Babyhood (9780062098788) Page 6

  When we stopped for a light, I looked at the guy next to us. I remember thinking how simple his life seemed. Wherever he was driving, I was willing to bet it didn’t matter to him as much as our drive mattered to us.

  I noticed his car. Then I’m pretty sure I said, “I was talking to Barry today, and they really love their Camry. They did go with the four-door.”

  My Beloved opened her eyes and turned her head ever so slightly toward me. Her pained expression told me to go with my first instinct.

  “You okay?”

  She nodded yes, and I drove us to the hospital.

  The main difference between a hospital admission area and the Department of Motor Vehicles is that the DMV really doesn’t care. Hospitals care, but they still make you fill out a clipboard-full of forms and “wait over there.”

  While the woman that I loved sat caressing the stomach that we both loved, I fumbled through my wallet, produced cards and IDs, and listed as many phone numbers and next of kins as my frazzled brain would offer up.

  A steady stream of both green- and white-clothed hospital employees kept whizzing past us on their way to taking care of someone not us, and I remember feeling like immigrants must feel trying to get a cab from the airport.

  “Will somebody just help us, please?”

  Whenever anyone did talk to us, even if it was just to give us a map of fire exits and a pamphlet on the history of the hospital, I made a special effort to observe the name on their name tag and use it pointedly in a complete sentence.

  “Thank you, Dorothy. We really appreciate that, Dorothy.”

  “How we doing on that room, Darryl? We’ll be over here, Darryl. Honey? Darryl’s going to check on the room for us.”

  I wanted to forge a bond with them not just because I thought it would make us stand out and get better service, but also because I was naive enough to think this was a special night for them, too, and that we would all correspond regularly for years to come.

  “Hey, Dorothy, remember when Darryl tried to give an I.V. and he couldn’t find a vein? That was something, huh?”

  Of course, as soon as any of them took a coffee break and someone new came on duty, they became my new best friend.

  “What is your name? Rosalinda? That’s a very beautiful name . . . Listen, Rosalinda . . . I was wondering if you could help us . . .”

  Once in a while I sucked up to people who didn’t even work there. At one point I gave our whole medical history to a guy everyone kept calling “Doctor Cooper” only to find out he had a Ph.D. in art history and his wife happened to be in labor, too.

  Eventually, someone led us to our room—a doctor or a nurse, or an unbelievably conscientious ice cream man. All I know is they were wearing white, and I was thrilled to see them.

  And I remember lots of different people coming in with different stuff to do different things, the net result of which was that my wife was, in a matter of minutes, transformed from a Pregnant Woman into a Patient. Seeing her in her little standard-issue hospital gown and wristband, with her very own tan plastic pitcher of ice water nearby, I got very sad. Up to this point, we had been really lucky; since we’d been together, neither of us had ever been in a hospital. But now, here she was, in a little bed in the corner, with a button that you hit if you need a doctor real fast. Just like sick people. And I could see it was spooking her, too.

  I sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her face.

  “How you doing?”

  I swear, there are only so many different ways you can ask that question.

  Her response surprised me.

  “I want you to promise you’ll remarry.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “If anything ever happens to me, I want you to marry someone and get on with your life.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean, I don’t want you to totally forget about me either. You know . . . you could be sad periodically, and maybe you wouldn’t necessarily take her to places that you and I always went to, but I would want you to be happy.”

  “First of all—you’re a big nut.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You’re going to be fine. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “It might. You don’t know. What was that movie . . . ?”

  “What movie?”

  “The movie where the mother was giving birth and they helped pull out the baby but the mother died?”

  “City Slickers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sweetie, that was a cow.”

  “Even so, remember? She thought everything was going to be fine, too, and then look what happened.”

  “Honey, that’s so totally a different thing. First of all, the cow was living outdoors in bad weather for, like, thirty years. And second of all, it was a movie. And also keep in mind, that cow didn’t have me.”

  That seemed to work. She smiled.

  “I love you.”

  “Hey, what are you, kidding me?” I said. “I’m the one who loves you.”

  I don’t remember any other day in my life where I went through every emotion there is. Inside of twenty-four hours, I felt joy, fear, love, anger, helplessness, wonder, and a numbness in my right hip from sitting funny on my wife’s bed, which I know is not an emotion, but it’s something I went through and why keep it a secret? There’s a reason you can only go through all this at most every nine months. More often would be just unreasonable.

  At some point, my wife’s best friend came in. She had gone through this herself a couple of times and was someone my wife really wanted around. And while I had agreed to her being there, and was grateful for the support she provided, I have to admit it bugged me.

  She’s one of these women who speaks in really supportive tones, offering a nonstop stream of unconditional love that I really admire but can’t help but make fun of.

  “Isn’t she doing great?” she asked me every thirty seconds.

  “Boy, she sure is.”

  “You are doing so-ooooo great,” she reiterated to my wife, clutching her hand tightly in her own.

  “Yeah, sweetie, you really are,” I threw in weakly from behind.

  Now, I’m very well aware that if you ever plan on being totally selfless, the hour your wife gives birth to your child is as good a time as any to try. But I didn’t like being dropped down to the Number Two position on the Support Team.

  “Doesn’t your wife look beautiful?” she said for my wife’s ears but into my face. I’m thinking, “What does she think? I don’t know how to say nice things myself? I know how to say nice things myself . . .”

  Of course, what I said was, “Oh, wow, does she ever.” I leaned over her to address my actual wife. “You really do, honey.”

  After a while, our most thoughtful of friends stepped out into the hall to give us some time together.

  Alone again, with very little time to go, my bride and I looked at each other, and between her contractions and my feeble reminders to “Just breathe,” we ran a last-minute search for girls’ names.

  “Sarah?”

  “Nah . . . Stella?”

  “It’s a nice name if you’re Brando’s daughter . . . You sure I can’t talk you into Aretha?”

  “Oww owww owww . . .”

  “Okay, just breathe . . .”

  She breathed a few quick, sharp breaths and then I remembered something else.

  “Oh, geez.”

  “What?”

  “We forgot to get values.”

  “What?”

  “Our child’s going to be here any minute and we have no values.”

  At this point my wife contorted in pain, and then everything became a blur. There was a chunk of time—for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you how long it lasted—where doctors came in, nurses scurried about, machines were wheeled around, mirrors were brought in . . . everybody was talking and moving and coaching and touching and prodding and sponging and gloving and crying and pulling and crowding—and through
a haze of surreal commotion that veiled us somewhere entirely outside of place and time, I heard someone say, “Come here—you want to see?”

  I actually said, “See what?”

  “Your baby.”

  Oh. Right. I forgot that was happening today. I mean, I knew that’s why we were there and everything, but . . .

  I looked, and sure enough, something babylike was making its way into the world. No matter how many books you read, no matter how many tapes you watch, you still can’t believe that this can happen. I looked up at my wife and was even more floored by what I saw next: the most radiant, beautiful woman I had ever imagined. In that moment—her hair curling with sweat across her forehead, crying and wincing in pain—in the midst of all that, was this exquisite and inescapably feminine being, doing exactly what she had to do, instinctively and splendidly. She was like an ad for Woman. Powerful and stunning. That I do remember.

  It’s a phenomenon beyond comprehension that women know how to do this. In order to give birth, it seems that God gives women a thousand times more stamina, resources, know-how, and smarts than they would have ordinarily. Ironically, for those very same hours, men get less. They get a little less intelligent, less resourceful, and less capable. And I don’t think it’s just coincidence. I choose to believe we become less of whatever we are specifically so that women can become more of whatever they are. It’s a transfer. A gift of love. A shifting of the scales that helps perpetuate the cycle of Life, and then, later, when you get home, you can sort it all out and settle up.

  The next thing I remember was the doctor looking up from his rolling front-row seat and gleefully pronouncing, “It’s a boy!”

  My heart took another in a now dizzying flurry of ecstatic jolts.

  A boy! Yes!! I was thrilled not only because the mystery was over, but also because I could now openly confess to myself and to the world that, “Okay, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I really wanted a boy!”

  You’re never allowed to admit that. Throughout pregnancy, you’re only allowed to say, “We just want a healthy child.” No one gets to say out loud that secretly, women want girls and men want boys. So you deny it. You convince yourself you genuinely have no preference.

  But if it happens to work out your way, there’s no way to pretend you’re not smiling a teeny bit wider.

  “Would you like to cut the cord?”

  “What?”

  The doctor handed me something frightening, shiny and metal, and said, “You’re going to cut the cord, aren’t you?”

  Okay, here’s the thing: I know everybody does it, and it’s a magical moment and everything, but . . . what is that? Does merely being present at the birth automatically qualify a person to perform a medical procedure? If you visit your friend in the hospital, they don’t invite you to take out the guy’s appendix.

  “Come on, go ahead . . . we’ll be right here in case you screw it up . . .”

  Of course, I did it. Because I wanted the experience of that magic moment, and, plus, I didn’t want the doctor to think I was a wimp.

  I had been forewarned that babies don’t always look so pretty at birth, so I wasn’t shocked by that. What did surprise me is that they come out with perfectly manicured fingernails. Neat, trim, little white lines around the whole front part—amazing. What do they need that for? It’s practically the only thing they have at birth that resembles even remotely what it’ll look like later on. And there’s nothing they have that could be less important. Perhaps if they spent a little less time on their nails and used it instead to, just for example, finish developing their facial features, everyone would be better off. But, kids . . . there’s no talking to them.

  For the next few minutes, doctors and nurses continued to run around, they did a bunch of stuff, then they did some other stuff, wrapped the baby up, and then placed this brand-new person on his mother’s chest.

  I remember that my wife cried like a baby. The baby, ironically, cried like an angry woman in her thirties. I cried like a man exactly my age. The three of us cried, and held each other, and cried a little more, and then somebody nice must have packed us up and taken care of everything, because somehow, sometime later, the three of us—now and forever a family—went home.

  Whose Idea Was This?

  Walking into the house for the very first time with the child felt a bit like a honeymoon. The big difference, of course, is that when you carry a baby across a threshold, they’re significantly lighter than the average adult bride, and also, we didn’t immediately jump into a Jacuzzi and bad-mouth the band at the wedding.

  Like the previous nine months, my wife did the actual carrying. I supervised.

  “Careful, don’t drop him . . . Honey, you almost dropped him there . . .”

  The short journey from the front door to the baby’s room took an inordinately long time, because though he weighed significantly less than a wheel of cheese, we choreographed the move like he was a piano.

  “Okay . . . swing him around, now bring your end over . . . watch out for the umbrella stand . . . you know what, let me move the sofa out of the way . . .”

  Halfway to his room, I remembered.

  “Oh, damn.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I forgot to get this on tape.”

  All that time during the pregnancy when I was supposed to be reading baby books and taking baby classes and learning baby CPR didn’t go totally to waste because I did use the time to shop for the perfect video camera.

  “Look, honey, this one has the screen that flips open, plus we can digitize the baby’s face like they do on those cop shows.”

  Given all the time I put into getting the camera—not to mention all the time my wife put into making the baby—I thought it was well worth our while to make my wife repeat anything I failed to record for posterity.

  “Hold it, I think I forgot to hit a button or something . . . Why can’t I see his face?”

  “Sweetie, I’d like to get the baby inside.”

  “Wait . . . how come . . . oh, okay. I had the lens cap on. Now, come in again.”

  “I’m not coming in again.”

  “Just go back a little bit.”

  “How far—the hospital?”

  “No, just out the door. Can you make him wave?”

  “He’s a day old.”

  “I’m telling you, years from now, you’ll thank me.”

  The thing they don’t tell you in the video instruction manual is that babies don’t make great subjects for moving pictures—what with them not moving a whole lot. And if you train your camera on the new mom, given what they feel is their less than sparkly appearance, you’re likely to get their hand shoved into your lens, like a tobacco executive on 60 Minutes. So you end up shooting the one member of the family who is willing to go before the camera—the dog.

  “Here’s King destroying a pair of knitted booties.”

  The arrival of children can be exhausting not only for people but also for machines. Our answering machine almost packed up and quit those first few days, because everyone you know calls, and never just once. We came home from the hospital, hit the button, and heard a mechanical voice on the verge of an emotional breakdown.

  “You have one hundred and thirty-seven calls. The tape is now full . . . plus there’s another nine I scribbled down by hand . . . and I know it’s not my business, but there was a package at the door which I signed for because it said ‘perishable.’ ” Which, you have to admit, for a little machine, is remarkably conscientious.

  We, of course, saved the tape as a memento of the day. So years from now, our child can hear everyone who wished him well, along with a wrong number who kept calling looking for Rita.

  Most of the messages from family and friends were addressed directly to the baby. Which is another one of those things that’s too cute and yucky, and yet, invariably, something everyone does.

  “Yes, this is a message for Baby Schuyler . . . welcome to town. And tell your parent
s Uncle Bisque and Aunt Cutlet called. They’ll know who we are.”

  Or a popular variation—the “bypass-the-parents-and-bond-with-the-kid” calls.

  “Tell your mommy and daddy that if they won’t buy you a car when you get older, your Uncle Rudy’ll take care of you . . .”

  Some proud new parents will announce everything on the outgoing machine tape, so anyone who calls gets all the vital information.

  “Please leave a message for Steve, Julie, and Spartacus, who was born Tuesday night, weighs seven pounds three ounces, is eighteen and a half inches tall, enjoys long baths and romantic walks in the woods, and currently smells like a combination of pineapple and potato gnocchi.”

  While this is certainly an efficient way of disseminating information, it doesn’t make the caller feel particularly special. The implication is “If you’ve got access to a phone, you’re all of equal importance to us. Telemarketers, wrong numbers, prowlers casing the house . . . everyone—come share our joy.”

  And share they did. No sooner did we transcribe all our families’ and friends’ messages than we found ourselves inundated with the real thing.

  A new child in the house is a huge tourist attraction. It’s like Disneyland, except there the lines are longer and no one brings casseroles. Everybody has to come, everybody has to see.

  And everybody has to hold the baby. I remember being naturally protective of our infant son. During those first few days, regulations were firmly established.

  “Okay, you have to wash your hands before you handle the baby . . . You have to remove any sharp objects to be found on your person or clothing . . . If you’ve had a cold in the last eighteen months you must sit in the den until spring.”

  Even though we had only been parents for less than forty-eight hours, we felt perfectly justified in giving expert instructions to everyone. Like a newly founded country, we already had our laws, bylaws, and traditions.