'Mother of god,' Cal grimaced as he pulled back the tabs on Owen's nappy. Eli made jokes about the 'yellow peril' and he was not far from being right, but he was a smug bastard for not having to deal with this shit. Literally.
"Ooop!" Owen gave him a faux-surprise expression and Cal just about gagged on the taste on his tongue. Breathing through his mouth did not help the situation; did not. Eight month old Owen gave a sudden giggle and turned his hips, attempting to roll over.
"Oh no you don't," Cal grabbed a thigh and held on tightly while he also reached for the wipes. Owen gave him a disgruntled complaint. "All that pumpkin you love so much huh?"
Owen tried reaching above his head for purchase. Cal started wiping away the muck. "You know, one day, you may very well be wipin' my ass. Wouldn't that be a turn up for the books?" He gave his son raised eyebrows, as if he were expecting an answer. Owen rolled back into place. Cal reached for another wipe and another. "I'm not gonna make it easy eitha, just so you know," Cal added.
Gillian had wild ideas about celebrating these kinds of normal bodily functions, lest their kids get a complex and start to think certain things were 'dirty' or should be shameful. Cal half agreed with that; he didn't want his boys to grow up with the shame he had experienced as a boy. But the other half of him could just not bring himself to congratulate his son on doing the biggest wettest dump Cal had seen since Lewis was the same age. It just didn't come naturally.
Gillian had read articles that suggested shame was taught, which Cal agreed with. And that the concept of shame started at a very young age, through negative connotations to do with body function and image and a whole bunch of other stuff that Cal zoned out of listening to. But he was willing to give it a shot if it was important to his wife. It wasn't like they didn't already keep tabs on Lewis in a psychological sense, to make sure he was developing in a healthy way; the kid had been through a lot.
Looking back with a whole boatload of hindsight, Cal would have to say his father was kind of absentee. He went to work and he came home and on the weekends he would go down to the pub with his friends or whatever else it was he got up to (and Cal never cared to know what that was exactly). His father put food on the table and a roof over their heads but that was mostly the extent of his good parenting. When Cal or Thomas had been naughty, he was the extra-disciplinarian; their mother usually dispensed with a good whack in the moment and William with a follow-up belt once he got home, if the crime warranted it. He never talked to them about the world or life or things that mattered. He didn't play with them; he didn't teach them to ride their bikes.
When Cal's mother had gone into care the first time, there was absolutely no explanation, no questions were answered, William barely deviated from his usual routine; neighbours and friends fed the boys and washed their clothes and herded them off to school. That was the kind of shit that made Cal angry when he was older. That was the kind of shit that had made him run away from home periodically, skip out on school, screw around, get into fights; he just wanted to feel he mattered.
Gillian's father was a drinker, that was no secret, but a lot more damage was done by her mother, the enabler. She made excuses, she taught her children to second guess, to be able to read their father to check his mood. He was not violent, so Gillian said, at least not to her and Matthew, but there were times when he was drunk enough that he shoved Dana and Gillian remembered the threat of a slap in the air. She remembered the shame of having friends over in the afternoon and her father being off his face; she stopped inviting friends home. She remembered finding out her mother's father was also a drunk and the horror of realising she was doomed to carry on the line.
For a long time she didn't date and when she did she never took it seriously; she didn't want to become her mother and her grandmother before that. She didn't want to fall into a role she despised. So she worked on herself and she got therapy, she worked on forgiving her father and forging a new relationship with both her parents. Then she became a therapist herself and then she had met Alec. She had felt strongly that she could change him and therefore break the pattern.
And Cal, well he did just about everything he could to feel something. Drinking, smoking, drugs, screwing around. He skated through school, no plans for the future. And then his mother had died and the illusion of his life crashed down around him and nothing was the same after that. The drive to find out 'why' overrode everything else; it was a new obsession. He actually managed to get into a good college. Everything else and everybody else fell away.
It wasn't so unexpected that he married someone who was pathologically distant. God knows why Zoe even said yes. God only knows why Cal asked her in the first place. He supposed at the time he thought he loved her, maybe on some level he did. But they fought all the time and when he quit his Pentagon job in a big puff of destruction he got used to sleeping on the couch for a while. Zoe would not tolerate a lay-about. So Cal picked himself up again and ran in the opposite direction. His mother taught him to suppress feelings, his father taught him to turn a blind eye to them.
So it wasn't surprising when Gillian came to Cal one night to talk about how they wanted to raise their kids. In true Cal fashion, he hadn't given it much thought. You just get on with it, is what he'd told her and she told him stories of her childhood, stories he hadn't heard before about her father being too drunk to go to parent-teacher conferences and her mother always, always choosing to back up her husband over her children. Gillian didn't want that, she warned him then, they were not going to do that. They were going to be there for their kids and they were going to be there for each other, but not at the expense of someone else. There had to be a balance, and maybe it would take a while to find it now that they had Owen as well, but she didn't want to just blindly parent her way through their lives.
Cal thought about Emily. That is exactly what he did. And worse, he left most of it up to Zoe, who he knew to be emotionally distant. It was a bloody miracle Emily turned out the way she did and a little part of him believed Gillian to be responsible. She intervened quietly and subtly in almost every way. Without realising it, Cal had let her shape him into a better father. And when he did realise it, he could also acknowledge she had shaped him into a better man. The kind of man he wished his father had been (because his mother might not have gone so soon), the kind of man he wished his sons to be too.
Cal had a pile of baby wipes almost bigger than the actual nappy by the time he had got every stray particle of crap off his son's thighs, butt, pelvis and foot, after Owen executed a direct hit. He was pretty sure the stench had soaked into his clothes so that even after the dirty nappy had been bundled up and disposed of in the bin, Cal could still smell it. He decided to change Owen completely, just in case something had strayed and found a new home somewhere Cal couldn't see but would probably discover later. That was worth the mission of fighting the kid into a clean shirt and trousers, just so he had that clean baby smell again. When he was done with the boy, Cal took his son to the master bedroom and changed his own shirt.
Owen climbed awkwardly over the unmade bed, squealing along to some game of his Cal didn't get. He reached the top of the bed and pulled back the pillows, as if he were treasure hunting. Cal waited for him to find nothing, tossing the shirt he had slept in into the hamper in the bathroom. Owen turned and sat with his legs straight out, his back leaning up against the frame of the bed, surveying around him. Cal watched him with a little pang. He wanted to be able to say that was the bed the boy had been conceived in but it was so far from the truth. It was a miracle Owen was even there with them right now. A fluke pregnancy. An early arrival. A miracle. For real.
Cal pulled his clean shirt over his head. "Come on," he held out his hand to his baby boy. Owen gave him a grin and scooted his way over, pulling himself to his feet with his father's support. "Up!" He demanded. Cal swung him to his hip easily and planted a quick kiss against the boy's forehead.
Definitely much better.