Wings of Fury (to be continued)

In 7th grade I climbed into the cockpit of an F6F Hellcat and flew out over the Pacific to shoot down enemy planes, island bases and even entire aircraft carriers. I died several times. Each time, though, I sprang back to life and back into the sky, until I eventually was able to destroy the entire enemy fleet start to finish without losing a plane, and was named Admiral of the Fleet.

This of course was Wings of Fury, a few blinking green pixels on the black screen of our old Apple IIe, and I was able to accomplish all this with the up and down arrows, spacebar, and, for missiles and torpedoes, the letter “Z”. At the time it seemed a double triumph: the thrill of victory, yes, but also the success of squirreling away the time needed for this victory in a childhood otherwise largely devoid of electronica.

In retrospect, success has never come more easily. As I struggle with what may be my greatest challenge to date—bottle-feeding our 2-mo-old infant—I long for the simple pleasure of a 4-stroke computer game.

There is simply no equivalent path to guaranteed success. I've tried sitting, standing, walking; cooing, singing, talking; slow-flow, fast-flow, short-nipple, elongated, soft, firm; have tried waiting for full awake-ness and hunger, have tried sleepy and post-feed; I've tried persistence and persuasion and patience. The results are consistent and clear. This baby knows what he wants and a bottle it is not.

A point of clarification: When I, or a grandma, or anyone else besides Mama feeds our baby, it is still Mama's milk, not formula. Thanks goodness for pumping. But this technology has not yet allowed any of the rest of us to successfully get calories in the little bug, nor allowed us to give the Mama a tiny break.

Not that either one of us wants ourselves as parents, either of us, to become too independent too quickly from our baby. The demands of work, however, have already called me back, and there is considerable pressure for LL to return as well. And we are among the very lucky few who can afford to take even a few weeks off.

The U.S. is in the venerable club of only four nations--joined by Swaziland, Lesotho, and Papua New Guinea--that offers no paid maternity leave.

---again to be continued---