(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  There’s a tendency, when a possibility like this gets raised, for the couple to feel that they’ve brought on (and secretly deserve) the worst-case scenario. Erin and I had gotten pregnant too easily! We didn’t deserve such happiness! There had to be a catch! This brand of logic is total shite. But it’s also oddly comforting. It grants you a measure of control over fate, which otherwise feels sadistically random.

  THERE IS NO need to prolong the drama. Erin had the amnio. The procedure was painful, but it also revealed—after a few tense days—that Peanut was healthy. And that Peanut was…a Peanutta. This was our reward for the big scare. From the earliest days of the pregnancy, we had been rooting for a girl. Both of us had been terrorized by older brothers. So: Great relief. Great rejoicing. Which was important, because, as it turned out, my landlord was just about to give me the heave-ho, meaning we had to find a new place to live.

  This is another consequence of having been such late bloomers: Everything happens all at once. In three months we: found a home, closed on a home, moved me across town, moved Erin across the country, visited fourteen states, and set perfectly ridiculous deadlines for our books. (I also quit my teaching job, but you already knew that.)

  We live now amid a hundred boxes, stunned and sweaty with the onset of August. Erin is well into her final trimester. She has reached the cumbersome phase. Each morning, a bit mournfully, she weighs herself. She is fast approaching what we have come to think of as the “Jack Sprat Parallax,” the point at which she weighs more than I do. We are deep into the particulars of the final trimester: weekly sessions with the ob-gyn, prenatal yoga, birthing classes. We have had several awkward discussions about perineal massage, which, if you didn’t know, is intended to stretch the vaginal tissues so they won’t tear during the child’s expulsion.

  Did I mention that these discussions were awkward?

  Erin is also being bombarded with birth stories. The four-day labor, the magnesium-drip delirium labor, the emergency breech labor—she has heard them all. She is a good listener, polite to a fault. My sister-in-law recently related the story of her first birth, which involved a day-long home labor, no drugs, and hanging from a tree. Erin has no interest in such heroics. She has already announced her intention to call for Saint Epidural should the need arise.

  Another friend showed us her birth video, which included a rather lengthy illustrated disquisition on the configuration and operation of the (bloody) placenta. And yet another friend has brought it to our attention that Erin will likely poop during the birthing process. I have promised to poop in solidarity.

  DID I FORGET to mention the baby shower?

  I did.

  Here’s why: because the baby shower strikes me as one of those events invented and largely nurtured by our fake friends on Madison Avenue. It is intended to supply the anxious parents with everything they need to make sure their baby doesn’t die of cold or hunger or diaper rash or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or boredom. But the general result of such gatherings is that the couple winds up with thirty-seven designer outfits from, yes, Baby Gap.

  Now, look: I am just as susceptible as the next person to the sight of a little goo-face tricked out in designer togs. But I also happen to view food, shelter, and love as the only real requirements for the successful nurturance of an infant. The rest is just stuff. Some of this stuff is a matter of convenience: baby monitors, aerodynamic strollers, car seats. Most of it—the fancy-schmancy teething elements, the miniature Doc Martens—is retail masturbation. As a child of the gilded age, Peanut is going to get pelted with thousands of buy messages before she can even hold a penny. There’s no reason to accelerate that process.

  Thankfully, Erin and I agree on this point. We both believe that Americans would be a lot happier if they bought less and felt more, and we want to make sure we pass these values down to our daughter. At the same time, people want to buy us stuff. So we decided to throw an informal party that we billed as an effort to establish the Peanut Almond Library. Guests were instructed to bring a book, preferably used. Our final haul included forty-plus volumes, along with three adorable outfits, which certain guests insisted on buying for the child (in defiance of our direct orders) and which I plan to burn in a public Death to Capitalism rally when Peanut is old enough to appreciate the gesture.

  AS I MAY have hinted above, we are both quietly terrified of the actual birth process. Erin worries about the troublesome physics of the thing. She worries that she will never get her old body back. She worries about handling such a small, fragile creature. My central concern, frankly, is that I will lose the undivided adoration of my wife.

  And I will. It can’t be avoided.

  Sometimes, I walk into our bedroom and find Erin caressing her belly with a cupped palm. There is a look on her face of such contentment that I know I am intruding. Erin has begun the long process of falling in love with our daughter. I will go through a similar process, but let’s be honest: There is nothing on earth to equal Mother Love. If there were, we would have ceased doing business as a species long ago.

  I can feel myself getting displaced. And I can feel myself panicking. A few days ago, I picked a fight with Erin over her decision to give her cat some wet food as a treat. Hadn’t we agreed to feed the cat only dry food? Was it really fair to our daughter to lavish such treats on an ungrateful animal? I was disgustingly manipulative and almost comically furious. It drove me crazy to imagine Erin spending any of her attention on the cat. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out the math: I was redirecting my forbidden resentment of my daughter onto the animal. What can I tell you? I am resentful. And frightened. I’m frightened that I’m going to slip to number two in her book.

  All fathers suffer this fear. And I’ve seen more than one marriage brought to ruin by it. My own parents nearly came apart under the pressure of their children. So this is what we’ve been dealing with as we wait for Peanut to make her debut. Can I adjust to a lesser role? Will Erin be able to embrace motherhood without feeling too much anxiety? Will we resist the temptation to bicker over who is working harder? Will our hearts expand as required?

  Stay calm, stay happy, and the kid will be golden.

  That’s the mantra Erin and I keep chanting. We’ve got to bid adieu to our lives as nervous singles, to the flashy armor of our narcissism, to the notion that we will ever be able to control the course of our lives again. In other words, we’re fucked. To feel such unprecedented love runs against the monstrous self-regard of the era. We can hardly wait.

  10 WAYS I KILLED MY DAUGHTER WITHIN HER FIRST 72 HOURS OF LIFE

  A HEARTWARMING SAGA OF LOVE, FATHERHOOD, AND SERIAL INFANTICIDE

  Having your first baby is a joyous and unforgettable adventure, but one that can be compromised if you allow baby to die in your care. Unfortunately, the precipitous appearance of Baby tends to magnify the impression—at least among the inexperienced and unmedicated—that one has, rather by accident, killed him or her. This makes ensuing discussions with relatives awkward.

  MOTHER-IN-LAW:

  How is my sweet little lovey-dovey dumpling?

  YOU:

  Dead.

  Good news!

  Chances are, you have not killed Baby. Chances are, Baby is alive and well and merely plotting new ways to appear dead. I offer this reassurance from the perspective of a proud new papa who killed his daughter (Josephine Colette aka Peanut Almond aka Milkface McGee aka The Deceased) repeatedly in her first three days of life.

  Death #1: Massive Exsanguination (Blood Loss)

  Age of Deceased: 47 seconds

  In an effort to prove my commitment to fatherhood, I insist on catching Baby. I do not catch Baby. No, Baby goes whistling right through my mitts in a fashion familiar to any Red Sox fan who has watched Bill Buckner attempt to play first base. This should be the initial cause of death (blunt trauma), but the ob-gyn, perhaps sensing my physical ineptitude, provides backup on the play.

  Josephine Colette Almond, upon greeting the wo
rld, issues a single, stunned cry, then falls silent. She appears confused beyond terror.1 The nurses swoop in to sponge the blood and mucus from her body, and she clasps her hands beneath her chin, like a tiny penitent. Her irises—the dull gray of solder—fix on mine for a moment, and my chest stings with the adoration.

  The doctor reaches down to clamp the umbilical cord, which is dangling from her belly like a giant bluish strand of fusilli. “Do you want to make her belly button, Dad?” Before I can answer, she hands me a pair of scissors and gestures to a spot on the cord beyond the clamp. “Just cut here.”

  This should not be difficult. I know how to operate scissors. I am, if you will, scissor literate. The doctor nods, and my thumb and forefinger come together and the blade bites against the spongy cord. Snip. My daughter is officially off the amniotic dole, severed from my wife, who is lying back against the pillows, breathing deeply, her cheeks still marbled with exertion.

  The problem is the blood. Yes, there’s a trace of blood (which there shouldn’t be, given the clamp), and I can see now that I’ve cut too far down. In effect, I’ve stabbed my newborn in the gut. I close my eyes and watch red seep down her legs and stain the bedsheets. The small ration of blood inside Baby is gushing out now, and my daughter is draining to a chalky white.

  “What have I done?” I whisper.

  “You did a very good job, Mr. Almond,” the doctor says calmly. “You may let go of the scissors now.”

  Death #2: Broken Vertebrae

  Age of Deceased: 4 hours

  In the maternity ward, the nurses tell us not to worry. They tell us to get some rest. We are both totally in awe of the nurses. If the nurses told us to bathe the baby in lye, our only question would be, Should we heat the lye? We hit the Help button every seventeen minutes.2

  Erin limps to the bathroom, and, because I can think of no good reason to call for the on-duty nurse, I am for the first time alone with Baby, whom I was supposed to swaddle into a tight little burrito, though she looks more like a defective veggie wrap. As I set her down to sleep, she throws her arms up in the air and waves them like she just don’t care. Later on, it will be explained to me that this is normal, something called the Moro Reflex. For now, I am briefly convinced baby has a future in hip-hop.

  This maneuver, however, manages to tip her from her side onto her stomach, which we have been warned by countless paranoia-inducing baby books is the Position of Death. I reach down to flip her over—carefully, because (as I also know from the baby books) Baby doesn’t have neck muscles yet. The thing connecting her torso to her head is just a band of fat with some tubes in the middle.

  Baby reacts to this jostling by again waving her arms in the air like she just don’t care and kicking the plastic rim of the bassinet. Gravity—that first cruel joke—sends her tumbling off my hands and onto her shoulder. Her muscleless neck twists at a grisly angle. “Baby,” I whisper. “Baby!” I give baby a light shove. But Baby does not move.

  “Baby,” I plead. “Please don’t be dead.” Baby, curled like a brine shrimp, remains dead.

  I poke her in the tummy, probably harder than is appropriate.

  Baby spits up on my hand.

  Death #3: Cancer

  Age of Deceased: 9 hours

  The nurses instruct us to change Baby’s diaper every two hours. Erin has done the first three, so I’m up. I remove her diaper and marvel at her skinny little bowed legs and her abnormally long toes, which look disturbingly like fingers. Most of all, I make a determined effort to ignore my daughter’s gigantic red vulva. Her diaper is empty, but I decide to wipe anyway. A practice wipe. I hoist her up by the ankles and proceed gently unto the breach.

  Baby gets a curious look on her face. Her cheeks flush. Her eyes squinch up, as if she is bench-pressing another, much larger, baby. And then something very scary is happening: A thick, goopy substance is extruding from her tiny backside. My daughter is suddenly a tube of oil-based paint and she is being squeezed by the hand of some callous god. What comes out is a shimmery puce.

  It is immediately evident what’s happening: My daughter is shitting out a tumor. Yes, my daughter has cancer, cancer of the stomach and the intestines and the heart; her insides are not red and healthy, they are ravaged and feculent. And puce. This too is my fault. I have managed to transmit my malignant humours to the poor child, and now she is pooping out her poisoned life force.

  Erin, risen from the bed, stands at my shoulder. For a moment, we watch baby shit tumor together. “Hey,” she says. “It’s meconium!”

  Yes, I am seeing Baby’s first bowel movement, a superconcentrated form of stool that includes mucus, bile, and (somehow—I refused to investigate the details) hair.

  Death #4: Respiratory Failure

  Age of Deceased: 19 hours

  Baby has by now taken on a distinctly pugilistic aspect. Her face is red and puffed around the brows. She insists on holding her fists on either side of her chin and occasionally shoots out a left jab.

  This is okay with me. I remind myself: Baby is alive. I have not yet killed Baby. Indeed, it has begun to dawn on me that Baby is not quite so fragile as she would have me believe. I have watched the nurses handle her, the brisk tossing of her body this way and that, and noticed that she remains alive.

  Most of the time, Baby sleeps, and when she awakens she hits the local titty bar, which she attacks with such vigor that Erin yelps. I am the designated burper. I set Baby on my lap and pat her back. She tends to droop over and fall asleep without burping, then she throws up on herself. Baby is, in this sense, a bad drunk.

  Chief Nurse Kelly (CNK) deems my burping technique insufficient to the gastric needs of Baby. “Put her ovah your shouldah and get her right heah,” she explains, in cheerful Bostonese. She demonstrates. Baby looks as if she were operating a tiny jackhammer. She burps almost immediately. CNK hands Baby to me and leaves.

  I do exactly what CNK did, but Baby senses she is being handled by an incompetent. Her fingers wiggle nervously. Then Baby begins making odd noises, little suspirating yelps. Her diaphragm heaves. In my eagerness to mimic CNK, I have crushed Baby’s trachea. I hold Baby in my lap and watch her tiny death throes.

  “How cute!” Erin cries from the bed. “She’s got the hiccups!”

  Death #5: Aneurysm

  Age of Deceased: 27 hours

  Baby has somehow acquired a stuffy nose. Her breathing calls to mind Peter Lorre. This is a problem, as she must also feed, and Baby is not yet coordinating the two very well. The nurses have left us with a bulb syringe, which I remember their inserting in Baby’s nostrils just after birth to clear the mucus. I attempt the same thing. Because of a basic misunderstanding of physics,3 and specifically the concept of suction, I fail to deflate the bulb before insertion. Instead, I blow air up Baby’s nose.

  The air travels up into the soft cup of her skull and pops the fragile balloon around her brainpan, which I am certain exists despite having no actual neurological expertise. The popping of this fragile “brain balloon” ruptures the frontal lobes, the synaptic nerve bundles, and every single micro-artery in Baby’s head.

  Death #6: Intestinal Detonation

  Age of Deceased: 39 hours

  Baby has what Micki, the lactation expert, calls an “improper latch.” Mickey is a terrifyingly cheerful blond woman who has visited our room no fewer than seven times. Every time Baby needs to feed—which she signals by wailing in the manner of a deranged castrato—Micki bursts into our room and slams Baby’s mouth against Erin’s boob. She does this slamming at a number of angles, all the while saying encouraging things such as “She’s almost got it now! Good girl! Oh, wait, is that blood? Nothing to worry about!”

  I stand by the foot of the bed with my Supportive Dad smile while Erin and Baby weep inconsolably.

  “Good news for Dad!” Micki says. “Dad gets to do some finger feeding!”

  Contrary to my initial understanding, this does not mean that I will be serving Baby hors d’oeuvres. It means she wi
ll be fed through a tiny tube taped to my finger and attached to a syringe full of formula.

  “What about, you know, a bottle?” I say.

  “Oh, no,” Micki says. “That would cause nipple confusion!”

  I want to tell Micki that the child is likely to inherit nipple confusion from me anyway, but the baby has gone Pavarotti on our asses now. My finger is quickly taped and syringed and Baby affixed thereto. Micki’s beeper beeps and she rushes off. Erin, bone-tired, bloodied, falls into a deep sleep. Once again I am alone with Baby, who is sucking formula from my finger. Every few sucks she pauses to breathe and lets out a pleased sigh. The first syringe is gone in half a minute. Baby devours a second syringe, then a third. Midway through the fourth syringe, Baby’s eyes droop shut. Formula rills down her chin. I am bursting with pride. I have fed Baby! Baby sleeps.

  When I wake three hours later, Erin is hissing at me. “What did you do to her? She’s all bloated! She’s not breathing right!”

  I stumble over to the bassinet.

  Baby’s tiny belly does appear distended. Her face is the shade of a winter plum. A memory comes to me, unbidden, of a film my parents forced me to watch when I was young. It was about Swedish immigrants, all of whom were—as is the habit of Swedish immigrants in depressing films—starving to death. Then this one little girl finds a giant cache of cereal and eats so much her stomach bloats up and eventually explodes.

  “How much did you feed her?” Erin demands.

  “A couple of syringes.” I set my hand on her hand, in the cautious manner of a father who has yet again killed his infant. “She was hungry.”

  “Didn’t you hear Micki? Her stomach is the size of a walnut!”

  “It could be the hiccups,” I say, and hit the Help button.

  “She doesn’t have fucking hiccups,” Erin says.

  Nurse Tina appears. “What’s the problem?”

  Baby closes her eyes and releases a bowel movement of volcanic magnitude, a shuddering liquid outburst of the sort that will soon come to be known in our household as the Hot Mustard Explosion.