payoff will make it all worth it.

The more you cave in, the more you will be resented and contemned later. The same person who gave you a hard time when you were doing the right thing will blame you for quitting and doing exactly what they wanted.

This is a big problem in matriarchal cultures. I don’t know how Jewish men survive. So many of them are bulldozed by their wives.

A man is supposed to rule his house. Anyone who tells you different is your enemy and the enemy of God. And you can’t rule unless you spend a lot of time with God and let him rule you. All authority comes from time spent in the presence of God. A man who doesn’t submit to God makes decisions without God’s authority backing him up. He’s not a captain. He’s a mutineer. Mutineers get taken down by the same people they lead in mutiny.

The mutiny analogy is interesting. British captains could have men flogged and hanged. A sailor who defied and escaped his captain would be chased down by the crown and punished, because the sailor had defied the crown’s agent.

Sailors were terrified of their captains, even if their captains were short and frail. To them, the captain was the crown and the cat o’ nine tails and the gallows.

Mutineers were different. The leader of a mutiny had no one to back him up, so the other mutineers didn’t fear him much. If they slit his throat, they wouldn’t be hanged. They would be rewarded with his position.

God will back up a patriarch who submits to him, but if you live in a state of mutiny, you should expect to be defied and emasculated in your own house. You can’t submit to God unless you spend time in his presence. A book is not enough. Rules are not enough. The one who wrote the book is available. Naval officers don’t get their orders and their authority from books of regulations. Higher officers contact them and tell them what to do.

The baby was too warm, so I just took him to the changing table and put him in a onesie (with a picture of his face on it) and his first pair of pants. It’s not like I watched him get married, but it was a threshold. You can only wear pants for the first time once. Will every little change be reason for emotion? I wonder.

I guess you get over it eventually. Otherwise, it will be, “It’s his first bite of solid food!”; “It’s his first trip to the grocery store!”; “It’s his first trip to the other grocery store!”; “It’s the first time he’s gone to the grocery store in this onesie!”

Don’t ask for the car keys yet, kid. You have a ways to go.