Go to Zone!
by John Boyd

Once, there was only the two of us. How peaceful and serene it was. You rub my back, I’ll rub yours. We enjoyed such idle pleasure, like spending time in activities that now seem the stuff of legend and lore. I remember once having no compulsion to get out of bed on a Saturday. My wife and I laid in bed all day and watched the entire Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary – it is more than 10 hours long, folks. I even have a vague recollection of choosing a restaurant based on the quality and price of the food, not whether or not the interior designers considered the principles of noise dampening and dispersion of cacophonous chatter with corresponding utensil percussion. I remember going to one place because the wait staff spent time explaining specials and describing meal courses to exhilarate a mature pallet. Now I’m more interested in a server’s willingness to dodge flung macaroni.

But then there were three, and then four of us. There’s an age-old debate that we new parents have. Which is harder, getting that first bundle of joy or the second sack of sugar? The first is hard because all of a sudden, you have this other person around, who, though small enough to barely make it as a paperweight, also enjoys a presence large enough to rule two seemingly grownup parents. (A baby who is also a giant, if you will. It’s an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp.) But you just pass it back and forth, and go on courting. The second is easy because, well, for the most part you’ve done it before. The level of difficulty goes up though because you’ve doubled your chances of having sleepless nights wiping throw-up off your face. Still, each of you can go baseline to base day and night, depending on each other and sharing the load. If having one is as easy as a free throw, the second is like playing H-O-R-S-E on one of those adjustable goals lowered enough so that I feel athletic.

After a short time having both our first and second children, we fell into a groove. Things started hard with one, but we got the hang of it. With two, we put our practice in the game, and we figured it out again. We developed this fluid dribble and pass routine (i.e. baby dribbles on me, pass to mommy). As a team, we could man-up and take care of anything that came our way. We are a team, after all. As a foursome, we were unstoppable. We could face any foe, we could attend a good church, we could shop fearlessly, we were afraid of no restaurant (provided they printed coloring books and called them menus, served chicken fingers and got food to our table in 2.2 minutes or less). Better yet, we could split up and do a little one-on-one, if need be. “I’ll take Burpee and head to the store, you take Stinky and head to the park.”

With the arrival of nombre tres, however, our whole scheme has changed. It’s no more man to man; we’ve had to go to zone. If one requires adapting your routine, and two calls for team strategy, then three requires Bob Knight and an industrial-sized can of joint ointment. Splitting up now invariably favors my wife. She keeps the one who depends on her for nourishment, while I play two-on-one. Two hands, one for each neck, makes sense to me. Now we find ourselves outmatched and outnumbered. It didn’t take long for these three to figure out they were a team, and it was them against us.

Why on earth would we leave the blissful man-up routine? We had a bulletproof strategy, Dean Smith himself could not have provided a more effective defense. What would lead us to take on another mouth to feed – another mouth to mouth off? I haven’t gotten that far with my shrink; I’ll let you know. Right now we are still on 3rd grade at Clubview. But I’ll venture a guess: Just over one month ago, as I held my third baby girl in my arms, allowing the tears of joy to flow down my face, and listening to the gentle trembling of new breath, I didn’t need an answer why. I just knew. God once again gave heaven-in-flesh to an undeserving dad, and getting a gift for the third time is just as special as opening the first.

It will be a little harder to manage, I will probably need to start sketching x’s and o’s on a notepad and start calling 30-second timeouts more often. But I’ll know I’ve already won, even when I’m letting one dribble all over me.

A native of Columbus, John Boyd has recently returned here to work in his family business.