Learning to persevere: A continuing education issue

So what do you do if you want to help your wife but she gets mad when you try?

Such was the difficulty my younger brother faced when baby came home from the hospital. He worked while his wife exclusively took care of baby during maternity leave.

When she returned to office duty, he decided to pitch in. "Hey, honey," he said, "I'll take care of baby tonight. You just relax."

She readily accepted.

Until he couldn't get baby to stop crying. Snatching baby out of his arms, she shouted "Never mind!"

Baby soon stopped crying. My brother soon felt guilty.

• • •

"Cripes," he told me over the phone, "how difficult can getting a baby to quit crying be?"

But my brother persevered. It was a trait he'd learned from our farmer father. I recall the three of us standing long ago between two fields, oats on one side, corn on the other, the morning after a storm. A wild wind had flattened much of the oats while a humid breeze stirred the leaves of perfectly upright corn.

It didn't make sense. One field a total loss, the other entirely unaffected. As if the storm had consciously decided to batter only oats that night.

Our father didn't sigh. His eyes didn't go gray with defeat. His enormous hands didn't roll into angry fists.

"We'll just have to settle on using it as straw this year," he said.

• • •

A couple of weeks later, my brother called me back. Elation filled his voice, as if he'd just won $100 from a scratch-off lottery ticket. "I figured out how to get baby to eat," he said.

It was an accidental discovery. When his finger brushed against baby's cheek, baby turned his head and tried to suckle.

Brother got an idea: before giving baby a bottle of warm milk, touch its cheek.

"Ah, the rooting instinct," I said.

• • •

Not all solutions come so easily.

Take naming baby, for example. My brother wanted traditional family names passed across the years, like George, Edmund, Martha and Ann. His wife wanted more "modern-sounding" names. She liked Tyler, Logan, Madison and Alexis.

Her names were on parentplace.com's list of top five names given to boys and girls in Iowa during 2001. My brother's names were in the Farmer's Almanac list of top five names given to boys and girls in Iowa during 1861.

"Talk some sense into her," my brother pleaded.

"'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,'" I said.

"It's the first word he'll learn."

"The first word he'll probably learn is 'mama.'"

• • •

She got to pick baby's name. Some would say my brother "lost." In all truth, he just figured out when to pick his battles. She'd already decided on a modern name, the oats were flattened, and the best thing to do was move on.

Like to burping.

I got a phone call that night, too. How many lottery tickets could a guy win in a week?

"I was just holding him over my shoulder when I started rubbing his back, more out of affection than anything, and he belched," my brother said. "Really loud."

As he went on, I tried to recall how our father dealt with other people's baby stories.

(originally published Aug. 17, 2003)