The husband and I agreed we didn’t want to drag Eddie through endless procedures and treatments. So we decided that we’d just try to make the rest of his life comfortable, however long that might be. And besides, I figured, the best-case scenario would be if his heart just continued to grow, up to the point that he simply dropped dead of a heart attack, preferably with his face in one of my shoes.
Then that cross-country move from Los Angeles to Chicago in the dead of winter presented itself, and we took it. We worried the change might kill our old, hacky, incontinent dog. Not only did it not kill him, but damn it all if that old bugger didn’t catch himself a second wind.
The first time we took a walk to the shore of Lake Michigan, we watched with gaping mouths and puffs of steam pouring out of them as this suddenly frisky senior-citizen dog began goofily frolicking in the deep snow with our equally goofy year-old baby.
It seemed surprising yet totally inevitable that our dog would be so inspired by this late-life change. He even picked up his humping habits with renewed vigor, focusing his romantic interests on a St. Bernard puppy who lived in the apartment next door.
Then, four months after moving to Chicago, we left Eddie with a friend while we buzzed out of town for a quick weekend with the in-laws. On the second day the dog sitter called. She was in hysterics.
“Slow down, I can’t hear you . . .”
“EDDIE’S DEAD! HE’S DEAD!”
Slipping into my control-freak default position, I assumed she must be wrong. “Hang on. Are you sure he’s dead?”
She was sure, she sobbed. She’d gone out to the store and had come home to find Eddie on the floor in the living room, dead, with his head not in my shoes but in a box of Triscuits.
The little bastard, he died like he lived. On his own terms, and with snacks.
He was fourteen years old.
Though there wasn’t any real urgency as (a) Eddie was waiting for us in the vet’s freezer, and (b) he wasn’t going to get any more dead than he already was, we cut our trip short and returned home immediately. It just seemed wrong to leave him stuck on ice next to some unworthy, shitty cat.
At the vet’s office a technician pulled Eddie out of the freezer and dropped him onto the counter, then gave us his condolences and shut the door behind him. Eddie looked surprisingly good for a dead dog, just a pink petrified tongue sticking out the side of his mouth giving any indication as to his permanent state of deadness. We petted and hugged our beautiful dead doggie-pop, with our snotty tears setting onto his ice-cold fur, and the knowledge that if he were alive, he’d probably be horrified by our sad, sentimental display.
I was devastated by his death. I cried and cried, and then I changed a diaper and played peek-a-boo and cut the crusts off a peanut butter sandwich, and then I cried some more. My plans to be wracked by grief and sit shivah for a week were not to be. Sure, there was time for me to lay my head and sob into Eddie’s still Cheeto-smelling dog bed, but it turns out that sixteen-month-old babies have some fairly pressing needs.
Which illuminated something: now that I actually had a child, I could see quite clearly that having a dog was nothing like having a baby. Sure, they were roughly the same size, and both had figured out how to leave their fecal cleanup to the tall humans with opposable thumbs. But that’s pretty much where the comparison ended. If anything, Eddie was more like a brother to me, maybe even a first husband (minus the consummation, of course). Ours was a relationship of choice, not dependence. Eddie didn’t “need” me, and there’s no question that if we were to have been separated, within days he’d have been living with some Russian heiress, sitting on a pillow made of spun alpaca, eating veal treats, and having his nethers scratched from morning till night by the hired help. And in retrospect, if Eddie knew that I had ever called him my “baby,” he’d probably have bitten off my left tit, just to prove a point.
So yes, maybe it’s true that my relationship with my dog did change when I had a baby. But then again, so did my relationship with my husband, my parents, my friends, my work, my nipples, my body, and pretty much everything else in my life.
Now we have Dogboy, with his normal-size heart and his habit of licking our feet like the pandering perv that Eddie would have made him out to be. Though he may be no Eddie (it’s not his fault, but he’s not even close), Dogboy has mended the baseball-size hole that was left in the kid’s heart. Sometimes I catch her playing with him in her bedroom, dressing him up in her doll’s clothes, and calling him “baby brother”—which sometimes I find creepy, and other times spot-on.
*Because isn’t that how all normal people react to a natural disaster?
twenty
ONE IS ENOUGH
I am lying on my back, feet in stirrups. Dr. V. Jay snaps on a plastic glove and gives me the old “scootch toward me.” This is not how I planned on spending my Tuesday morning.
I have lived by the motto “Jump and the net will appear,” and not just because I have a thing for firemen. That simple philosophy has inspired me to lead a life of frequent and deliberate change. Hairstyles, apartments, boyfriends, careers . . . I cycled through them all with the ease of an iPod shuffle.
Right now you’re probably thinking, “Wow, what a flake.” And you’d be right, only I prefer the term change junkie. It’s more accurate, and besides, I kind of like the badass connotation.
But that was the old (young) me. Now I’m the new (old) me. I’m a mature (well, this point is debatable) woman; I’m a wife, with a kid, and a husband who wants another (kid, not wife). Unfortunately for him—and for three sets of eager, salivating grandparents—the concept of change now totally freaks me the freak out.
Screw that “Jump and the net will appear” crap. There could be three half-naked, six-pack-having firemen standing outside my window yelling, “Jump, you’re ovulating!” and I still wouldn’t budge. When it comes to this second-kid decision, I don’t even have the guts to pry my body off the floor.
Let me explain: I killed at pregnancy. I was a genius at delivery. And despite my fears that I would give birth to an ugly moron, the daughter turned out to be one of the good ones (I have seen some of the bad ones, and when they go bad, it’s a Thomas the Train Wreck). We’re a very small, very manageable, very happy family of three. A trio. A triptych. A triangle. The strongest shape in the known universe. So why, for the love of carbs, would we push our luck? I’d always been a good gambler, and even though my experience was limited to the nickel slots in Reno, I knew when to hold ’em, when to fold ’em, when to walk away, and when to run screaming from the prospect of another kid.
But then came the vacillating. I don’t know how it started, but some days I’d find my brain playing Good Cop/Crazy Cop with itself. One minute I was scheduling a vasectomy for my husband based on the fact that two out of three finalists on last season’s American Idol were only children; the next minute I was gazing longingly at my daughter’s baby pictures and telling my husband to “HURRY UP AND STICK IT IN BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND!” Most times, though, I could fight the impulse.
And then, it happened.
Oprah happened.
It was a Sunday afternoon. The husband was out, the kid was napping, I was shaving lint balls off the couch. I turned on the TV and began watching an episode of Oprah, and it was a doozy. I won’t go into much detail because if I do I may start crying, and until I can afford a waterproof computer I’d rather not run the risk of electrocution.
I’ll just say that the topic was siblings and the lengths to which they will go to protect each other. Never mind that I grew up with two brothers whose idea of brotherly love was to fart on my head simultaneously; the episode killed me. It was as though Oprah herself had reached through the TV screen, torn my heart from my chest, had her personal chef sauté it, and then ate it with a full-bodied Bordeaux. I bawled my eyes out, heaving, sobbing, and snotting all over the place (luckily, my laptop was well out of range). When my daughter awoke from her nap, in order to quell the liquids po
uring from my face I had to pinch my upper-arm flab and imagine the least pleasant thing I could think of (i.e., that time I accidentally caught a glimpse of my dad bending over in his bathrobe. PS: It worked).
My husband and I “did it” that night, the Night of the Oprah Effect. Afterward, I pulled my legs up to my chest, stuck a pillow under my rear, and tried to will the smartest of the sperm (out of the way, dum-dums!) to penetrate my lonely egg hanging out in her fallopian palace.
I awoke the next morning in a spiral of regret. “Another kid? Now? What about my career?! My time?! My life?! My boobs?! What the farg was I thinking?!”
But then I reminded myself of the odds; it had taken us well over a year to conceive the first time, so I figured chances were slim that this one would stick.
A few days later I felt an odd twinge-y/cramp-y/ PING! in my lower abdomen.
Oh no.
A wave of remorse washed over me as I remembered all the times I’d mocked those hippie chicks who claimed they could “feel” the moment of conception.
In an instant I was hit with the reality of what we had done. It was sharper and more startling than stepping on a Barbie shoe in the middle of the night. How could I have allowed Oprah to ruin everything? We’d clearly used up all our good genes on the first kid; Number Two would undoubtedly be a disaster. But not an ugly moron, no. This one would be bad. “Bad Seed” bad. Mean, nasty, wicked bad. We were nine months away and counting from Stephen King’s next literary inspiration.
And then, as if to compound the emotional torture, a strange set of symptoms appeared. First up: a hot, red rash that started on my arms and then migrated across my chest and stomach. I checked in with my old doctor friend (www.webmd.com) and learned that many women experience hormonally induced hives in the beginning stages of pregnancy.
Terrific. An angry red rash: not just a pregnancy symptom, but further proof of the red-hot mistake we were making.
Then came the vertigo. If you’ve never felt it, vertigo is like the bed spins you felt the first time you got drunk, but without that margarita aftertaste. I’d lay awake at night clutching the bedsheets, feeling like Jimmy Stewart falling off a three-story building in Rear Window, only with much better special effects.
Great. So not only were we about to destroy our perfectly manageable little family setup, but I was going to spend the next nine months stumbling around in a dizzy, rashy, gassy body. (I may have neglected to mention the gassy part, as I’m not entirely certain that was a pregnancy symptom.)
The husband suggested I pick up a home pregnancy test, but it was still too early for that. Anyway, I figured, why waste the thirteen dollars? We’d need every penny since we’d soon be moving into the poorhouse. And even if we were able to keep the house, that money might come in handy when Number Two’s parole officer required a bribe.
A few nights later, the most graphic proof: bright-pink spotting. I didn’t even need to surf the web for this one, it had happened during my first pregnancy. This was the brightest, pinkest nail in the coffin. It was time to rewrite our future. No longer would we be the mobile, relaxed trio. Now we would be the harried, overstressed, financially unstable family of four. No more family vacations at Disney World; now we would spend holidays sorting trash at the city dump.
Still, I had to admit that even if Number Two was a disaster, it would be nice for our daughter to have someone else—a friend, a compatriot, someone to victimize, and a partner to lean on when her parents become decrepit and needy (more than we already are, anyway). And sure, her Ivy League education fund probably wouldn’t be enough to cover both kids, but it would divide nicely into community college tuition for two, with enough left over for family therapy.
As I felt the boulders of long-held notions being rearranged in my mind, another unfamiliar sensation took over: a surge, as the light spotting turned into heavy spotting, and the pink turned a deep, dark red.
This was no light spotting. This was serious bleeding. Heavy, worrisome, almost like . . .
FWAP! Dr. V. Jay snaps off his plastic gloves and tosses them into a trash can.
“It’s your period. A heavy one, yes, but just a period.”
So what about the other symptoms? The rash? The vertigo? The uncontrollable gas?
My doctor shrugs. “I don’t have an answer for you. But thank you for waiting until after the exam to tell me about the gas.”
I wasn’t pregnant. Not even a little. Huh.
Now you’re probably thinking, “Wow, she’s flaky AND has hysterical pregnancy tendencies.” And again, you’d be right. But the most interesting takeaway from this story isn’t the fact that I’m able to talk myself into thinking I’m pregnant (I’ve always been pretty persuasive); it’s how relieved I don’t feel at finding out that I’m not. And that “fear of change”? It’s gone. Seems it’s been replaced, knocked out of position by a faint sense of sadness for the little delinquent that never was, and never will be.
Which isn’t to say there can’t be another. Dr. V says it’s true, given my age and the dustiness of my ovaries, my odds of conceiving are low and, yes, getting lower with every passing day. But, he says, if I want another, there’s no reason we shouldn’t keep trying.
And now I do, and so we will; we’ll pull the goalie, pray for the net, and let the chips (and sperm) fall (and swim) where they may.
twenty-one
PRIVATE TIME
The important thing to know is that we are not sex addicts.
We are not cavalier about where or when we engage in sexual congress.
We have a door on our bedroom, and we do, on occasion, close it. Because—I don’t want to speak out of turn here, but—in the immortal words of Sylvester Stallone in Rocky 5 (or Rocky 6 or Rocky 117, I can’t recall), after ten years of marriage, we “still have a little something left in the basement,” if you know what I mean.*
And while I won’t get into raw specifics about what was going on behind our slightly ajar door on this particular Friday night, let me try to set the stage.
It was around nine o’clock. I was cuddling with the kid, having just read her a bedtime story. It’s a lovely ritual that brings the day to a sweet close in a warm, cozy fashion, so warm and cozy, in fact, that nine times out of ten I pass out in her bed, only to wake up sometime around one in the morning with the hardback version of Goodnight Moon splayed across my face and a Barbie-shaped kink in my shoulder. Most nights I stumble out of her room like some sorority girl doing the walk of shame out of a neighboring frat house. Other nights the husband will rouse me and send me to our bed at a decent hour, sparing me permanent damage to my face and back.
On this particular night I awoke to him giving me a gentle shake/shove. When I staggered dead-eyed into the bedroom, he gave me a come-hither glance and whispered sweet nothings to me: “WANNA DO SOME (euphemism for intercourse)-ING?”
It was no wonder he’d gotten turned on—I was wearing my third-most-flattering yoga pants and a T-shirt/sports-bra combo that squishes my breasts together into one long, ready-for-anything uniboob.
I shook the cobwebs from my head like a Looney Tunes cartoon character, and then responded to his offer by purring something seductive like, “Y’ARIGHT, LET’S GO.”
We commenced our foreplay routine. On that night we decided to go with #4A, though we did shake it up with a few added elements—and again, I won’t go into too much detail so as not to embarrass you, dear reader.* But I will say that I did reach into my bedside table in which we have a small selection of, let’s just call them “implements,” that were given to me as jokey shower gifts back when we got married. While the rubber on the majority of them has turned to sticky dust, and while the thing that works on AAA batteries is now corroded (though there was that time it turned itself on spontaneously in the middle of the day), there is one device that does still work, and therefore is put into service on occasion, and yes, this was one of those occasions that we plugged it in and let it work its magic.
Fast-
forward, maybe twelve minutes or so—again, I won’t go into much detail here, though I will say that my thigh muscles were being worked to capacity and that I was making good use of my balancing skills, while the husband was exercising his neck muscles and his ability to hyperextend his elbows. Also, three of our most supportive pillows were in use.
Imagine what you will (and feel free to reference the author’s photo on the back cover, though, full disclosure, my hair was considerably less coiffed by this point), just know that things were progressing and going fairly well—I’m guessing somewhere around a “B+” if we were being graded—and we were both poised to “complete our tasks,” you might say, when I happened to turn my head and see the child standing at the bedroom door, rubbing her sleepy eyes.
“MOMMA?”
The husband and I froze for a split second, before uncoupling with the force of a gasoline explosion. One moment we were on the bed, and the next we were separated by the approximate length of a football field. The husband somersaulted into a pile of laundry only to emerge fully clothed, wrapped in a pillowcase, my yoga pants, and a “Got Milk?” baseball cap, while I stood there, nude (except for socks; it was November in Chicago—don’t judge), babbling incoherently (“Hi hah huh, why are you, do you need pee, or glass water, you need, Mommy’s cold, I’m just going to put this dish towel around my legs”), and wondering if we had just scarred our child for life.*
Without warning, the kid emitted a gleeful shriek, ran to the bed, climbed up onto it, and began jumping.
“BOUNCE TIME!” she squealed. “BOUNCE TIME!”
Clearly, she was very not disturbed by what she had seen—if anything, she was in a state of pure delight, having gleaned that we were in the middle of some hilariously bouncy party game—and she wanted in on the fun too.
How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane Page 14