I’d like to blame pregnancy hormones for my constant obsession over when the house would be finished, but I know I’d act the same way tomorrow except I wouldn’t be able to sing a chorus of “In the Ghetto” by Elvis Presley to drive home my point because the words “a poor little baby child is born—in the ghetto” wouldn’t have the same impact now that the baby is eight years old.
I even climbed on scaffolding to help hang crown molding when I was eight months pregnant in my desperation to get the house finished. I realize this doesn’t trump Mary having to ride to Bethlehem on a donkey and give birth in a stable, but it feels like a close second.
We moved back into the house exactly two weeks before Caroline was born, in spite of the fact that we had no kitchen countertops or other necessary components that make up a kitchen. But we had the pink nursery, and that’s all that really mattered. Who needs an oven when you have darling, whimsical letters that spell CAROLINE hanging on a pink wall and a fresh, white crib that the baby won’t actually sleep in for several months?
Along the way there were high points and low points. And then there was Joe, the guy we hired to tile our shower, who had never actually installed tile.
Joe tiled the shower stall in our new master bathroom. We originally hired a man named Mr. Baldo of Baldo and Son Construction to work on the shower and other various jobs, but Mr. Baldo took off with our money before he ever completed all the work we’d hired him to do.
Of course, we shouldn’t have been shocked by this turn of events, considering he’d already admitted to us that he didn’t actually have a son, even though his business was named Baldo and Son. I guess he just felt that the “and Son” gave him an air of legitimacy, much like Fred Sanford.
Two months before my due date, we found ourselves without a tile guy and with a shower that desperately needed to be tiled. And it’s a fact of life that at the intersection of crazy and desperate, you’ll find lowered standards. One of our subcontractors mentioned that his brother-in-law, Joe, might be available to do some tile work, so we called him. He was more than happy to take the job, his price was reasonable, and best of all, he could start the next day.
Joe showed up promptly the next morning with his bucket of grout and began laying tile in the shower. He turned out to be quite the conversationalist, and while he was working, he began to chat extensively with Perry. They talked about the neighborhood and our construction project, and then Joe said, “You know what, Mr. Perry? I didn’t even know how to install tile until last week, but I bought a video at Home Depot, and now I think I know what I’m doing.”
Well.
That certainly is comforting, Joe.
You’d think he might have kept that bit of information to himself, but I guess Joe was a firm believer in being transparent. We soon discovered he was a firm believer in something else too.
Perry returned to the job site one morning and could tell Joe had left in a hurry. His tools were strewn about the bathroom, and he hadn’t covered the bucket of grout. When Joe showed up that day, Perry asked him what had happened. Joe informed him our house was haunted and we needed to have some sort of exorcism.
Okay, sure. Let’s get that scheduled. What are your thoughts on a nice housewarming party combined with an exorcism? Will people bring gifts? Perhaps a nice mango-scented candle and some holy oil?
When pressed further, Joe based his suspicion on hearing voices after everyone else had left. Never mind the fact that every window in the house was left open and we lived in a corner house where people were constantly walking by. The logical conclusion, according to Joe, was that we had some ghosts. Obviously plural, because although I don’t know much about ghosts, I bet they don’t travel alone. They likely travel in packs, the way women visit the restroom when they’re out together.
We never did have the house exorcised, and shockingly, we’ve never had any more ghost issues. However, there is something in our house that’s extremely frightening: the tile job in our shower. It’s painfully obvious we didn’t need a priest as much as we needed someone with more tile experience than an hour-long tutorial from a Home Depot video.
After we moved back into the house, I attempted to clean the construction dirt and grime off the tile in the shower. I finally gave up, realizing it was impossible to get it completely clean thanks to all the jagged lines and grout imperfections. I griped about it regularly to Perry, questioning how anyone would be bold enough or dumb enough to take on a job with no experience other than watching a video.
But then it hit me. Was that really so different from what we were doing? Weren’t we taking on the most monumental job in the world in deciding to have a child? And what did we know? We were just two dumb kids. Kids in our early thirties, but kids nonetheless. How else do you explain that most of our meals were cooked in the microwave and we considered donuts to be part of a balanced breakfast? I prided myself on the fact I’d read upward of two whole books on the parenting process, but in reality I could only wish for something as extensive as a Home Depot video production on how to be a parent.
Like Anne Lamott says in Traveling Mercies, “I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools—friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.”
Perry and I were going to walk this road, hoping for the advice of friends and parents and well-meaning old ladies at the grocery store to get us through, but most of all, knowing we were completely dependent on God to give us wisdom about how to lay all the tiles of childhood as straight as we could and to smooth in the grout with the hope of covering our own imperfections and making them work with the overall design and personality of our daughter.
Of course we couldn’t have known then that we’d also have times, much like Joe, when we’d wonder if the creation we were working on might be possessed. Especially from ages two through four. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Chapter 5
Shamu & the Chicken Spaghetti
One day shortly after Joe the tile novice left us, I decided I might feel better and eliminate some stress if I took a day off from obsessing about the house and singing “In the Ghetto” to relax and get a little color on my very pregnant physique. Yes, because that would make it look better. Whenever I visit Sea World, I always hear people remark that Shamu would look a lot smaller if only he had a tan.
So in a flash of brilliance, I decided to put on a swimsuit and sit in the backyard to get some sun. And to maximize my efforts, I contorted my seven-months-pregnant body into a nonmaternity bikini, even though there was maximum spillage everywhere. Looking good. But I figured no one would see me, and really, in the long run, wouldn’t a little bit of a tan make my pregnant body look so much better?
The answer was literally a big, fat no, but God bless me for my optimism. The only thing that was going to make me look better at that point was childbirth, accompanied by an ensuing maximum-weight-loss diet plan—oh, and the evaporation of the fifteen pounds of water I was retaining in my ankles.
I was in the middle of gathering my crucial laying-out-in-the-sun supplies, such as InStyle magazine, a bottle of water, and a towel, when the phone rang. As I was talking on the phone, I walked into the backyard without realizing I hadn’t brought any of my things out with me. I turned to go back inside and realized I had shut, and therefore locked, the back door behind me.
I was standing in the backyard of our rental home, seven months pregnant, in a bikini swimsuit with no towel, no T-shirt, and no tarp to cover my large, exposed self. I immediately began weighing my options. I tried all the back windows. They were shut tight. I contemplated hoisting my pregnant body over the chain-link fence in the hope that the front door might be unlocked.
Now there is a mental im
age. A huge, pregnant woman in a too-small bikini climbing a chain-link fence. It’s enough to make a person wish they didn’t have eyes. Never mind that it would have taken a forklift or maybe even a crane to get me over that fence.
After I quit panicking, I realized I had a phone with me, so I called Perry on his cell phone and explained what had happened. After he quit laughing hysterically, he said that he’d get home as soon as he could. But he was about forty-five minutes away.
I spent those minutes talking on the phone to Gulley while intermittently drinking water out of the garden hose to keep myself hydrated and hanging out of an increasingly small swimsuit. It was a scene straight from an episode of Cops.
Perry finally arrived after what seemed like hours and saved his waddling damsel in distress. Air-conditioning and a maternity dress that actually covered my body had never felt so good. I know people always say pregnant women glow, but I think it’s only because the pregnancy hormones make you so hot that you have no other choice but to walk around with sweat glistening on your face the majority of the time. Plus, I adamantly believe that people, especially husbands, are just a little frightened by pregnant women and their ability to completely freak out at a moment’s notice, so they try to come up with verbs that have a positive connotation.
That day marked the end of my attempts to try to be beautiful and pregnant at the same time. Along with a lesson that perhaps I shouldn’t be so vain. Maybe now that I was about to be someone’s mother, I should worry more about things like researching the safest car seats and putting those plastic childproof plugs in electrical sockets instead of lying out in the sun like I was still in college and skipping my biology lab. And certainly there would be plenty of time to lie out in the sun and relax after I had the baby. Right?
Our house was finally finished by the middle of July. Of course, finished is a relative term. It was inhabitable. As long as you don’t consider a functioning kitchen to be an essential part of a home—and there are plenty of tribes in countries all over the world that don’t. Personally, I always enjoy a legitimate reason to pick up Mexican food for dinner. Washing our dishes with the hose in the backyard was a little awkward, but that only lasted until Perry brought in a piece of plywood and a twenty-five-dollar temporary sink he bought at Home Depot.
I constantly complained about the lack of proper air-conditioning that summer. I would lie in bed next to Perry at night and launch into a six-part lecture, complete with bullet points, about how I couldn’t believe we’d spent all this money on new air-conditioning units that didn’t actually cool off our house. I felt certain we’d been a part of some elaborate air-conditioning con job and wrote numerous letters in my head to the Better Business Bureau about our shady heating and cooling company. Perry never really responded to my rants about how our bedroom felt like the surface of the sun. But that might have been because he was too wrapped up in three down comforters to hear me.
We spent the next few weeks unpacking all our things, hanging pictures, and getting splinters from our makeshift kitchen countertops. But all that really mattered to me was that I could sit in the pink rocker in the nursery at nighttime and pray for our new baby girl, who was about to make her big debut. God had given me a verse for her a few months earlier, and I’d sit in the silence of that freshly painted nursery and whisper the words like a prayer:
I will pour water on the thirsty land,
and streams on the dry ground;
I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring,
and my blessing on your descendants.
They will spring up like grass in a meadow,
like poplar trees by flowing streams.
Some will say, “I belong to the LORD”;
others will call themselves by the name of Jacob;
still others will write on their hand, “The LORD’s.”
ISAIAH 44:3-5
Ultimately, as much as I hoped and prayed for a healthy, perfect baby, what I desired more than anything else was to raise a child who would know the joy of putting God first in her life and the wisdom as a parent to show her what that looks like. Perry had lost his dad in an accident when he was just nine years old, the same age I was when my parents divorced. I had a difficult relationship with my mother, and Perry couldn’t fill a bucket with what he knew about girls. Both of us felt like we were venturing into uncharted territory here, and we knew we couldn’t do this by ourselves. In fact, I think we knew at some level then, and we are continuing to learn more and more, that we’re doing it in spite of ourselves. We are two very imperfect souls who have been entrusted with a little piece of heaven, and we don’t take that lightly.
The last week of July finally rolled around, and we got the call from the countertop people that they were ready to finish our kitchen. Perry scheduled them for Friday, August 1, and decided it would be a great opportunity for him to take a last-minute trip down to the national seashore to fish and camp out for the night. Because he was apparently trying to kill me.
Who thinks it’s a good idea to leave your wife, who is currently nine months pregnant, to drive to a remote destination with no cell service to catch sharks? Other than someone who has a death wish. He agreed to wait to leave until after my doctor’s appointment that Thursday morning. Probably because I’d spent the previous twenty-four hours informing him that missing the birth of your first child is the kind of thing a woman never gets over. NEVER. Like on my deathbed I would hold his hand and whisper, “Remember how you weren’t there when our baby was born?”
But my doctor checked me out and said it didn’t look like I was going into labor anytime soon. And with that proclamation, Perry packed up his fishing rods and his common sense and headed toward the coast. Meanwhile, I stayed home to supervise the kitchen crew as they installed everything, and I made plans with my mother-in-law for her to come over early Saturday morning to help me unpack boxes and organize the new kitchen.
Because God loves Perry, he came home safe and sound from his shark expedition late Friday afternoon. We had plans to attend a dinner party that night for our church, so I did the necessary acrobatics to get myself into the last of my maternity tops that still fit (and a pair of heels, which has no relevance to this story, but I was proud of myself for suffering for the sake of fashion and felt that you should know) and waddled out for our big night on the town. Or a big night eating chicken spaghetti and talking about future plans for our church. Same difference. Unless you are in your teens and envisioning how glamorous life will be someday.
We had a nice night and even had some friends come back to our house to get the official tour of the remodel. Finally, around midnight, Perry and I crawled into bed, and I commenced my nightly ritual of complaining about all the ways we’d been suckered into buying a subpar air-conditioning unit while Perry put on his stocking cap and wool socks.
Around 3:00 a.m. I woke up like someone had slapped me. I sat straight up and immediately knew something wasn’t right. But then the feeling went away, and I lay down to go back to sleep. Twenty minutes later, just as I’d drifted off, I woke up again. And I knew. I knew. Clearly, I’d eaten some bad chicken spaghetti. There was no other explanation for the way my stomach was cramping. Certainly not the fact that I was nine and a half months pregnant and possibly in labor.
Bless my heart.
I continued to lie there in denial, fuming about the unsanitary nature of poultry in general and casseroles in particular, as I experienced wave after wave of food poisoning. Exactly twenty minutes apart. And then fifteen minutes apart. And then ten minutes apart.
Around 6:00 a.m. I finally began to come out of my haze of denial, shook Perry lightly, and said, “Hey. I think I might be in labor.”
He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Do I have time to take a shower?” he asked, scratching his head.
Really? Do you have time to take a shower? How am I supposed to know that? Until about thirty minutes ago, I thought I had food poisoning. I am an idiot.
I
told him he probably had time to take a shower because that was obviously the most pressing matter at hand. In the meantime, I called my parents, Gulley, and my sister to let them know I may or may not be, but probably was, in labor, but I could also be in the throes of a case of salmonella that hit with waves of astonishing regularity.
Then I called my mother-in-law, who was supposed to arrive in about an hour to help me with the kitchen. She asked, “So should I not come over?”
And I responded with an emphatic, “No, you need to come over right now and help me get this kitchen unpacked!”
Because in what can only be described as “labor logic,” I felt like I could survive childbirth but I couldn’t handle bringing my baby home to a house without an organized silverware drawer and Tupperware cabinet.
This was not the ghetto.
This was our home. And it was about to have a real, live baby in it.
Chapter 6
I Wanted My Epidural in the First Trimester
I think it’s important for you to know that there was a time in my life when I seriously considered adopting any potential children I might have. Not out of any sense of compassionate obligation, but because I thought the best method of childbirth might be to completely skip the whole birth part of that equation and go straight to the precious little bundle wrapped up like a burrito.
There are women who want to experience natural childbirth, but those are probably the same women who run marathons. I am not one of those women. I believe in the miracles of modern medicine, and that includes epidurals. Which is why one of the first questions I asked my doctor upon finding out I was pregnant was “How soon can I get the meds?” When he encouraged me to write an official birth plan, mine was a single piece of paper with “EPIDURAL!!!!!” scrawled in large letters with a Sharpie pen.
Sparkly Green Earrings Page 3