Ever since we brought our new baby home last September, my husband and I have engaged in daily grappling over the level of this infant’s general awareness. At some point, we think we have to stop swearing, but we are putting that off at least until after our son recognizes us. The logic, I guess, is that he doesn’t currently know who is uttering profanity, so he’s still unequipped to report any of this to my mother.
We visited my husband’s family in Portland, Oregon, for the holidays. I walked into the living room on Christmas Day and found our baby sleeping on my mother-in-law’s shoulder as she watched “Die Hard” with the volume turned down. “Don’t you think he might be a little too young for this?” I joked as Bruce Willis walked his bare bloody feet over broken glass. “He has to see it sometime,” her dismissive response came back.
The receptacle for all bad but confident parenting advice, the internet, told us before he was even born that it’s important to begin to read and sing to your baby the instant he enters the world. This felt silly for at least the first month as we showed him books his eyes couldn’t see and read him stories, fully understanding he doesn’t know what language is. Or that he even exists. But we did it anyway because we are more scared of failure than logic.
The singing always seemed at least a little more sensible. No, he doesn’t understand the lyrics, but we figured the melodies might be soothing, even to someone who hasn’t yet discovered his hands.
I’ve experienced a strange phenomenon I absolutely did not anticipate when it comes to picking out the songs to sing. There I’ll be, rocking him, and searching my mental database for appropriate material, and the next thing I know I’m almost subconsciously informing him that “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.”
‘The music just pours out of me’
Listen. I haven’t been a member of a Latter-day Saint Primary for 28 years. The last time I attended church Mitt Romney was running for president, and “I’m a [Victory for Satan]” ads were plastered all over Manhattan. These songs should have been purged from my brain by now and replaced with trivia about all the trashy reality TV I’ve consumed in the past decade.
But no. Here I am, finding myself having to explain to my husband, who has never been religious, why someone might be dense enough to think an apricot tree is covered in popcorn balls. Or speculating about whether the pioneer children really did sing as they walked. And walked. And walked.
I don’t even realize when I’m doing it. The music just pours out of me like I’m an inanimate jukebox and someone just shoved some tithing down my throat.
I did not anticipate parenthood would require me to (badly) explain to my spouse what a Lamanite is and why I was singing to our kid about it. But there I was last week, looking for a way to search, ponder and pray myself out of this habit before our son becomes old enough to start singing these tunes back at me.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Primary children sing at a worship service.
Recently I found myself performing “I Belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” so now I’m just straight up lying to this child. To make it more honest, I guess I could add a second verse about how I traded in that church membership for booze and general hooliganism, but then I’d have to find a rhyme for homosexuality, and I wouldn’t even know where to start.
Traditions die hard
I suppose on some level it makes sense that Mormonism is bubbling out of my pores as I learn to become a parent. The most intimate view of child rearing I’ve had in my life is my own upbringing, which was framed by all the traditional Latter-day Saint milestones and everything that comes in between them. It’s only natural that I’d recently catch myself starting to think about whom we should get to baptize our baby when he’s 8, before remembering that, oh wait, we’re not doing any of that.
Still, there’s something that feels odd to this recovering Bible-thumper that there won’t be some kind of religious ceremony for my second-grader down the road. Maybe there’s a ceremonial antidotal event we can organize to scratch that itch when we get there — a spiritual methadone. Like, letting him get his first tattoo, maybe. (Don’t worry. It will be tasteful.)
Truthfully, we don’t see ourselves as a family that hates religion or distrusts anyone who values it. I was fortunate to marry a man who came in without an opinion about my childhood faith, and even though he doesn’t understand most of it, whenever he sees a nice example of Christianity in practice, he’s sure to give credit where credit is due.
A few years ago we were watching a film where a character made a biblical reference to the woman taken in adultery from the New Testament. My husband paused the movie to ask me for context. I explained to him this was a story of Jesus standing up for a woman who was accused and abused by a group of men who declared her a sinner. When I finished the account, my husband, with tears in his eyes, said, “Awe. Jesus seems like he was a really sweet guy. It’s too bad what happened to him.”
(BYU Museum of Art) Carl Heinrich Bloch’s "Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda."
I must have laughed for five straight minutes. The way he so earnestly gave props to one of the most well-known religious figures in the world like this was a recently departed family member we were mourning.
I guess it wouldn’t kill me to try to have at least a touch more of that attitude as I attempt, as a matter of course, to train myself away from reciting Primary songs. I may not plan to teach my son to take the sacrament or buy him an illustrated Book of Mormon, but I confess I wouldn’t mind if, rather than take his life lessons from “Die Hard,” I saw him live the lyrics, “I’ll walk with you. I’ll talk with you. That’s how I’ll show my love for you.”
After all, that was a song my loving parents sang to me, and it seems I survived it.
(Eli McCann) Tribune guest columnist Eli McCann.
Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband, new baby and their two naughty (yet worshipped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.
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