Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood

  “I do?”

  “It’s very crucial.”

  But it was too late. The pin had fastened itself to the dough and every time the girl rolled it, it stuck to the pin and came apart, destroying the dough’s precious integrity.

  “Wait, we need to start over,” I said.

  “No, we don’t. It’s easy,” she said.

  “Take the pin out. You gotta take the pin out of the dough. You know what? Let me do the dough and then you can spread the sauce.”

  I commandeered the pin from her and tossed it into the sink, then began stretching the dough with my hands, working feverishly to undo the damage.

  “See how I do this?” I asked. “Isn’t this fun?”

  The girl now looked bored. “Yeah, sure.” She started to wander back to the TV and I quickly put the dough down on the cookie sheet so that I could restrain her.

  “Wait, wait,” I said. “I’m done stretching the dough. See? Now you can spread the sauce.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. I swear. I won’t interfere.”

  She got back up on her little stool and I presented her with a container of sauce. She dipped her spoon in it and spattered it all over the counter. I interfered.

  “Sweetie, you have to spread it evenly. Try not to get it on the counter.”

  “I know! I got it.”

  “Yes, but you’re spattering it, see?”

  I took her hand and tried spreading the sauce with her, like a golf instructor helping you with your grip. I was the one doing the real spreading. I was simply treating her hand as an extension of the spoon.

  “See? Isn’t this fun?” I asked her.

  She wrenched away from my grip. “No! I wanna do it!”

  “Okay, but just please try to keep it contained to the dough itself.”

  She spattered the sauce again.

  “Oops! Sorry,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” I said. But I was lying. She was ruining the pizza. “Maybe we should take turns spreading the sauce.”

  “No! I can do it.” And she spattered the sauce yet again. I grabbed the spoon back.

  “Okay, you’re fired from this.”

  “Aw.”

  “Lemme spread this sauce and you can put the cheese on. You’d be good at that.”

  “Okay.”

  I spread the sauce lovingly around, bringing it right to the edge of the dough without spilling it over the side, finishing up just as she was wandering back to the TV again.

  “Cheese time!” I said. “You can do the cheese now.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Right then, my wife walked in.

  “Oooh, are you guys making pizza together?”

  “We are,” I said. “We’re having tons of fun, right?”

  The girl said nothing.

  “You’re letting her help, right, Drew?” my wife asked.

  “Absolutely. She helped roll the dough.”

  “No, I didn’t,” the girl said.

  “And she helped spread the sauce.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Of course you did. I did virtually nothing.”

  “You have to let her help,” my wife said. “It’s okay if she makes mistakes.”

  “I know, I know. I’m letting her put the cheese on it, I swear.”

  My wife and I had just bought a parenting book called Love and Logic that said you need to let kids do as many things on their own as humanly possible. That way, they become confident and more self-reliant and, most important, they don’t bother you with whiny bullshit all day long. Self-reliant kids are the ones that end up building railroads and annexing small Baltic nations. If you constantly hover and do everything for your kids, you hinder their maturation process. They become convinced that they need you to do everything for them. The authors argued that if you let children make mistakes when they’re young, the cost of those mistakes is relatively low: a spilled milk glass, a missed school bus ride, etc. Those are mistakes that any parent can live with. But if you butt in at every opportunity, then the child makes much more costly mistakes later in life: committing armed robbery, shooting liquefied crack into her eyeballs, going to law school, etc.

  So here was a perfect opportunity for me to let my child stand there and make mistakes with relatively little consequence. I had jumped in when she screwed up the dough. I had jumped in when she got tomato sauce all over everything. If I jumped in on the cheese-application stage, the girl would never learn to make a pizza properly. But more important, she would never WANT to learn. She would become sullen and insecure. She would run away from home and hop on a bus to LA. Then she would become addicted to heroin and fall in love with an abusive record label executive. All of that would happen if I kept her from cheesing the pizza. I swore to back off, to watch patiently and let her figure out things for herself. The cheese was in her hands now. She was in full control.

  And God, she fucked it all up. I mean, it wasn’t even close. There were slabs of cheese hanging over the sides. The spacing between slices was all uneven. She would jam the cheese into the dough and drag it around, creating huge snowbanks of red sauce and tearing holes—HOLES—in the crust. My pizza—my masterpizza—was being ruined in front of my eyes. It was like watching someone put his foot through a Van Gogh.

  But I bit my lip. I had to. If I stepped in now . . . if I took away this precious learning opportunity, then all would be lost. I had to see this as a positive experience. My daughter would grow up strong and independent and it would all be thanks to my decision to let her make a pizza. A horrible, flavorless, overworked pizza. Surely one night of poor eating wasn’t worth a lifetime of—

  “Let me do the cheese. You go watch TV.”

  “YAY!”

  I finished the pizza and put it in the oven. Twenty minutes later, it came out perfectly.

  NICU

  Before the malrotation, before the phone call from the operating room to let us know if our new son was going to live, there were the arguments for and against a third child. Having a third child means you should never again expect the world to sympathize with you. Even people with two kids deserve some compassion because until you have two children, you have no idea how big a pain in the ass two kids are. You think it’s going to be double the work, but it’s not. It’s four times the work because you’re managing both the kids and the complex relationship between them, which is exhausting. The burden grows exponentially. That’s two children ruining your pizza instead of just one.

  People with four or more kids are crazy people who belong in jail, but three edges between being dedicated to family and being a glutton for punishment. I was never 100 percent into the idea. While we were in the trying-to- conceive stage, my wife would tell me to get away from the microwave whenever I heated my leftovers so that my testicles wouldn’t get bombarded with a dash of extra radiation. But sometimes, I would stand in front of it anyway.

  “Get away from there!” she said once.

  “Are you sure? Because, you know, we’ve got two nice kids. Tempting to quit while we’re ahead, no?”

  “I know. I know it’s not the easiest decision. But seriously, stop cooking your balls.”

  So we knew three kids would be a world of shit going in. But after a while, we deluded ourselves into thinking it would be relatively easy. We were veterans of the birthing process. The wife would go to the hospital, get C-sectioned real good, and we’d be all set to go. That’s one of the perks of having extra kids. You get to walk into that hospital acting like you own the place. You get to sneer at all the newbie parents who have no idea where the delivery ward is. There are no surprises waiting for you.

  Except when your wife begins contracting at seven months and needs to be rushed to the hospital for early delivery. Except when they bring out fancy new high-resolution ultraso
und machines that look ready to transform back into Optimus Prime at any moment, machines that end up detecting certain “abnormalities” in the fetus. Except when a team of doctors including an ob-gyn and a high-risk fetal specialist comes in to explain to you and your wife that your son might have some kind of genetic hiccup, and then the specialist proceeds to hop onto Wikipedia in front of you because she knows so little about the condition she thinks your son might have.

  We were in the antepartum unit when they told us about the fetus. His head was too big. His tongue was too big. The openings to his kidneys were dilated. They feared that he might have a genetic defect classified as an overgrowth syndrome—a suite of conditions with possible symptoms that range from the benign (you have a big head) to the severe (you are mentally retarded).

  The ob-gyn suggested we might want to hold off on tying my wife’s tubes during the C-section in case anything happened to the child and we wanted to try to have another one to replace it. There was no warning for any of this. A new and far more difficult future was suddenly THERE, eating us up and spitting us back out.

  “I know this is a lot to absorb,” said the ob-gyn. “We’re going to leave now so you two can talk about it in private.”

  When the doctors left, my wife burst into tears.

  “I wasn’t ready for that,” she said.

  “Neither was I.” I knelt by the hospital bed and gripped her hand. “But this is not the end,” I told her. “It’s not. Don’t think this is the end. There’s so much more of this life and so much of it will be good, I promise you. There will still be graduations and Christmases and weddings and everything that’s wonderful, everything that’s so much better than this. I swear it.”

  “I saw his face on the ultrasound. He was beautiful.”

  “This is not the end.” And I wanted to believe that. I hoped that, through the hot tubs and giant amusement park mousetraps and late-night arrests, perhaps we were trained for this exact moment, that we had enough strength and love to make it through the birth, the interminable wait for test results, the surgery, and the phone call. That phone call.

  • • •

  The baby had survived so much up to that point. He was delivered seven weeks early, but he could breathe. His eyes and heart and kidneys were all functioning properly. At one point, a neonatologist who never removed her surgical mask told me that the baby’s brain scan had come back negative. He wasn’t going to be mentally handicapped. He would be able to talk and think and learn just like his brother and sister could. I wept tears of joy in front of the doctor. She patted my arm gently and scurried away.

  The baby had served nine days in the NICU so far with little complaint. But now came this. Now came the disembowelment.

  I took the phone from the receptionist, and as I put it to my ear, I had a split second to imagine what it would be like if the surgical assistant told me that the baby’s digestive system was compromised. That the baby would die. And the vision seemed so possible that I felt as if it were now inevitable. I prepared myself to deal with it. This was meant to be. He was meant to live this long and no longer, and I will not spend the rest of my life bitter. I will not pine for some imaginary little boy with perfectly arranged insides who has the ability to live for eighty years because that’s not who this boy was. He was meant to be dead. Please, God, don’t let him be meant to be dead.

  “Mr. Magary?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Dr. Holman from the OR. Dr. Staffen has had a chance to examine the bowels and they are one hundred percent healthy. Your son is going to be just fine.”

  I responded loudly so that my wife could overhear. “He’s going to be okay?”

  “Yes, the doctor will be out to talk with you once the procedure is finished.”

  “Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. So he’s not gonna die, right? I just want to make double sure.”

  “He’s going to be all right.”

  I gave the phone back to the receptionist, and my wife and I collapsed into each other, heaving long sobs. Before this, I never knew that joy and misery could merge into a single emotion, that you could cry for ten-minute stretches while feeling simultaneously overjoyed and horrified. But now I knew it firsthand: a whole new dimension to the human condition. Call it joyful sadness. Call it sad joyfulness. Call it jadness. Who knows. All I know is that I had a hard time differentiating between THANK GOD MY SON IS ALIVE and HOLY SHIT MY SON JUST HAD HIS INTESTINES TOSSED. There was no clear division in that moment. There was just the overwhelming happening of it all. Kathy the NICU nurse brought us back to another private room where we sat, dazed from emotional overload.

  “We may have to go to church now,” my wife said to me.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “I mean, you know. He’s gonna live.”

  “I know. I do like having Sunday mornings free, though.”

  “It would teach the other two a bit of gratitude.”

  “That it would. I’m still not sure I believe any of that God stuff, but yeah. I want to be more grateful. If not to God, then to . . . I dunno . . . life, I suppose.”

  Half an hour later, the surgeon came in and told us that the baby was hunky-dory and already back up in the NICU. All that was left was to bust him out of there and bring him home. I was certain it would be a cinch. We were already past the hard part. Getting a baby out of the NICU would be nothing. It’s EASY, isn’t it?

  • • •

  No matter how fortunate you are in life, if you have a child in the NICU, you will feel like God ripped you off. Every day, you walk into the NICU praying that your child will finally be healthy enough to go home. And as you make that walk, you pass by dozens of new parents strolling out of the postpartum unit with healthy, happy, full-term babies. I walked to the NICU every day to see our baby and I would see new fathers pushing their wives out of the elevators, holding flower bouquets and IT’S A BOY balloons, and I would fight with all my strength to not feel as if I had been cheated. I already had two perfectly healthy, wonderful children. I had already been treated to two moments when I was just like the ecstatic families strolling out of the hospital. And our third child had survived being gutted and cleaned like a fish. There was no reason for me to be bitter. At all.

  But the feeling was there, no matter how hard I fought against it. The shift between the maternity ward waiting room—with boisterous families either waiting or celebrating—and the entrance to the NICU was too jarring not to affect me. The NICU entrance lay past the third-floor lobby, through a set of double doors and down a silent white hall to a modest reception area, with a tiny waiting room of its own that was perpetually empty. I would check in by showing the receptionist my wristband (which was growing more faded and crackled by the day; I worried constantly about it falling off) and then wash my hands thoroughly at one of the two sinks to the left of the receptionist’s desk. You were allowed to bring covered drinks into the NICU but I never did because I was the exact kind of person that would trip and fall and spill a forty-two-ounce Coke Zero directly into a newborn’s respirator.

  All NICU entrants had to sterilize their hands at a special washing station to prevent infection. There was a bathroom right next door to the station and I used it every time I visited because I was so terribly nervous about finding out the baby’s status that I always ended up having to take a giant shit. Then I would worry that it was inappropriate to take a shit in a NICU. I would wash my hands compulsively afterward but still worry that I hadn’t gotten all of the filth off, that I was spreading fecal matter all over the place and giving every infant in the unit meningitis with my poopy hands.

  The NICU was divided into sections based upon the severity of each infant’s condition. The ones at the back were high-risk babies that needed careful monitoring, my son among the unfortunates. As I walked to the back of the unit, I could always see the other babies along the way. Some weighed as
little as a single pound. It seemed unfathomable to me that anything that small could grow at all, that it could add fat and muscle and become something other than a tiny, helpless little creature. Some of the babies were housed in bassinets lined with foil that had heat lamps shining on them at all times, like burgers set out for pickup in a T.G.I. Friday’s kitchen. Some were being rocked gently and fed by traumatized mothers still wearing their hospital gowns. You could hear the babies crying, some of them emitting a high-pitched “neuro-cry” that was a clear signal that their brains had been compromised.

  I tried not to stare at the other children because it seemed like I was being intrusive, but I couldn’t help it. I would see doctors and nurses talk to other parents in hushed tones and wonder what was wrong with their children. The majority of babies were housed in alcoves, with only a curtain surrounding them for privacy. A handful of babies got actual private rooms. I wondered if you got a room because your baby was certain to pass away. All of the joy and anticipation you could feel in the main waiting area of the maternity ward was missing here. Once inside the NICU, there was nothing but angst. You knew that every second in this place, someone was holding his or her breath. I wondered how many couples walked out of the NICU every year empty-handed.

  After the baby’s surgery, I walked back to his isolette with my wife so that I could stare at him. The entire incubator was covered with a fitted giraffe blanket, to give parents a sense that this was a warm and cute place, not the terrifying place we all knew it to be. There was a flap at the top of the blanket that I could unsnap and open to look down at the baby, as if I were staring at fish underneath a glass bottom boat. I pulled the flap open and saw my son lying on a biliblanket, a blanket that lit up with changing colors to help lower the baby’s bilirubin levels (high levels of bilirubin cause jaundice). It would shift from green to yellow to red every few moments, as if my son were onstage at a rock concert.

  “Should we take a picture of him?” I asked my wife.

  She shook her head and began to cry. “I don’t want to remember any of this.”