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

  I took her inside a real school bus once and it was like a grown man being led onto the field at Yankee Stadium. She was awed. She treated the rows of cheap green vinyl seating like church pews, making a point of sitting in every single one. I made sure to show her the hump seat in the back, the one that rests over the rear wheel well.

  “That’s where the awesome kids sit and write out dirty Mad Libs,” I told her. She nodded in reverence.

  The day of her first ballet class, I ran into a mom who asked me if my kid liked princesses.

  “No, she likes buses,” I said, proud the girl had resisted the whole phenomenon. She wasn’t a sucker like the rest of her peers. Her interests were real, not some byproduct of corporate brainwashing. “I don’t think she really cares about princesses.”

  “Oh, she will,” said the mom. She had a gleefully ominous air about her, as if she enjoyed the prospect of my future suffering.

  Over in the corner of the church basement, Miss Rhonda kept a long rack of princess dresses, including favorites like Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, etc. All the little girls grabbed at the dresses like it was the first night of eliminations on The Bachelor, and my daughter followed suit. All she had to see were kids her age grabbing at the dresses to know she desired them.

  From that day forward, the girl was all princesses, all the time. The Disney Princess people have made marketing inroads into every facet of American existence, and I was now forced to deal with all of them. They have princess stickers on grapes. They aren’t special grapes, mind you; they’re just grapes that happen to be marked up 200 percent. Suddenly, I saw princesses all over the place, hiding in plain sight. It’s like when you buy a car and then suddenly see nothing but that particular car every time you go out driving. I wanted to refrain from buying her so much princess crap, but the girl just seemed so excited by it all. I didn’t want to kill her buzz. No parent ever does. Suddenly, the whole culture had seduced not only my child but my wife and me as well. We bought all the princess movies. We bought all the princess games. We bought all the princess Barbie dolls. The girl forced me to personally dress the dolls on several occasions.

  “I don’t think this Princess Jasmine halter top will fit on Princess Aurora,” I told the girl. “It’s been tailored for a more . . . uh . . . buxom princess.”

  “Just do it!”

  “Why are her hands so rigid? It’s like she’s dead. I can’t get any of the fabric past her wrist.”

  There was no stopping the girl’s descent into Princessmania. She loved all the princesses and she loved Miss Rhonda. Certain people have the touch when it comes to dealing with children, and Miss Rhonda had it. She knew which princess was each student’s favorite at any given second. She offered to make princess dresses for my daughter. She even invited the girl to her end-of-summer party at her house. We ate that shit up. I felt like I had gotten in with the Mob. Miss Rhonda had tapped our child for greatness. We were IN. And while I despised the entire Princess Industrial Complex, I wasn’t above flattery. When a teacher is paying extra attention to your child, you believe that it’s because you raised such an exceptional kid, one that stands out head and shoulders above the rest of her booger-eating friends. Let’s see little Brandy Reynolds down the street get that kind of audience with Miss Rhonda!

  At the end of ballet season, all the parents were invited to come watch the students perform a recital. The theme of this recital was Pocahontas, one of the lesser Disney princesses but also one of the most attractive. Miss Rhonda dressed all the girls in Native American outfits and gave them headdresses made out of construction paper. She lined the girls up in an imaginary canoe and had them pantomime rowing down a river. As they heaved and hoed, Miss Rhonda suddenly stopped them.

  “STOP!” she cried. “I hear the paleskins coming!”

  I whispered to my wife, “Did she just say ‘paleskins’?”

  “I think she did,” my wife whispered back.

  “Is that racist? I mean, she’s talking about white people, so that’s okay, right?”

  “Shhhh!”

  The girls stopped pretending to row, and Miss Rhonda commanded, “Now say, ‘What do you want, paleskins?’”

  And all the girls shouted, “WHAT DO YOU WANT, PALESKINS?”

  I turned to my wife. “Holy shit! Now they’re all saying it!”

  “Shhhh!”

  Then Miss Rhonda assumed the role of the bad guy from the Virginia Company.

  “I’m going to take all your land!” she shouted at them.

  Well, the little Pocahontases weren’t about to take being colonized lying down. They jumped up and chased Miss Rhonda all over the room while doing an Indian war chant, patting their mouths and making the stereotypical BABABABABA sound, which was just breathtakingly inappropriate. I gritted my teeth and prayed that no members of the Sioux Nation would stumble by the church basement window to see it. It was a revolution in miniature, and Miss Rhonda couldn’t quash it with smallpox-infected blankets the way real settlers did.

  Every month, my daughter latched on to a new princess to worship. She got so into Snow White that she would play the DVD and pantomime every scene in it. At night, she demanded that I tell her the story of Snow White getting lost in the dark and frightening forest, then she demanded I tell it again and again and again.

  “And then Snow White got lost in the dark and frightening forest,” I said. “And all the evil trees tried to eat her.”

  “No, no, no! They were nice trees!”

  “They were?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Because in the movie, the trees look pretty angry.”

  “No, when she wakes up, all her animal friends are there.”

  “Yes, and then all of the nice rabbits and deer showed up and Snow White was happy.”

  “Tell it again!”

  “No.”

  Eventually, she asked me to download the soundtrack so that she could act out the movie on her own, without the pictures to guide her. All I had to do was say no, but again I didn’t. I still liked the cheap sugar rush you get from buying your kids stupid crap. I downloaded the soundtrack, and over the next few weeks, the girl would have me play it front to back and watch as she acted out every scene. I got to be the Huntsman and pretend I was gonna stab the shit out of her multiple times, which I found inappropriately cathartic. My daughter also took special care with the scene where Snow White bites into the apple, dies, and rests in a glass coffin. The girl was all about resting in that glass coffin. One day, while we were playing in the basement, she explained the blocking needed to perform her Snow White routine.

  “I’m going to die,” she told me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And then you’re going to come and kiss me on the lips.”

  “Yeah, no, that isn’t gonna happen.”

  “And then we can get married!”

  “HOLY CHRIST, NO.”

  She grew serious for a moment. “Dad, am I gonna die?”

  “Like, you personally? In real life?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not anytime soon.”

  “Are you gonna die?”

  “Me? Not anytime soon.”

  “But when?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe when I’m eighty? Hopefully, we’ll all be cyborgs by then.”

  “What’s a cyborg?”

  “The point is . . . you don’t need to worry about dying anytime soon. That’s the fun of being your age.”

  “Okay. Well, I’m going to die now.”

  “Okay.”

  She lay down on the couch as the chorale for Snow White’s funeral pageant began playing. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still, pursing her lips just a touch.

  At a certain point, you learn to get over yourself as a parent. Diapers are gross, but you get over it. You go to bed at
9:00 P.M. every night because you’re lame, but you get over it. And sometimes, your child will innocently want you to kiss her on the mouth, clearly not thinking of such an act the same way you do. You get over it.

  The girl looked very pretty in her official Disney Snow White dress, lying pretend dead on the couch. The dress had poofy blue shoulders and cheap gold trim along the sleeves, with a sparkly red top and a silken sheath of yellow polyester for a skirt. The Christmas prior, my mom had bought her a pair of blue Snow White shoes, with blue heels that blinked with every step and a little heart-shaped picture of Snow White adorning the toes. She had her eyes closed and arms crossed over her chest now, and for a moment, I thought about what it would feel like if she really were dead, if that were really her corpse resting on the sofa, with a choir chanting, “To be happy forever.” She was so beautiful and perfect lying there, the thought of it was unbearable. I wanted her to wake up, to live again.

  I leaned in and gave her the tiniest of pecks. The girl’s big fat brown eyes popped open and she smiled as if she really had been brought back from the grave. I led her out into the center of the room and spun her around as the finale played. In my head, I was fast-forwarding two and a half decades to her wedding day, seeing her resplendent in a white gown and leading her out onto the parquet floor of some random hotel ballroom, with her new husband—a strapping young lad who needed to kiss my ass for YEARS before finally winning my grudging approval—looking on. I could nearly touch the moment.

  A few months later, I was about to take the girl to Miss Rhonda’s class and she resisted.

  “I don’t wanna go,” she said.

  “You don’t?” I asked. “Don’t you like ballet?”

  “No. It’s boring.”

  “What about princesses?”

  “Princesses are for little kids.”

  “Well, what do you like?”

  “Alicia!” She pronounced it “Ah-LEE-cee-ah” in a fabulous Spanish accent.

  “Who’s Alicia?”

  “FROM GO, DIEGO, GO!”

  “Seriously? That show is awful.”

  “I wanna be Alicia for Halloween!”

  So Alicia became the next phase. And then puppies. And then secret agents. And then some other thing. I’ve lost track at this point. We never went to Miss Rhonda’s class again.

  On a shelf in our basement, we still have all the remnants of her infatuations: Charlotte the bus, the dresses, a toy car wash my brother-in-law constructed for her. Each group of toys represents a phase in the girl’s life that she’ll never repeat, a person she’ll never be again. Sometimes I miss those versions of her. Sometimes I have to fight the urge to listen to some dwarf song while I’m working because I want to get a whiff of the memory because the memory is the only real connection you have to that version of the child. Even a photo is hopelessly inadequate. I look at the photos now and find it hard to believe those phases ever existed. I need something tangible to unearth the feeling: a song, a dress, a magic wand, whatever. In my head, sometimes I can hear that choir at the end of Snow White still singing, and I can see the girl lying stone-dead on our couch. I miss seeing her like that. I miss having the chance to save her.

  CAESARIAN

  My wife and I agreed that we needed to have a second child because an only child is 90 percent more likely to have an imaginary friend who wants to murder you in your sleep. Besides, our daughter was getting older now and my wife wanted her to have a “friend” in the house, as much as a two-year-old can be friends with a baby that doesn’t do anything but sleep and cry.

  It took a year for us to conceive our second child. This is a common ordeal for the average middle-class American couple that puts off having children until their thirties. We knew so many other couples that had experienced fertility problems and miscarriages that it was more surprising when someone we knew had a child without being consigned to thirty-eight consecutive weeks of bed rest. Turns out God WANTS you to conceive when you’re eighteen years old, apparently so that you can spend your twenties miserable and penniless and living in a camper.

  Months passed and our frustration over failing to have a second child grew more acute. Every new period that arrived felt like a horrible defeat. All that hot sex for nothing! My wife asked me to go to a urologist and he told me that, when trying to have a baby, the male should only orgasm once every three days, in order to build up a hefty payload. You really wanna saturate the woman’s reproductive area, like it’s an Iowa floodplain. I tried holding out for three days at a time. It was not easy. By the second day of the abstinence cycle, I was ready to hump a mailbox.

  Sometimes my wife’s cycle would arrive a week late and we’d cross our fingers and hope that the pregnancy had taken root, getting our hopes up higher and higher the further we got away from the cycle date. Then the period would drop and the entire project would be reset. I felt like I was raking up a pile of leaves only to have the wind blow them all away. The process became torturous—the idea of a second baby finally arriving seemed so far away that I felt as if we would never get to it. We wanted every failed pregnancy test to be a mistake. Hey, it came from Target. Just how reliable could it be? Of course, the second we finally got a positive, we took the exact opposite stance. Hey, it came from Target. It can’t possibly be wrong!

  So it took a while to finally break into the bank vault and get my wife successfully pregnant again. By the time I got her to the hospital to be induced, we had essentially been waiting for the boy to arrive for twenty-one months. My wife didn’t feel like waiting one second longer.

  The nurse came into my wife’s hospital room to check her cervix. It needed to be dilated to ten centimeters before she could start pushing the boy out. It was not at ten centimeters. It wasn’t even close.

  “We’re gonna have to apply Cervidil,” she told us. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the drug Cervidil, it is—according to its own website—a “vaginal insert for cervical ripening,” which I think you’ll agree makes a woman’s cervix sound delicious. Cervidil must be applied directly to the cervix, which is akin to someone trying to jam a thumbtack into the back of your throat using a boxing glove. The nurse began the application.

  “OH JESUS CHRIST!” my wife screamed.

  “Almost there,” the nurse noted.

  Meanwhile, I stood there holding my wife’s hand, being like, “It’s okay, dear.” And it so wasn’t okay. I was of no help whatsoever. You never feel more useless than when your pregnant wife is screaming her brains out and you know that there’s nothing you can do verbally or physically to make it better. The fact that you’re standing there like an idiot—having the dumb luck to be born with a penis—only makes it worse.

  The worst part was that the Cervidil was merely the beginning. The drug doesn’t even induce labor. It only induces the inducement. You have to get it inserted overnight, wait twelve hours, have your cervix checked again, and THEN you get the Pitocin, which is a drug meant to speed up the process. After the first application, we sat there bored out of our minds for half a day. I turned on the TV in the room.

  “Oh, hey,” I said to my wife. “It’s House! We haven’t seen this one!”

  “I don’t wanna watch a hospital show. I’m IN a hospital. Right now.”

  At that moment, one of the patients on the show started coughing up blood in her hospital room, and my wife nearly threw the remote at me.

  She was strapped to two different machines, one that monitored contractions and another that monitored the baby’s heart rate and blood pressure. The cheap Velcro straps began to dig into her skin. You can’t lie flat on your back when you’re in the late stages of pregnancy because it can restrict blood flow to the fetus. As a result, pregnant women have to contort themselves into a variety of positions, none of them optimal. My wife couldn’t stand the discomfort one second longer. I stared at her belly and it seemed like it was its own separate enti
ty, just this massive orb of flesh divorced from her body. I kept waiting for it to float away like a hot air balloon. Every time she wanted to take a leak, she had to rip the monitor equipment off, go to the bathroom, ask the nurse to resquirt her tummy with clear goo that looked like a porn film money shot, and have the monitor electrodes strapped back on. At one point, her eyes lolled back inside her head.

  “I feel dizzy,” she said.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I think I’m gonna pass out.”

  Her blood pressure began to drop precipitously and I ran out of the room to grab a nurse, only one was already walking over because nurses can monitor patients from the front desk, which is helpful for them because then they don’t have to actually talk to patients. The nurse strolled in and looked at my wife.

  “Hmm. That’s weird,” she said casually. “Her blood pressure is NOT supposed to be that low.”

  “Is she dying?”

  “Huh. Why is this machine being so silly?”

  I tried to strangle the nurse with my eyes. “IS SHE DYING?!”

  The amazing thing about hospitals is how blasé the nurses and doctors can be about everything. An exploding heart is no more interesting to them than a bad sandwich. It’s not like on TV, where doctors run EVERYWHERE, their asses tightly clenched and their faces grim with the determination to save lives, no matter the cost. In a real hospital, everyone just plods along. A patient is an item on a to-do list. If a patient is stable enough to be left unattended for twenty straight hours, then they can be left unattended for twenty straight hours. There’s no constant sense of urgency.

  Of course, doctors and nurses have to be this way. They can’t be emotionally attached to every patient. They can’t be screaming out for defibrillators every waking second. They’d end up doing their jobs poorly. I understood all that while we were in that room, and yet it was little comfort when my wife’s blood pressure was dipping down to corpse levels and the nurse was acting like the fucking cable box was on the fritz.