Babyhood (9780062098788) Page 3

  She smiled a smile I had never seen.

  “Yes.”

  All the reactions I had practiced did not prepare me for the one that actually came, which was an electrifying chill from head to toe, followed by a piercing connection between us—eye to eye and heart to heart—that shouted of Newness. A wonderful and sweet Newness that lovingly but decidedly drew a very clear line in our life together. On one side was everything we had ever been through before, and on the other, this moment on.

  The Morning After

  Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, this news also signified another little change in our relationship. Specifically, it was, I realize now, the moment my wife took charge of the whole thing.

  The moment she walked in the door and informed me that she was pregnant and we were going to have a baby, she inaugurated the next phase of our relationship—and the one that, as of this writing, we’re still in—the phase in which she has all the information.

  Since that day, I don’t think I have once told her anything she didn’t already know. Nor, come to think of it, have I even found out anything at the same time she did. She gets everything first. By virtue of her body being Ground Zero for all pregnancy bulletins, and by virtue of her maternal instincts and accumulated knowledge, it has been my job to keep up with her, or, as has been much more often the case, find out from her in the first place that there already are things I have to catch up on. All because she broke the news to me. If, on the other hand, men got to announce the pregnancy, things might be different.

  “Honey, sit down . . . there’s something you should know . . . I’ve given this a lot of thought . . . after looking at your belly, and speaking to a lot of people I know who know things, I’m happy to inform you—and you’re the first one I’m telling—you’re pregnant!”

  “Oh, Johnny—is that really true?”

  “You bet it is, baby.”

  You’d look pret-ty clever, wouldn’t you?

  In the days that followed, I walked around with this wonderful sort of otherworldly buzz. There was not only exciting and terrific news to savor, but, since we had agreed not to share the news with anyone for at least a while, there was also a fun cloak of secrecy surrounding the whole thing. For probably the first time since we met, we had a secret to share that, devoid of any interfering input from anyone, bonded us solidly in our private, giddy enterprise. There were silly phone calls for no reason.

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No. You?”

  “Nope.”

  “Swear?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “I bought a rattle.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Well, I didn’t actually buy it, but I went into a store and I played around with one.”

  “Did you think of any names?”

  “Many.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Okay, and I really like it . . . Roquefort.”

  “I gotta go.”

  I became fiercely protective of my wife and the amoeba of a child she was carrying. When we walked around outside, I was like a Secret Service guy, eyes darting everywhere, scanning the terrain for anything that smacked of trouble: a door that could open and swing into her belly, a sidewalk crack that could throw her off balance, an air-conditioner draft that might adversely overcool our incubating Loved One. I was bristling with energy and teeming with purpose.

  The world had shifted, and everything around me glistened with new dimension. Every place I looked I saw a great place to be somebody’s parent.

  “I could walk into that 7-Eleven and buy my kid a soda . . . I could play ball in that park and teach my kid how to hit a jump shot . . . I could pass that statue and explain to my kid why Bolivia sent us a guy on a horse . . .” It all seemed nothing but good.

  And, I must say, the knowledge that I had physically generated a new life was a surprising additional kick. I mean, I had, for many years, understood the mechanics of reproduction, and as a relatively healthy male, suspected I probably had it within me to contribute in this arena. But to have confirmation, validation, living, breathing proof—this was a great sense of power. My walk changed. I’d make my way across the very same parking lot I crossed every day, but now with a perceptible strut. I had, after all, successfully fulfilled the most basic and sacred function of my gender: I had “spread my seed.” I had “spawned.” I had “gone forth and been fruitful.” Fruit was coming forth. My loins were bountiful. I was invincible. I was—dun da dun—“Fertile-Man.”

  It was an intoxicating feeling. I felt the urge to brag to strangers.

  “I have produced a child, how-are-ya-nice-to-see-ya.”

  “Pardon me, we’ve never met, but I just wanted you to know I’ve procreated. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

  I had to stop myself from approaching women on the street. It was embarrassing.

  “Excuse me, have you considered childbearing? Because if you’re interested, I could help you create Life right now. No disrespect intended . . . nothing lecherous or lascivious about it—I’m simply here to assist. Because, you see—I am Fertile-Man.”

  No question about it, life was buzzing now. The clock was ticking and every tick brought excitement and adventure. It was somewhere around here that we both realized, “Okay, great, but we don’t have the slightest idea what we’re doing.”

  Every Day, Every Day

  I Buy a Book

  Books—in case you’re not familiar—have things all written out for you, nice and legibly, that explain almost anything you want to know. So, to calm ourselves down, and to give us some specific outlet for our nervous energy, the mother-of-my-child-to-be and I went down to the nearest bookstore and hit those Baby Shelves. This is one of those sections of the store that, when you’re not expecting a baby, you instinctively avoid. Like foreign language instructions in a VCR manual; nothing wrong with it, just clearly not for you. But suddenly, this section is your best friend.

  You cannot believe how many books they have. There’s not one phase or aspect of baby development that has not been thoroughly documented between covers. And each one seems an absolute must to read. Or at least a must to buy.

  I’m not sure when this explosion happened. When we were babies, there was really only one book: Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. Between that and whatever they learned from their parents, our parents seemed to have everything covered. And what they didn’t know, they made up as they went along.

  But now there are thousands of choices, and one designed for everyone in the family. There’s Mother and Baby, Father and Baby, Grandparent and Baby, Baby, and Whoever You Get to Stay with the Kid While You’re Reading All These Books . . . (And one of my favorites, A Baby Is Born, which they also made into a terrific movie with Barbra Streisand and Baby Huey.)

  And the titles try desperately to outreach the competition. Pregnancy and Birth is shoved aside by Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth, followed by Fooling Around, Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth, and Talking to Boys in the First Place, Fooling Around, Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth.

  These books don’t just present information, they demand to be read. The titles dare you to pass them by. Everything You Need to Know . . . , What You Really Must Know . . . , What Everyone Else Knows and Secretly Ridicules You Behind Your Back for Not Knowing . . . There’s never anything casual about it. You never see a book called Only If You’re Really Interested . . . , Well, If You Really Must Know . . . , or Frankly, This Probably Won’t Come Up, But . . .

  I suppose I should appreciate that I live in a time when all this information is available. In the Middle Ages, for example, these kinds of books involved a lot more guesswork.

  “Question: My child has a strange rattling sound in her chest. Is it demons?”

  “Answer: Could be demons, could be an imbalance of bodily humours. Try applying leeches, administer a cupping, then sacrifice a newborn calf to Yahweh.”

  As we paid for our books—we ended up getting only two books t
hat day, What to Expect When You’re Expecting and What to Expect When You’re Expecting Not So Much a Baby but a Package from U.P.S.—I felt very reassured.

  “All right, so good . . . we’ll take the books home, we’ll read the books, and we’ll know, more or less, what to expect.”

  “We’ll be fine,” concurred my bride.

  Truthfully? I didn’t read any of them. I glanced at ’em, but I can’t honestly report that I read them. I wanted to, it’s just that between the books you buy and the books you get as gifts and the ones dropped off by your friends whose kids are older now and need shelf space, it’s just too much book. I was overwhelmed with books. (By the way, those hand-me-down books are extraspecial, because all the stains and dribbles found in the dog-eared pages have transformed them into unintentional “scratch and sniff” books. In addition to facts and graphs and pictures, you also get to find out what food your nephew was eating and during which chapter.)

  My wife, on the other hand, read them all, and called me over when something caught her eye.

  “Look at this.”

  “What?”

  “Read that, right there.”

  “ ‘. . . this condition is known as explosive diarrhea . . .’ Jesus! Can that be true?”

  “That’s what it says . . .”

  “This is exactly why I don’t read these books.”

  To cover for my self-imposed ignorance, I took the position that this baby-book blackout reflected some sort of active core belief system.

  “Personally, I find these books to be too theoretical, and to my way of thinking, there’s just no substitute for hands-on experience.”

  Which sounds a heckuva lot better than “I was gonna read them, but there was a Dick Van Dyke Show on I never saw . . .”

  Peanut Butter and

  Lamb Chops

  Even without reading any “What to Expect” books, there are some things everyone knows to expect. You know, for example, from every old movie, TV show, joke, and established cliché that pregnant women are likely to crave peculiar foods and have unpredictable mood swings. But when you go through it yourself, you still can’t believe what’s going on.

  One time, only a few weeks into pregnancy, I was awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of muted sniffling and the gentle smacking of pasty lips. Now, if it had been the lip-smacking alone, I would have assumed it was the dog, once again licking himself grotesquely and thoroughly. But the sniffling was new. The dog, while certainly a loving and sensitive animal, had never actually been moved to tears. I turned over to discover my wife sitting up and staring into space.

  “You okay?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You sure?”

  She said, “Ask me what I did from two-thirty to now.”

  “Okay. What?”

  “Ate a banana and cried.”

  Okay. That was a sentence I had literally never heard. To my knowledge, eating a banana and crying is something you would do only if you were, say, auditioning for a part in a dramatic monkey movie.

  I didn’t know exactly what to say.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want to talk?”

  “No.”

  A few moments of silence.

  “Do you want me to get you anything?”

  “No, I’m so nauseous.”

  “How many bananas did you have?”

  “Eight.”

  “Well,” I thought to myself. “There you go. That might be part of the problem.” But something told me it would have been woefully unproductive to say, “Honey, next time, maybe don’t eat so many bananas at one time.” Instead, I extended myself as lovingly and unconditionally as I knew how.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Yeah—shut up and leave me alone.”

  This particular fun patch of your couplehood presents some of the juiciest, trickiest, and most explosive minefields that you will encounter in your linked-together little lives. Nowhere is a loving husband’s ability to tap-dance, turn the other cheek, and “just walk away” put more relentlessly to the test.

  The key to survival, I found, was in accepting that virtually nothing I did would be right. And if I did do something right, it was probably by accident. I reminded myself constantly that whatever horrific outbursts she unleashed, however vicious the attacks that came my way, they were all the result of tsunami-sized waves of surging hormones and should not reflect unnecessarily harshly on the Woman I Love. Until this phase blew over, I would just shake off these blows, pick myself up from the canvas, and again politely offer her my chin.

  I think most husbands accept this pretty readily, because even the dumbest of the group knows that they’re still getting off pretty easy. After all, it’s not their bodies going through these violent upheavals.

  I remember one night I felt my wife’s head and was concerned she might be getting a fever.

  “Gee, you seem hot,” I said in an irrefutably sympathetic tone.

  Her response?

  “Yeah, maybe it’s because I’m in @#*!#-ing HELL.”

  Apparently, that’s not uncommon. When you’re in @#*!#-ing hell, your forehead can feel a wee bit feverish. (By the way, that’s the way my wife actually curses. She doesn’t use dirty words; she’ll literally say “asterisk, pound sign, exclamation point, the-letter-‘A’-with-a-circle-around-it, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.”)

  I thought I was prepared for the food cravings. Having seen enough I Love Lucy reruns growing up, I was all set to run out, any time of day or night, for pickles and ice cream. As it turns out, my wife had no interest in either pickles or ice cream. However, we couldn’t get our hands on enough peanut butter and lamb chops. Peanut butter and lamb chops—which was also, interestingly enough, the name of a delightful children’s show I enjoyed as a young boy—were not foods that had ever been a significant part of our life before pregnancy. In fact, my wife almost never ate either.

  So where did these cravings come from? I concluded it’s the baby, ordering in. Prenatal takeout. Even without ever being in a restaurant, fetuses develop remarkably discerning palates, and they are not shy about demanding what they want. If they get a hankering, they just pick up that umbilical cord and call.

  “You know what would taste good right now? A cheeseburger, large fries, and a vanilla shake. And if you could, hurry it up, because I’m supposed to grow lungs in a half hour.”

  In an ideal world, once you ascertain what it is your wife craves, you would stock up on it and have more ready at all times. In the real world, however, not only does the hankering change day to day and hour to hour, but the very same thing that hit the spot at one in the morning can be the most repulsive suggestion imaginable at one forty-five.

  “I’m starving.”

  “How about another lamb chop?”

  “Uchhh! What’s the matter with you?!”

  “What’d I say?”

  “I’m going to throw up right in this chair.”

  “I thought lamb chops were helping.”

  “Stop!”

  “What?”

  “Stop saying it!”

  “What—lamb chops?”

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry . . .”

  It is virtually impossible to suggest the right snack to a pregnant woman. The chance of hitting the bull’s-eye is infinitesimal, and, more significantly, the margin for error is enormous. As a reasonably intelligent person, I could pretty safely guess that if someone’s feeling queasy, it’s better not to suggest, let’s say, a warm glass of clam juice. You just know that. Certain foods simply do not paint a pretty picture: Sweetbreads. Frog’s legs. Sauerkraut soufflé. Crabmeat daiquiris . . . clearly all to be avoided. But—a cracker? Never would I have dreamed that the mere mention of a dry, salted nothing of a cracker could send a grown woman lunging for a sink. But I did mention it, and she did lunge.

  In addition to the wild cravings and the crippling nausea, w
omen also get the tougher end of the deal foodwise, because they have to restrict themselves in consideration of the youngster hatching within. A lot of nifty foods and delectable beverages are cut right out of the picture. Wonderful man that I am, I jumped behind my wife in full support.

  “You know what, sweetie? If you can’t have any wine, I won’t have wine either. You can’t have a sip of beer? None for me, then. No spicy food for you? I, too, shall abstain. I shall submit myself unwaveringly to the very same grueling regimen of denial and sacrifice as you, my love.”

  But after a while, I had to rethink it.

  “Look, I know what I said, but let’s be honest: You have to protect the well-being of our child. Me? I was just trying to be nice . . . There’s no reason I should have to put myself through that, is there, really? I mean, not that I’m not enjoying the steamed bok choy and brussels sprouts platter, but I’m just going to grab a pepperoni pizza and seven beers. I will, however, eat over there, so don’t worry, you won’t see a thing . . .”

  The one aspect of this whole food circus that I wish someone had told me about is how much weight men put on during pregnancy. Traditionally, dads-to-be pile on as much as—and often more than—the women who are actually With Child.

  I’d like to say I did it on purpose. To “keep my wife company.”

  The sad truth is, I didn’t know it was going on. It quietly snuck up on me. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been that surprising. Not only did I snack every time she snacked, but more often than not, I’d run down for some food that the Love of My Life needed to have “NOW!!!” and in the time it took me to prepare it just-to-her-liking and sprint it back upstairs, the aforementioned Love of My Life had changed her mind. The oh-so-urgent urge was no longer urging. And as I mentioned, not only is that very same food—ordered minutes ago—no longer desirable, it’s now entirely disgusting. The thought that I would even be holding a plate and making it available is both repulsive and a testament to the enormity of my insensitivity.