Comment
print
July 11, 2008
Pro Estrogen
Jack Gilden
Special to the Jewish Times
There’s no use denying it. When I first went into the business of manufacturing babies my goal was to produce as many of one model as I could: I wanted five raucous Jewish boys, just like the Marx Bros.
I got off to a good start, with a very manly prototype. Unfortunately soon after those in control of the manufacturing plant lost interest in research and development. Only one more finished product rolled off that assembly room floor ––a girl. We named her Iliana, or Illy for short.
Her handle is Greek, not Jewish, though she was named in honor of my grandfather, Isidore, a peripatetic fiddler. It also derives from “The Iliad,” my favorite book, read aloud to my wife one captivating chapter at a time when we were dating.
Despite these sentimental accoutrements I was anxious about raising a girl. I’m rough-hewn, to say the least, more a pleaser to a group of men than a charmer to women. In other words, without relying on gastronomic music as an icebreaker, I wasn’t sure I could relate to another person.
I also was terrified. My face resembles a landsman gorilla freshly sprung from a zoo. What if my little flower inherited my goonish features and hairy back?
I decided that that was crazy. I mean my mother is beautiful, my sisters aren’t bad and my wife, to me, was a dish. With any luck my baby doll would be like them.
That’s when the real terror hit. What if she actually turned out attractive?
The mere thought of it released a homicidal maniac inside me. Fifteen years from now a guy, the inevitable greasy, pimply aspiring thug, rings my bell and says: “Hey Pop, where’s your daughter?”
The answer: Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam.
But then it all changed.
In her little baby eyes I started seeing a love unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was as though her lenses contained a shmoe filter to clear away baldness, shortness and inadequacy and replace it with an indestructible man soaring through the sky, tallis flapping in the wind.
She used to reach out from her high chair and grab my nose in her little fingers. Pulling me close, she would give me a kiss on it amid peels of laughter, perhaps mistaking it for a plantain.
And then one day, instead of a kiss, she clamped down with her brand new incisors while I howled in pain. Had the proboscis not been the length and circumference of a goodly sized oak limb, she might have sawed the whole thing off.
Despite all this, older ladies, wise in the ways of fathers and daughters, kept warning me to hold onto my heart. “A girl is a totally different thing,” they said. One Saturday this summer I found out what they meant.
My two kids and I were at a park when I became very ill with a migraine. My head throbbed and my eyes felt like they were going to bounce out of their sockets.
All of the sudden my little princess took control. “Daddy,” she said. “I want you to go right home so I can be your nurse.” When we got back to the house I lay down in bed while, one by one, she brought her stuffed animals and placed them in a circle around the cadaver.
Illy sat next to me for a half-hour and petted my hand until the pain was gone. All the while her brother was in the other room banging pots and pans in an apparent effort to remove my brain with a corkscrew of sound waves.
At that moment I had to admit it: Having a girl is not at all like having another boy. And thank God for that.
Jack Gilden, president of the Baltimore-based Gilden Integrated, writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES.