We spent the entire morning distracting her from the fact that she was hungry, and we did this by giving her things that she could shove into her mouth: measuring cups, spoons, sharp knives, and matches. HAHA! Just kidding about the matches. It’s amazing what the art of distraction can do to a grumpy infant. If her mood had been traced by a monitor that morning it would have looked like a series of mountains and valleys, the valleys being the two seconds that she realized OH MY GOD I’M HUNGRY, and the mountains being the next sixty seconds of Jon making a silly face or me finding an object in the house that she hadn’t ever seen and shoving it in her hands. By the time we had to leave for the hospital we were at a point where we were about to take apart the computers to show her what a motherboard looks like. THERE JUST WEREN’T ANY MORE OPTIONS.
We’d been to this particular hospital before and were prepared for the harrowing experience it is to see children in various states of pain and disease. Still, nothing can really protect your heart from witnessing children in wheelchairs or children with tubes in their ears and noses, and I tried to concentrate on the fact that this MRI was a preventative measure, not something she had to undergo because of a diagnosed disease. As I was walked through the halls I had never been more thankful for my health, for my husband’s health, and for the screaming, whiny, grumpy health of my cranky Leta Elise.
After we checked in and Leta had her vitals taken we were told that we would have to keep her awake for another forty-five minutes before they could give her the sedative, something called Nembutal that would be delivered orally and not intravenously THANK THE LORD GOD OF EVERY RELIGION ON EARTH. However, it was already over an hour past Leta’s nap time, and we were going to have to keep her awake for another forty-five minutes? Did they not have any idea who they were dealing with? Had they not heard of Her Screamness Who Screams a Lot Every Day With the Screaming? I started to panic a little bit, and Jon, sensing my discomfort and afraid I might make a scene, haunted by the echoes of my unpredictable outbursts, whisked Leta away to be with the Avon World Sales Leader in the waiting room. When he came back to me he assured me that everything was okay, and COME ON! If anyone can keep that baby awake it’s That Woman With All The Jewelry.
Of course, the Avon World Sales Leader did not disappoint, and while keeping Leta awake without any screaming she also made a 40 percent sales increase for the Western Region of Avon she was that good. Plus, she had on a festive, patriotic scarf. I would have stayed awake for her, too.
When it came time to sedate Leta, I held her down on the table while a nurse shot a hefty portion of Nembutal into Leta’s gagging, very cute mouth. Leta didn’t cry, she just made that loud Hamilton gagging sound, like the sound of a sick hippopotamus wailing in the mud. The nurse told me that I could hold her as the sedative took effect, and so I tried to cuddle Leta to my shoulder as she went under. What happened next will go down as one of the funniest eight-minute periods of my life. My baby was drunk. Not just drunk but D.R.U.N.K. She was as drunk as a sixteen-year-old on prom night who has had a Long Island Iced Tea on an empty stomach and is in total denial about how drunk she is.
For eight minutes my child tried to deny her state of drunkenness, and she giggled and laughed and blew raspberries and bobbed her head about four hundred times. If she had been able to talk she would have said, “I pomnise nat I am dot nrunk. No, I neam it! I’m dot nrunk!” And she fought it and fought it. I’ve never seen her giggle so much, and I’m just glad that she was immobile and not staggering into walls or falling over on other people LIKE HER MOTHER DOES WHEN SHE IS DOT NRUNK.
After eight hilarious, head-bobbing minutes she finally passed out on my shoulder, as still as a pitch black night. She went very limp and became very heavy, and since I had been warned about this I wasn’t too upset when I felt her that way in my arms. We laid her down on the table and waited for the call to be taken into the MRI room. I think for both Jon and myself it was a treat to see Leta so asleep, her eyes closed and her body so still. Leta had always put herself to sleep, so we rarely got a glimpse of her when she was in this state, and when we did the room was dark and we were trying not to wake her up. She looked so helpless, so tiny and fragile. So little. In those few moments before the MRI we got to be with our sleeping little Leta, and HOLY SHIT! We made a baby! I had never felt so startled at that realization.
When the nurse strapped her onto the MRI table I almost lost my breakfast on the floor, and that was the moment when the mama bear inside of me roared and wanted to claw out the eyes of everyone in the room. She lay there strapped into this contraption, so lifeless and still, and I couldn’t do anything at that point. I had to stand by and watch that part happen and I’d never felt so helpless. The MRI room was straight out of a scene in Willy Wonka, a gigantic thing-a-magoogy sitting in the middle with all these Disney stickers slapped on its side. There were Disney stickers all over the walls there to distract children from the fact that they were being STRAPPED AGAINST THEIR WILL INTO A MACHINE THAT WOULD SUCK OUT THEIR BRAIN! RUN! RUN! I expected Gene Wilder to hop out of the thing-a-magoogy and say, “Is the grisly reaper mowing? Yes, the danger must be growing, ’cause the rowers keep on rowing, and they’re certainly not showing, any signs that they are slowing!”
OH MY GOD I ALMOST FREAKED OUT! AND IT WAS LOUD! MY GOD THE NOISE! GENE WILDER! IN PURPLE PANTS!
And then it was over.
Done.
No laser beams or death rays or Oompa-Loompas. The nurse had said that Leta would most likely be asleep for another hour and a half, but we already discovered that the nurses didn’t know who was lying there on that machine, and the moment Leta was pulled out of the tunnel she shot awake. And she was not happy, no, not at all, not one bit, and thus commenced Screams a Lot Every Day With the Screaming. I’m not good with hangovers, either, so I would have screamed, too.
She continued screaming in the recovery room, where she drank a bottle of apple juice and two bottles of milk. All of her vitals seemed normal, and after forty-five minutes of Leta’s cranky whimpering and screaming the doctor finally came in to give us the good news, that her brain was developing normally, that her skull looked fine, that nothing looked bad. He urged us to keep a close watch on the size of her head in the next few months and warned us that we might want to do another MRI when she turned a year old, just to be safe. There were no words to describe the feeling I had at that news. It felt like the calm as a thunderstorm parts and the sun shoots through the opening in the clouds, and the wind blows the scent of wet leaves and grass into the shadows across the pavement: the feeling of being spared.
The following day she was back to normal, eating Cheerios and stuffing them into her pants. I was suddenly finding Cheerios everywhere, even in the sheets on our bed. She was in a great mood all day and probably had no recollection of being strapped into the Wonkanator, or of being punch drunk and loopy. However, I will always remember those few hours, and the days of worry leading up to those few hours, and the years and years leading up to those days when I didn’t know what it was like to have my soul wrapped inside the palm of a baby.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
If Your Wife Is Pregnant, You Might Want to Skip This One
There is not much that I won’t talk about or discuss in great detail with perfect strangers, no topic of conversation off-limits. That is, until I went seven months without having sex.
Seven months after Leta’s birth a certain procedure reconvened in the Armstrong household. This procedure was actually the type of procedure that got us into the situation that made reconvening the procedure so difficult, if you know what I’m saying. If you don’t know what I’m saying then I’ll break this down for you into specifics: when Leta came out of my body she ripped me apart, and the mess that she left—a mess that I felt every stitch of because the epidural had worn off by that point—didn’t heal for a very long, long time. So long, in fact, that both my best friend and my sister said to me in the subsequent months, “What? You mean you haven’t
done the procedure yet? Are you serious?”
I AM SERIOUS. And I couldn’t find anyone anywhere to back me up. WHERE ARE YOU, PROCEDURE-LESS PERSON?
Some books said that it might take a few weeks (HA!) or months before the procedure could be reconvened, and if you’re one of those women who after only six weeks of shoving her boobs down a bottomless opossum could reconvene the procedure with a smile or maybe even an “ooh, yes” then I heartily salute your robotic, adjustable vagina. I bet yours is the type of vagina that can hum show tunes or fold sheets all by itself.
In the middle of all my depression and anxiety and daydreaming about life ending so that the pain might just go away, I honestly thought that I might not ever reconvene the procedure again. By having this baby I had destroyed the procedure part of my life. My doctor assured me that everything had healed the way it should have healed, but that maybe my scar tissue was just tender and that I needed to give it more time.
HOW MUCH TIME IS ENOUGH TIME? I hope this story SCARES THE LIVING SHIT out of some guy out there whose wife is in her third trimester. Ask yourself, buddy, just how long can YOU go without the procedure?
For some women I talked to, three months was the magic number. Others waited four or five months, and I only heard of one other story where they had to wait six whole months to reconvene the procedure. Well, this is my story: my vagina can’t fold sheets. In fact, my vagina is so retarded that we had to wait to reconvene the procedure until after I had started my period for the first time, after I could stretch it out with A FUCKING TAMPON to get it stabilized for the procedure. YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UP.
Jon wrote a Thank You Letter to Tampax, and after the procedure had been reconvened I was so giddy and elated that I wanted to run up and down our street naked shouting to the neighbors, “THE PROCEDURE! IT’S BEEN RECONVENED! WAKE UP EVERYBODY! RECONVENE YOUR PROCEDURE!”
On top of everything that my body had been through with the pregnancy and birth and aftermath, I was unable to reconvene the procedure for seven months and twelve days. And on each and every one of those days I had the thought that I might not ever be able to reconvene the procedure. I had friends with children Leta’s age, friends who were already pregnant again, three and four and five months pregnant, meaning their procedures reconvened in a timely, penis-friendly fashion. Where did these people get their vaginas? Did they trade in their brains?
I want to end this story with just one other tiny detail, the part about how I got a urinary tract infection from reconvening the procedure. I woke up a few days after the incident peeing fire and blood into the toilet, unable to veer more than a few feet from the bathroom the entire day. I wanted to laugh about this, because this was ridiculous, and THEY DON’T TELL YOU ABOUT THIS STUFF when you take your baby home from the hospital, that in seven months when your vagina finally heals and you’re able to reconvene your procedure, there will be one day when your baby will spend her entire day in the high chair next to the toilet.
The Mormon Church holds a general assembly meeting twice a year, a meeting called General Conference where the leaders of the Church give talks about the same stuff you have to hear about over and over again in Sunday school every Sunday, stuff like: 1) The importance of being faithful, 2) The importance of prayer in our lives, 3) The importance of serving others, 4) The importance of reading the scriptures, 5) The importance of tithing, and 6) The importance of thong panties.
General Conference is always the most boring meeting in the history of religion on earth. They always give the same talks about the same things and there is always one story about how someone learned an important lesson while attending to the cows on the farm he grew up on in Idaho. And at one point someone will say a sentence that involves the word MOUNTAIN and it will come out sounding like MAO-IN, because that’s how they say things in Utah, and I will take a steak knife and gouge out my eye.
Not that I would be watching.
In Utah the Mormons can just roll out of bed and watch Conference because the local NBC affiliate is owned by the Mormon Church and hey! There’s the Prophet on Channel 5! In Utah, General Conference is like a vacation from having to go to church because you can sit there nude and watch all the talks while eating Cheetos. But in other places, places far away like Tennessee where I grew up, the Mormons actually have to get dressed up and go to church and watch it via satellite. And they have to sit there and try not to fall asleep or become suffocated because the panty hose their mothers made them wear is cutting off circulation to the lower halves of their bodies.
We sent Leta to Conference Camp one weekend in October so that my mother could watch her for two days while Jon and I took the mini-honeymoon we never had up in Park City. It happened to be the same weekend as General Conference, and for two days Leta had to fold her arms and be reverent while the Prophet and the Apostles of the Mormon Church gave talks about thong panties. And while she learned about the importance of prayer and scriptures and tithing and sin and trials and tribulations, Jon and I were sipping bourbon in a hot tub on the deck of a private suite overlooking one of the most beautiful ski resorts in the world.
We arrived at Deer Valley Lodge on a Friday night when the air was crisp and the “deng deng deng deng” guitar riff on every song of an Interpol album was ringing in our ears from having blasted it the entire way. We stood at the check-in desk, drunk on pretzels and Pringles, only to find out that the modest room we had reserved had been mysteriously downgraded to a less than modest room, one without the hot tub. EGAD.
Perhaps it was the pretzels, perhaps it was just the thought of a weekend away from infant management, but neither Jon nor I made a huge fuss; we stood there patiently waiting for the guy at the desk to figure out what went wrong. He apologized for the misunderstanding and I said, “No problem, I used to work for Delta Air Lines and people are crazy. I am not one of those people, so you can take your time.” He sighed, relaxed a bit, and said, “I wish every customer were like you.” And then he upgraded us to the master suite, a series of rooms bigger than our house with a kitchen and bathroom decked out with granite countertops and travertine tiles. And there was a hot tub, for skinny-dipping.
Being nice! Its pays off! You heard it here first.
We spent the weekend driving through the mountains and hiking in the rain and sleeping for hours and hours in the midafternoon. My God, the sleeping. Jon took a nap with me, for hours. Jon doesn’t ever take a nap, and there he was lying next to me, still and lovely and irresistible. We indulged in room service and then got sushi and then ordered champagne at 1 PM in the afternoon for brunch. We ran naked to the hot tub and sat in front of the fireplace to dry off. And then the fire alarm went off.
There’s a whole story about the fire alarm and the entire suite being filled with smoke, and I would totally tell it to you but all you need to know is that there was this one moment when I turned to Jon and said, “I’m a little worried about ALL THAT SMOKE POURING OUT OF THE FIREPLACE.” And he was all, it’s the wood! The wood is green and very smoky! And then the fire alarm went off and the phone rang and the hotel management was all, “MR. ARMSTRONG!”
I can only imagine what the hotel management was thinking, like, that couple is smoking some serious pot for the fucking fire alarm to go off. But the entire suite was filled with smoke, and these guys ran in to figure out what was going on, and I was hiding in the bathroom naked, and they found out that the flue in the fireplace had been shut the entire time. For the rest of the weekend I would turn to Jon and casually say, “It was the wood. The wood was green.”
The only other incident worth mentioning was the little bathroom break we took on a hiking trail after driving for an hour in the mountains. Both of our bladders were about to pop, and there were no bathroom facilities within a thirty-mile radius. The trail was clearly marked with a sign that read, “This area is a protected watershed. No animals allowed.” Which meant, you are not allowed to use the bathroom here, you Imbecile.
But who was going
to know? I had to go pee, and so Jon and I hiked several yards up the trail to a place we thought was out of the way where no one would notice. So I squatted down in the midst of some bushes and trees, and Jon stood nearby because men can do that, just stand there and go pee whereas I HAD TO SQUAT. EMPHASIS COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED. And I was going pee, my bare white ass hanging out in nature, and in the middle of my stream a BOY AND HIS FATHER WALKED BY. And when I say walk by, I mean that they passed within THREE FEET of my bare white ass. Jon heard someone talking, and he thought it was me, so he said, “What’s up?”
WHAT’S UP?? WHAT’S UP?? HEY BOY AND YOUR FATHER: THERE’S MY WIFE’S BARE WHITE ASS.
I was caught up in the moment of the peeing, and the only thing I could think to do was squat down farther, my bare white ass now touching the forest floor. Oh my God, I had just shown some boy and his father my ass. In the woods. Where I’d been forbidden to pee.
After they passed by I stood up to pull up my pants only to discover that my bare white ass was covered in pine needles. So Jon and I spent the next five minutes picking pine needles out of my panties. I want those five minutes back.
I eventually overcame the embarrassing horror of that moment to enjoy the rest of Our Weekend Away and spent Sunday morning in bed sleeping and sleeping some more until Jon had to push my body out of bed. My reasoning was that I might not ever get to sleep that much again. After we checked out and ate a year’s worth of chocolate at the brunch buffet, we headed back out of the mountains, Interpol in the CD player, all of our clothes smelling like smoke from the wood that was green.
One early Wednesday morning I stuck Leta in the BabyBjörn, put the dog on a leash, and took a walk with a friend to a local coffee shop. Leta was dressed entirely in clothes that had been given to her from other people: a shirt from the neighbor, a pair of cut-off denim pants from my mother, and girly socks from Jon’s sister. The dog was nude, but he’s always nude, so no one really noticed.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 19