by Jenny Lawson
I didn’t have an answer for her. When you can’t tell whether something’s porn or not anymore, that’s when you know it’s time to go home. Or to quit. Possibly both.
IT WOULD BE PARTICULARLY fitting (and easy) to finish this chapter with a paragraph about how I personally ended my career in HR because I lost my ability to tell porn from real life, but that would be a lie, as I actually quit because I wanted to give myself a year to find out whether I could be a writer. I told my boss that I had a book inside of me, and that I needed to get it out even if I had to squeeze it through my vagina. Because that’s exactly what the world needs. A book squeezed from my vagina.
But it must have been a worthwhile bet, since you’re now holding that very book in your hands. Unless this is the year 2057, and you’re a police detective holding this stained, unfinished manuscript as you stand over the body of the lonely elderly woman who was found partially eaten by her own house cats, and this chapter ends with a handwritten note that says, “Note to self: Find a more upbeat way to end this chapter, because being eaten by cats is depressing, and also a terrible running theme to have in a book. Also, buy cat food and pay the insurance on the hovercar.” If this is the case then I apologize to you for the state of my apartment. Please know that I was not expecting company, and that I usually never have dirty dishes in the sink or partially eaten bodies on the floor. I can assure you this whole day is a total anomaly for me.
1. Did you know that “ostensively” isn’t a word? Because I didn’t, and apparently I’ve been using the wrong word for my entire life. Apparently the “correct” word is “ostensibly.” Ostensively.
If You See My Liver, You’ve Gone Too Far
*Spoiler alert: Bambi’s mom doesn’t make it.
Okay, get prepared, because this chapter is kind of depressing and is about dead babies. I know. Ew. But they don’t all die, and in the end everything is fine. Mostly. If you just forget about all those dead babies. Or if you call them fetuses. Calling them fetuses makes it feel more clinical and less sad, but I’m pretty sure I get to call them whatever I want, because they’re my dead babies. And no, I’m not calling them “babies” instead of “fetuses” for any political reason, because I’m actually totally prochoice and you can do whatever you want with your body, but stop hijacking this chapter, asshole, because this is about me. God, you have a problem. Also, my editor is all, “WTF are you doing? How are you going to build up suspense if you just gave away the entire chapter in the first paragraph? Don’t you know about the six elements of drama?” and I’m all, “No, but I know that when I go see a sad movie I always want someone to run in right before the sad scene and be like, ‘Okay, Bambi’s mom’s about to bite it, but it’s totally going to be okay in the end. Don’t freak.’” And that’s what I just did for you. You’re welcome. My editor just pointed out that I just ruined Bambi for everyone who hasn’t seen it, but IT’S FUCKING BAMBI, y’all. It’s totally not my fault if you haven’t seen Bambi yet. It’s been out for years. Hey, have you heard about this new thing called “a sandwich” yet? It’s awesome. My editor says I’m being purposely fatuous. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad, so I’m going to go back up to the top and add a spoiler alert. I’m like a goddamn saint.
So, how do you write something funny about dead babies? Answer: You can’t. So get prepared.
I ALWAYS IMAGINED that when I got pregnant it would be awesome, and everything would go perfectly, and I’d pose for all those artfully naked, pregnant Demi Mooresque pictures and put them all over my house, and suddenly I’d have less cellulite, and then I’d go into labor while I was standing in line at the bank, but it would be okay because the baby would get stuck in my pants leg, so it totally wouldn’t slam into the floor. Thank God for skinny jeans with maternity panels; am I right? And that was basically exactly what I expected would happen the first time I got pregnant. In real life, though, I found out I was pregnant, promptly got so sick I could hardly move, and threw up into my office garbage can all day long. At the time I was still working in human resources, teaching people how to act appropriately at a nonprofit Christian organization in Houston. That sounds like it’s a joke, but I assure you it’s not. I was actually really good at pretending to be appropriate (when I wasn’t throwing up in front of large groups of people), but it started to become obvious to everyone that I was either pregnant or dying, so Victor and I decided to go ahead and tell everyone. And everyone was thrilled, except for the cleaning lady at my office who had to empty my trash can.
I had always wanted to be a mother. I didn’t really like other people’s babies, but I never considered that a job requirement, as I assumed that my baby would be kick-ass, or would at least quickly turn into a kid. When I was little I always wanted to have a slumber party, but my parents were too smart to ever agree to have one, and so I told myself that one day when I was old enough I’d have a kid and have a slumber party with her every night. That seems like a ridiculous reason for having a child, but there are worse ones. At my core, though, was a need that I couldn’t quite verbalize. I wanted to be part of my family legacy. I wanted to give a child the kind of magical childhood I wanted. I wanted to see a small reflection of myself and the generations before me in a new face, and be reborn again too. I wanted to have someone I could beat at Scrabble.
Victor and I picked out names, bought baby sweaters, and wondered what our lives would be like as parents. I was nervous, but too sick to really worry. A few weeks before the second trimester, Victor and I went into the doctor’s office for an ultrasound. I hadn’t slept much that night, because I’d had a panic attack and ended up calling my sister at midnight, hysterically yelling, “OHMYGOD, WHAT IF THE BABY’S A REPUBLICAN?” Then she hung up on me because she enjoys being unsupportive. Or maybe she was mad that I call her only at midnight when I’m having panic attacks. I don’t really know. What I do know, though, was that I was braced to hear almost anything in that exam room.
“It’s twins.”
“It’s triplets.”
“It’s a Republican.”
“It’s a small bear.”
Granted, that last one seemed unlikely, but I was mentally prepared for almost anything—anything except for what the doctor actually told us: That there was no heartbeat. That the baby was dead. That “these things happen for the best.” And this is when I broke. It wasn’t obvious from the outside. I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I went numb, and then I realized that this was all my fault. If I’d gone to church, or believed in the right God, this wouldn’t have happened. The exam room door was the unlucky number that falls after twelve, and I’d wanted to ask for another room but had been too embarrassed to say why. If I’d demanded another room, the baby would still be alive. There were a million reasons why this was happening, and all of them were because of me.
I numbly followed Victor down the halls, and for the first time in my life I seriously considered suicide. I wondered if I would be fast enough to slip away from Victor before he noticed that I was gone. I wondered if the building was tall enough to kill me if I jumped, or if I’d just wake up, broken physically as well as mentally, in a hospital bed. I wondered what I could do to not have to ever deal with this, because I knew I wasn’t strong enough to come out whole on the other side. Victor seemed to sense that I was planning on running, or maybe he was just on autopilot himself, because he held on to my arm almost painfully, leaving me no room for escape. We went home, and while I waited to miscarry, I had Victor call everyone and tell them to never, ever mention this to me again. No flowers, no “I’m sorrys.” Nothing. Because I knew that the only way I could survive this would be to block it from my mind.
And that might have been easier to do except for the fact that I didn’t miscarry. I continued to carry the baby for another month and then I had a nervous breakdown. I’m still not sure what triggered it, but my coworkers found me crying hysterically in my office. I didn’t even recognize the sounds as human, and I remember wondering w
hat that horrible noise was, until I realized it was me, keening uncontrollably until I finally exhausted myself. Victor took me home, and my doctor eventually realized I needed this to end immediately and performed the surgery. There were complications from the procedure, and I ended up having a painful, hemorrhaging miscarriage that night. A week later I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and put on an antidepressant that made me suicidal. Which is not really how an antidepressant is supposed to work, turns out. Victor found me trawling online for suicide message boards, pulled my Internet access, and got me on another drug that worked. My psychiatrist worked with me until I was eventually able to leave the house without having a breakdown, and then he mailed me a letter telling me that he was retiring suddenly, which I’m pretty sure is code for, “You’re too fucked up even for me. I’m totally breaking up with you.” But that was fine, because I was better and stronger and ready to try again.
And then I got pregnant again.
And then I lost it again.
I switched doctors and demanded to be tested for everything in the books. That’s when I found out that I had antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, which I could barely even spell. I went home and looked it up on the Internet and it basically said, “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE,” but then my doctor told me that it wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s a rare autoimmune disease that causes blood clots, and worsens during pregnancy. I told her that I was pretty sure that I also had polio and testicular cancer, and she said that I wasn’t allowed to read WebMD anymore.
I was put on a regimen of baby aspirin and I was all, “Seriously? Fucking baby aspirin?” But my doctor assured me that it would thin my blood enough to stop having miscarriages. And that’s when I had another miscarriage. Coincidentally, this is the same time when I screamed, “FUCK BABY ASPIRIN,” and my doctor agreed to prescribe a heavy-duty treatment of expensive blood thinners, and I was all, “Hell, yeah.” Then she said, “Here’s your giant duffel bag of syringes so that you can inject the medication directly into your bloodstream,” and I thought, “Oh. I have made a terrible mistake.” But by then it was too late to back out, because I’d read all the Internet horror stories about women having strokes because of this blood disease, and I thought that perhaps all the blood thinners would help the polio that I’d also diagnosed myself with, and so I took a deep breath and I started giving myself injections. In the stomach. Twice a day. Awesome. It’s basically like getting the treatment for rabies, except instead of five shots you have to get seven hundred.
And after many, many months of shots I found myself pregnant again. This time I was getting further along than ever before. By the second trimester my stomach had become a patchwork quilt of bruises, and when I would pull up my shirt for checkups the ultrasound techs invariably gasped in horror, until I quickly assured them that I was not being pummeled repeatedly in the stomach. They still gave Victor the stink-eye, though, which was actually a nice distraction, since every time we had an ultrasound I would wince in terror, certain that the baby would be gone. But it wasn’t.
I kept my appointments and adamantly insisted that none of them fall on the unlucky-numbered day. I took to calling that number “twelve-B.” As in eleven, twelve, twelve-B, fourteen. People thought I was insane, and I was. (Still am.) But I wasn’t taking any chances, and curing my worsening OCD wasn’t as important to me as the possibility that asking the cats to wish me luck was keeping the baby alive. Once, as Victor drove me to work in the morning, I realized that I’d forgotten to ask the cats to wish us luck and I demanded that he turn around immediately. He tried to logically explain that the cats didn’t actually have the ability to give me good or bad luck, but it didn’t matter. I knew that the cats weren’t in charge of good luck. These were the same cats who would stand inside the litter box and cluelessly poop over the side. Of course they weren’t controlling my destiny. I was controlling my destiny. I was just doing it by following all the little OCD routines that I’d picked up that had made life keep going. They were, of course, all the bizarre little routines that made my life incredibly complicated as well, but it was a mental illness I was willing to live with if it kept my baby (who we’d just been told was a girl) alive.
When I was seven months along, my coworkers decided to throw me a shower. I’d vehemently insisted against it, because I knew it would interfere with all of my secret little rituals, but they were adamant and decided to throw me an involuntary surprise shower. One that just happened to be on the unluckily numbered floor. I got into the elevator, expecting to go to a budget meeting, but I couldn’t bring myself to press the unlucky-numbered button, so I did what I always did, which was to ride the elevator until someone else got on and pressed that unlucky button for me. Except that no one was getting in the elevator to go to that floor. Because they were all already in the conference room waiting to surprise me. Twenty minutes later someone came looking for me and found me sitting helplessly in the corner of the elevator. I told them I was just dizzy and resting, but I think it was probably pretty obvious I was more than slightly unhinged.
By the eighth month my stomach was huge and tight, and I didn’t have any extra folds of fat to pinch away that I could stick the syringes into. My doctor insisted that although the needles were quite long, they were not long enough to actually reach the baby, but I was terrified that I would end up injecting blood thinners into her head, and so I would yell, “MOVE, BABY. GO TO YOUR LEFT OR YOU’RE GOING TO GET STABBED.” Then Victor would point out that most fetuses don’t speak English, but I’d been talking to her a lot and I felt sure she’d picked up a few basic phrases. I did worry, though, that she didn’t know which direction “left” was, and so I’d yell, “My left. Not your left. Unless you’re facing my belly button. Then it’s your left too. If you can see my liver you’ve gone too far.” Then Victor looked at me worriedly and I was all, “You know, you could help,” and he was like, “What the fuck can I do? You have obviously lost your mind.” Then I glared at him until he finally sighed resignedly, walked around me, leaned down, and shouted at the left side of my stomach, “THIS WAY, BABY. MOVE TOWARD MY VOICE!” And I smiled at him gratefully, but after I finished the shot Victor muttered, “If this doesn’t work out we’re just getting a puppy,” which was kind of a crazy thing to say, because we already had a puppy. Clearly Victor was losing his mind and it was up to me to keep our family together. Me and the cats, who were granting me luck only when I specifically asked for it, that is. So, yeah . . . there was a lot riding on me.
One of hundreds of injections. Ah, the simplicities of motherhood.
Time crept by until it was finally time to induce. We went to the hospital maternity ward, and Victor quickly turned the television up to drown out the woman across the hall who was enthusiastically screaming, “JESUSGODKILLMENOW.”
“She’s praying,” Victor said unconvincingly.
In a twisted sort of serendipity, the TV screen buzzed on to reveal the bloody-stomach scene from Alien, which should probably be banned from all labor rooms. Victor attempted to switch it, but I asked him to leave it on because it seemed to fit the theme.
A nurse came in to start my IVs and told us that she was sorry about the woman screaming next door, and that she’d told her that she needed to keep it down. I wondered what the nurse would do if the woman refused to keep quiet. The nurse was a petite black woman, but you got the feeling that she could easily drag a screaming pregnant woman out into the street if she needed to, and she struck me as being someone who should not be tested. “It’s because she’s black,” explained the nurse matter-of-factly.
“Um . . . what?” I asked, certain I’d misheard her.
“The lady yelling in the other room. She’s black,” the nurse continued. “Black women are always the loudest when they have babies. Screaming to Jesus, usually. White women are much quieter, right up until the baby starts to crown. Then you can’t tell a white woman from a black woman. Asian women make no sound at all. Quiet as church mice. We
have to keep an extra-careful eye on them, because if we don’t keep checking their hootchies they’ll give birth without even letting us know.”
“Oh,” I mumbled, as I found myself near speechless . . . less from the racial profiling and more from hearing a medical professional use the word “hootchies.” Mostly because I’m pretty sure that the word she was looking for was “coochies.” She must have noticed my look of concern, because she patted my hand and said, “It’s okay. I’m black, so I can totally say that out loud. The other nurses on the floor just have to think it. And,” she added proudly, “I’ve just distracted you so much that you didn’t even notice that I put all your IVs in.” And she was right. I had totally been distracted by Asian hootchies. And not for the first time.
Victor knew I was scared, but I wasn’t so nervous about the pain. I was terrified because the risk of stillbirth is so much higher with antiphospholipid syndrome. I was so focused on getting my daughter out of my body (which I still viewed as a veritable deathtrap) that I hardly noticed the pain. Victor murmured sweet, supportive things in my ear, but they sounded so unnatural coming from his mouth that I couldn’t stop giggling hysterically, and everyone looked at me like I was the crazy one, and so I told Victor he wasn’t allowed to speak anymore. Then one more push, and there was silence. And then the beautiful sound of crying. It was me crying. And then it was Hailey crying. My sweet, beautiful daughter. And it was amazing.
It wasn’t until that very moment that I actually let myself believe that I really might be able to be someone’s mother. As I held her in my arms, Victor cried, and I was filled with so much wonderment and awe that it felt as if my chest would explode. Then the epidural started to wear off and I remember thinking that it would be nice if this baby’s mother would come and take her so that I could get some sleep. And then I remembered that I was that baby’s mother. Then I felt a little scared for both of us.