She administered new meds through the IV and my wife shot back to life. Then the nurse left us to process what had just happened.
“Was I dying?” my wife asked me.
“The nurse never really made it clear.”
“Because that felt . . . bad.”
“You didn’t look happy about it.”
“Somebody needs to come take this goddamn baby out. I’m dying of thirst.” When you’re in labor, you can’t eat. You can only suck on ice chips instead of drinking straight fluids. And ice chips are terrible—tiny little nuggets formed from what tastes like old dishwater. It’s like chewing on a handful of frozen teeth. Refilling the ice chip cup every half hour was the only useful task I could perform for her.
A few hours later, the nurse came in and said the Cervidil had to be applied a second time. My wife nearly passed out hearing the news.
Sixteen hours after arriving at the hospital, she was finally ready to be induced. The anesthesiologist came by to administer the epidural and my wife greeted him as a liberator. Soon after, the ob-gyn came into our room for the delivery, followed close behind by my father-in-law, who had popped in for a visit.
The doctor looked over my wife. “Okay, so I think we’re about ready to—”
“Excuse me, Doctor,” said my father-in-law. “Are you Dr. Kleinbaum of the Rockville Kleinbaums?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I think that your daughter is our neighbor at the beach!” My father-in-law is a wonderful man who hates waking up before 1:00 P.M. and loves having extended conversations with absolute strangers.
“Really?” asked the doctor.
“Yes! I think they live in the townhome right next door.”
“Is that right?”
“How is she? We don’t get down there much because we usually have to rent out the house during the summer. You know, they’re making all kinds of noise about building on the lot next door—”
“HEY!” my wife shouted, pointing at her belly. “Pregnant woman here!”
My father-in-law took umbrage. “We’re just having a nice conversation, Schatz.”
“Will you get out of here already?”
“All right, all right.”
He looked at me and laughed. “Good luck, Drew.” Then he sauntered out of the room, as casual as if he had just gone shopping for groceries.
Finally, after hours of waiting for my wife to ripen, she was ready to push. The nurse took one of her legs and I hoisted the other. We pulled her legs back like she was a turkey waiting to be trussed as a second nurse sat sentry over the precious dilated cervix. She began pushing sometime around midnight. After a few hours of trying to pop the baby out, the thing had barely moved an inch. My wife looked exhausted. Defeated. She was looking for the doctor to finally walk back into the room (they don’t have to be there for all of the pushing; doctors are just closers) so that she could end the charade of trying to have the child naturally. At this point, she wanted sleep and a cold ginger ale more than she wanted a second child. The doctor came back in, examined the crown of the baby’s head, and offered my wife two options.
“Okay, so this baby isn’t coming out,” he told her. “And I see his heart rate dropping. So we can keep at this pushing for a bit, or we can—”
That was all the opening she needed. “CAESARIAN!”
“Are you sure?”
“Please. Just get this thing out.”
They handed me a set of surgical scrubs, which I put on with glee because I love pretending to be a doctor. Then the nurse told me I had to gather up all of our stuff because we weren’t coming back to the room. I looked around. There was a lot of shit. I didn’t want to move. I hate moving. This was our home now.
“Can’t I just leave it here for a second?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not,” the nurse said.
“Well, where do I put it? Is there, like, a bus station locker somewhere?”
“They’ll have a place for you to put your things in the recovery room.”
I threw all of our belongings into six different hospital-issued garbage bags and then huffed alongside my wife like a homeless person as they rolled her gurney roughly ten feet to the OR. I was expecting a much longer walk, a walk long enough for me to make some kind of rousing speech about the beauty of this moment to a woman who was half-conscious. Instead, the OR was right there, which makes perfect sense from a medical standpoint, though not from a dramatic one. The recovery room nurse told me to place my bags on a nearby chair, and I begged her reassurance that no one would come and steal my wallet while my wife was being slashed open.
They put a shower cap on my wife’s head and drew a curtain across the top of her stomach. The nurse told me not to go past the curtain, and I obeyed the hell out of her. A team of doctors gathered at her feet and the sounds began. I could hear gooshing and gurgling and all kinds of horrible noises. Not being able to look beyond the curtain only made things worse because it allowed my imagination to roam free, with scythes and ice cream scoops digging into my wife’s body.
“Do you have the baby?” I asked the doctor.
“Not yet. Sometimes, once the incision is opened, they hide.”
And I thought, Where is there to hide? It’s not like a uterus has a supply closet. I looked down at my wife and she was fighting to stay awake so that she could witness the birth.
“I’m gonna be sick,” she told me. The nurse handed me one of those plastic hospital basins shaped like a kidney bean to place near her mouth and she drooled bile into it. She began crying, the tears pooling along the bottom ridge of her glasses’ lenses.
“This is so awful, Drew.”
“You’re doing great. It’s all gonna be over soon.”
“It’s horrible. I can feel them reaching in.”
“It’ll all be over soon and we’ll have a beautiful son and you won’t remember any of this. Not the waiting. Not the Cervidil. Not the monitors. Not even this hospital. Please, just hang on.”
“I love you.”
“I love you so much, just please hang on. I swear to you it’ll be okay.”
Dr. Kleinbaum yanked the baby out and held him over the curtain, like this was some kind of puppet show.
“You did it!” I screamed to my wife. “You fucking did it!”
She gave the baby a kiss. “I’m going to pass out now.”
“By all means.”
And pass out she did. Once the baby pops out, you assume that’s the end of it, that they stitch Mommy up in five seconds and you go about your merry way. But in reality, a C-section is major surgery, which means layers upon layers of dermis and subcutaneous tissue must be repaired, the stitches made only after the placenta and the amniotic fluid have been removed. My wife slept in relative peace while I sat there, watching the silhouettes move ominously to and fro on the other side of the curtain and hearing the awful sounds of a medical vacuum sucking up the afterbirth.
“Are you guys almost done?” I asked.
“Not quite,” said the doctor. “We have to massage her uterus back into place from the inside.”
“Oh Jesus, don’t tell me that.”
I could see the doctor on the other side of the curtain laboring feverishly, as if he were mining for coal. Meanwhile, the baby was over in the corner of the room, having his vitals checked and his umbilical cord snipped (they don’t allow the father to snip the umbilical after a Caesarian for reasons of sterilization). He was perfect—a real live being created out of virtually nothing. He was much better off than my wife or me, frankly. No mixed-up intestines for our second kid; only our third one would get to experience that particular thrill. They started to wheel him away to the nursery while my wife was still being stitched up. The nurse asked me if I wanted to leave her to go with my son, and suddenly I felt as if I was being torn between loyalties. My poor wife w
as still a piece of meat lying on a cold surgical table. But you only get to be there for the first few moments of the child’s life once.
I went with the baby. I bathed him and changed him and swaddled him under a warm light in the nursery. Eventually, he fell asleep and the nurse encouraged me to go to the postpartum recovery room to do likewise.
I staggered out into the hallway. It was later in the morning now. My son happened to be born the day the president was being inaugurated. I dragged my body through the maternity ward as nurses and doctors and patients in wheelchairs gathered around every available TV set to watch the ceremony. I walked past all of it oblivious to the moment, like a caveman who had just woken up after being frozen in ice.
Inside the room, there was a little loveseat that pulled out for fathers to sleep on, and for thirty minutes I sank into a sleep so dark and black, I felt as if I could never be pulled out of it. There are many memorable things about watching a child being born, but what sticks with you the most is the exhaustion—the toll of the process, for both you and your wife (your wife more so), from conception all the way to delivery. It’s the sense that you will never find yourself more physically or emotionally drained. It’s almost as if God planned it that way. It’s almost as if He designed it so that you won’t be surprised when you find yourself running on empty for the next two decades.
EVENING AT THE IMPROV
The hardest part of giving a kid a bath is getting the kid into the bath. When my daughter was a baby, we could just throw her in the sink against her will and wash her like she was a saucepan. But as she learned to walk and talk and developed working muscles, getting her in the bath became more and more difficult. I had to find a way to get her to want to take a bath, which meant offering bribes or threatening punishment, often in tandem. You’ll get candy, or you’ll never get candy again.
Then, one night, I figured out a third technique. I went up to her while she was playing downstairs and told her the exciting news.
“Mommy bought you something at Target today!”
“She did?”
“Uh-huh. But it’s upstairs. Let’s go upstairs to see it!”
She flew up the stairs and I quickly closed the baby gate at the top of the steps behind her so that she couldn’t get back down. The girl was three years old now, but the nuances of opening a baby gate were still a mystery to her. You had to push down on the tab while simultaneously lifting the gate up, and I deliberately used my body to shield my hand every time I opened it so that she wouldn’t learn the technique. It was the only thing I still had over her.
“You closed the gate!” she wailed.
“I know. That’s because it’s . . . BATHTIME! BATHTIME BATHTIME BATHTIME!”
“Noooooo! I don’t wanna take a bath! You tricked me!”
She grabbed the bars on the gate and rattled them like a caged prisoner.
“Sweetheart, I tricked you because I love you,” I said, “and because there’s yogurt in your hair.”
“Did Mom get me anything?”
“Oh, yeah, she got you some underwear.”
“I DON’T LIKE UNDERWEAR!”
“Well, I thought the underwear was exciting. My mistake. Let’s hop in the bath now.”
“NO!”
“Umm . . . please?”
“NO!”
Then I had an idea.
“We could tell jokes,” I said.
“Jokes?”
“Mmm-hmm. Remember that joke about the interrupting cow that you li—”
“MOO!”
“Yes, that one. You’re very clever. Want to hear more?”
“Okay!”
“I’ll tell you more, but only if you shake a tail feather and get in the tub.”
She stripped down naked and bounded into the warm water. I soaped her up and told her the same tired knock-knock jokes a few times over. Orange you glad I didn’t say banana, etc. But the material was wearing thin on her, and I had yet to wash her hair. You can take a child swimming and she won’t complain for a second about getting water on her face. But get water on her face in the tub and she’ll react like you just threw acid into her eyes.
“I have to wash your hair,” I told her.
“I don’t wanna wash my hair.”
“I know you don’t. But all you have to do is look up and the water won’t get in your eyes. I swear this works and you never listen to me.”
“No.”
“How about this: Why don’t you tell me a joke?”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Why should I have all the fun? You try one on me.”
“Okay. Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Hairy.”
“Hairy who?”
“Hairy eyeball.”
Then she laughed so hard that her head naturally tilted upward and I was able to wet her hair without any kind of fuss. I even managed to penetrate the dreaded outside shell of the hair. For some reason, the surface of a child’s hair is virtually waterproof. One time, I poured water on the girl’s hair and it all slid clean off, as if she had dunked her head in Thompson’s WaterSeal. This time, I achieved full saturation down to the scalp.
“Oh, this is great!” I told her. “Tell another.”
“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Hairy.”
“Hairy who?”
“Hairy eyeball in your butt.”
More laughter. I snuck in a quick lather.
“You tell one, Daddy.”
“Okay,” I said. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Peanut.”
“Peanut who?”
“A gallon of rotten peanut butter up your butt.”
That was the killer. I could feel her laughter reverberating off the bathroom tile and now she was completely distracted. Jokes about butts WORKED. I could have washed her hair a dozen more times and not gotten a rise out of her.
“More!” she demanded.
Just like that, I had a meme. I scrambled to find more elaborate things to stick up another person’s butt: toy ponies, a pint of vanilla ice cream, six corncobs, a milk truck. Eventually, I dropped the whole knock-knock formula and segued directly into singing Eddie Murphy’s “Boogie in Your Butt” to her. She went nuts with laughter, throwing her head so far back I thought it might roll off her body. Right on cue, she started inventing her own lyrics.
“Put some gum in your butt!” she cried out.
I reacted with phony disgust and that made her laugh even harder.
“Put some ants in your butt!” I countered.
“Put a guitar in your butt.”
“Put an astronaut in your butt.”
“Put candy in your butt.”
“Put Germany in your butt.”
“What’s Germany?”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s in your butt now.”
On and on we went. Everything we said was filthy and vile and horrible, but the bath itself was perfectly executed. She didn’t splash water outside the tub once. She didn’t bitch when I put the bath toys away or when I threw out the rubber duck that had black mildew leaking out of it. And when I opened the tub drain without her looking, she didn’t immediately close it back up so that she could hang around in the bath for another eight hours, the way she usually did. The last of the bathwater swirled down the drain and she stepped out to receive her toweling like a civilized lady.
“That was excellent,” I told her. “I’ve never had so much fun, and thank you for taking your bath without a fuss.”
“Do one more!” she said.
So I found one more thing to stick up your butt and she slipped into her jammies without a fight.
“Let’s go tell Mom!”
“No, no, no,” I said
. “She wouldn’t get any of these jokes. Far too sophisticated for her. Let’s just keep this between us for now. No butt talk outside the tub, all right?”
“All right.”
And for the next six weeks, bathtime was the greatest time ever. I had found the key to bonding with my child in the tub, and all it required was me reciting a laundry list of terrifying rectal fillings: ham sandwiches, rice pudding, an eyeball coated in diarrhea, rabbit feet soaked in pee-pee, and such and such. Oh, we had a ball. I felt like I was holding court at the Comedy Cellar every night, bringing the house down with every set. It was magic.
Until . . .
“I overheard you in the bath,” my wife said. “Why are you guys talking about putting stuff up butts?”
“It’s just our special time.”
“Drew.”
“I didn’t teach her any swearwords. Except for ‘butt,’ I guess. Does that count?”
“‘Put some barf salad up your butt’?”
“It’s completely innocent.”
“No more.”
“I’ll never have an audience like this again! Free speech, woman!”
“No more.”
I relented. I knew I’d get caught eventually and I knew it was a cheap way of gaining my daughter’s affections. I began to wonder how much damage all those butt jokes had done to her psyche. Now she was gonna head off to school and tell her teacher to stick a doodie fish pie up her butt and it would be all my fault. There was no going back now. The floodgates had been opened.
I brought her upstairs the next night and she jumped in the tub excitedly.
“Put some snowmen up your butt!”
“Right. About that . . . ,” I began. “Listen, we can’t make poopy jokes anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s just not right. I can’t have you talking poopy talk once you get to school and all that. I’m sorry, girl. We can still tell jokes, but they gotta be clean.”