generation S for selfish?
Only one in three couples says raising children is an important part of marriage.
A recent Pew survey says children used to rank as the highest source of personal fulfillment for their parents, but having kids has dropped to one of the least-cited factors in a successful marriage, after “mutual happiness.”
in sickness or in health?
A lousy marriage might literally make you sick. Marriage has traditionally been thought to prolong life and promote health; new research from Brigham Young University has shown that that’s true only if you have a good marriage. Marital strife can raise your risk for heart disease.
and baby makes …us miserable
Twenty-five separate studies establish that marital quality drops substantially after parenthood. The married research team at Berkeley, Carolyn and Philip Cowan, announced the findings in 2009. Their investigation found that the drop in marital satisfaction was almost entirely accounted for by the couples who slid into being parents, disagreed over it, or were ambivalent about it. Couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born.
* Like many people who elope, particularly on the spur of the moment, I suspect my ex and I probably never would have married if we’d actually had to plan a wedding and stand up and recite vows in front of people we loved.
* You can get a great café con leche on any street in Miami; thank God for that!
* When doctors inform you that your tumor is a danger to you, why do they label it as if it were a citrus fruit, usually a grapefruit? Maybe it’s because if the tumor is the size of an orange, it would sound manageable; whereas a grapefruit implies a certain heft. If it is watermelon sized, it would be obvious to everyone. (You get seventy-two thousand Google hits on “tumor the size of a grapefruit.”)
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Hungry Like the Wolf
“Marriage is about raising children, that’s the purpose of the institution.”
—RUSH LIMBAUGH, “FAMILY VALUES ADVOCATE,”
MARRIED THREE TIMES, NO KIDS
Deciding to have a baby can be one of the most important and exciting decisions for a couple. For many, trying to procreate brings them even closer together. Ha! Not us. We couldn’t even agree on who wanted one in the first place. Having a baby was another opportunity for us to plumb the depths of marital mayhem and strife. Good times!
He Says
Annabelle wanted to have a baby. She wanted one, she wanted one from me, and she wanted one now! If I showed any resistance to this, she cleverly ascribed her newfound baby lust to me because of how baby friendly I was around my friends’ children. It was one of the things that finally made me attractive to her.
Yes, it was true that I loved making my friends’ little tykes giggle until they spit up. But the thing I loved most of all about them was that they weren’t mine. I admired my friends for having babies in the same way I admire Picasso’s Guernica, Washington’s surprise Christmas attack on Trenton, or how anyone can put together anything from IKEA. Just knowing I could never accomplish any of these things in my lifetime makes them all the more impressive. And so it was with my married friends and their offspring. They seemed so responsible, selfless, and mature—so not me. Life for them was no longer a string of temporary arrangements, transitional relationships, casual sex, and cheap adolescent thrills. Had these friends with infants lost their minds? But Annabelle put it to me hard: if I truly loved her, shouldn’t I take that step out of Adolescentville and stride with her into adult parenthood? Check and mated and off to Cedars-Sinai to take out the grapefruit fibroid.
But first, the night before her surgery, I took Polaroids of Annabelle’s pristine, never-been-operated-on body in the buff. Her pussy was so perfect and pretty, I couldn’t believe they were going to cut into it. I spent the next three nights sleeping on Annabelle’s hospital room floor while she weaned herself off the morphine drip and peed into a bag. Recognizing how nervous she was about the surgery and recovery, I did my best to pretend I wasn’t scared shitless. Here we had just got married and already we’d had to deal with death, disease, and surgery. If this had been a movie script I’d written, everyone who read it would laugh in my face and tell me, “This could never happen. Now go and rewrite it and be sure you make it more believable and realistic.”
I remember thinking that if I was able to help Annabelle get through all this, weather the storm, as it were, then she would never doubt how committed I was to her and our marriage. (God, was I naive back then or what? A mere babe in the great marital woods.) I accepted the operation as a necessity and therefore inevitable, so there was nothing more to do than to try to keep up a brave front, make her as comfortable as possible, and perhaps steal a couple of her Vicodin.
To celebrate Annabelle’s release, we spent a ridiculously expensive night at the Four Seasons Hotel. It was too soon to have sex, but Annabelle wanted to show me her surgical scar. She worried it would turn me off. I assured her nothing could turn me off when it came to her pussy. She undid her robe and presented it: large, thick black stitches going diagonally across, jutting in and out. I tried to think of something comforting and loving to say, but all that came out was “Oh my God, my wife has a Franken-gina!”
With her uterine tumor safely removed from the picture, Annabelle thought it was time for us to get down to the business of making her pregnant. I imagined getting a neurotic, high-strung, and overly anxious person like Annabelle pregnant could take months, even years, and by that time, I might actually be ready for fatherhood. Then a little problem arose less than a month into our sexual Olympics—Annabelle was pregnant. Oh, come on! What kind of luck is that?!
After the initial disappointment of being cheated out of all those years of fucking passed, a wave of euphoria hit me. Annabelle and I had decided to do something together, and wonder of wonders, we did it! We’re having a baby! Maybe this having a baby thing was actually going to bring us closer. Maybe during Annabelle’s pregnancy we would spend the time planning how we were going to be this whole new kind of family. Having a baby would reflect our cool, hip, “enlightened” postmodern personalities and world-views. Or I could get a job writing a TV show in Austin, Texas, and we would spend the next seven months apart. I was hesitant about taking the gig; I was already employed with my writing partner at a production company, and I had seen myself playing the part of the dutiful husband massaging his wife’s tired swollen feet and lying to her about how awesome she looked even when her butt tripled in size. But Annabelle absolutely insisted I go. She knew that the business reality of being the head writer of a show in production was vastly superior to gambling that one of my own scripts would ever see the light of day. She said I’d be an idiot to pass on such a great opportunity, and so somewhat against my better judgment, I accepted.
I remember shopping with her to stock up the house the day before I was to leave and it just didn’t feel real that I’d be gone for so long during such a crucial period in our lives. We made heartfelt promises to travel back and forth as much as we could, and just to make matters even more complicated, we also decided that before our child was born, we should buy a new house. We rationalized that doing two completely different things in two completely different parts of the country was all part of our experiment in having a cool, nontraditional family.
The climatic seasons in LA are as follows: summer, more summer, two weeks of light rain, and then summer again. With this in mind, I mocked those who warned me that Texas was way hotter. Within seconds of exiting the Austin airport, I realized I might have slightly underestimated my idea of heat. Central Texas in the throes of summer is 100 degrees during the day and 101 at night, and it has 1,000 percent humidity. This makes Los Angeles feel like Green Bay in February. After visiting for just one miserably hot night in Austin, Annabelle, dripping with sweat and anger, got back on a plane to LA and told me she wo
uld never come to Texas again for any reason.
This left me working on a show that was run on a shoestring budget and shot guerrilla indie film style, which meant that writing and filming went on around the clock. My working hours consisted of whenever I managed to wake up until whenever I lost consciousness. No one on the show was nice to me, every meal was some kind of meat barbecued and drowned in cheese—a lactose-intolerant vegetarian’s dream come true—and worst of all, Austin is a college town teeming with the prettiest, longest-legged gals in Texas, who all seemed to be in an extremely fierce competition with one another over who could wear the shortest, sexiest miniskirt. It was the ultimate tease for a thirty-five-year-old married man without the slightest chance of having sex for months.
During my long, hot, sexless, miserable months in Austin, Annabelle was back home busily searching for a new house in between morning sickness vomiting and bouts of frequent constipation. She was also informed that her uterine surgery prevented her from giving birth vaginally, and she would have to have a cesarean section. (Vaginally is the least sexy of words that refer to all things vagina.) As for us, we resorted to the only behavior appropriate for a postmodern married couple in such a tense and unpredictable situation: we bitched, griped, and moaned at each other daily by phone. This quickly escalated into a contest of who was having a worse time of it, which in turn led to more frustration, miscommunication, yelling, and phone receiver banging.
The nadir of our phone conversation confrontations, or “con-phontations,” came the day the New York Times review of my series Austin Stories came out. It was a rave. Finally, I had some long-overdue satisfaction for all the hard work and outrageous hours. I imagined that with a strong review from such a prestigious paper there was now a possibility the show might get an order for a second, even a third season. Although I truly hated Texas (and its inferno weather as well as its pork-grilling, gun-toting, pickup-driving, execution-happy citizens), I thought if the show got picked up, the best thing to do was to get a nice apartment in Austin. This way, when I had to be there shooting, Annabelle and our baby would be more comfortable when they came to visit. When I relayed this merely speculative sentiment to Annabelle, it was as if I had invited her to a medieval witch burning and she was the witch. She exploded in a Krakatoa-like volcanic rage, calling me all sorts of things, most beginning with fucking and ending in idiot!
My getting a place in Austin turned out to be one of the stupidest things I ever proposed. Despite the positive reviews, the executives at MTV hated the show, they despised me for writing it, and even the cast and crew detested me. I returned home to an unsympathetic wife now seven months pregnant. (I never forgave myself and vowed never to make such future plans, however vague, again.) Reunited in the same city, Annabelle and I would finally have the opportunity to find common ground and get back to creating our twenty-first-century household. Together we were going to move into the new house Annabelle had found for us, study the latest baby research, get the nursery ready, and choose the perfect pediatrician. But the week I returned, Annabelle began having prelabor contractions and was ordered on bed rest. And to make sure the baby stayed inside, she was given a medication that gave her intense and perpetual intestinal gas. So I was sent out into the world while Annabelle was quarantined in the bed. Once again we were forced to go about lives apart from each other. We were fast becoming a contemporary John and Abigail Adams, minus, of course, their acute intellectual brilliance and profound selflessness.
I took over the pediatrician search and got an instant tutorial on the tangential effect show business has on a whole community. Even the baby docs act like stars in Los Angeles. Big egos, fancy Beverly Hills offices, and a Hollywood medical swagger that oozes “I take care of the Banderas/Griffith kids, so I may not even have time for your baby.” I especially disliked the cultlike guru aura that surrounded Annabelle’s choice of pediatrician, Dr. Paul Fleiss. He’s the father of the infamous Heidi Fleiss and he has a slew of rules for new parents, the biggest one being no male circumcision. He won’t work with you if you circumcise your son. I attended an open house where he spoke to a group of parents-to-be for forty-five minutes, mainly on the subject of the foreskin. He also insists on breast-feeding until the child is eleven, but for the most part, for Fleiss it’s all foreskin all the time. Some of these newly expectant parents were moved to tears by Dr. Fleiss’s passionate advocacy of the penis flap. Yet all I could think of while he talked was: this is Heidi Fleiss’s father, and she’s a whore-pimp-madam-drug-addict-alcoholic-felon-of-a-train-wreck. Given how his own daughter turned out, perhaps he doesn’t deserve his cult status or to take care of my baby, foreskin or not.
Although Annabelle relented on Fleiss, she did like some of the things he had advocated, especially his theory about never giving a baby a pacifier. I was of the let’s-wait-and-see school of what works for us and our baby. I thought that because we had never been parents, it would be better to get some empirical experience under our belts. This touched a raw nerve in Annabelle. She had collected books and articles and had scanned research online for several minutes on the subject of pacifiers and forbidding them was the only way. I was not only unqualified to have an opinion, but was also once again an “idiot” for not understanding the more profound ramifications. My play-it-by-ear pacifier approach was to Annabelle akin to devil worship, or worse, voting Republican. At one point during our dispute, I feared she might actually leave me over this matter, but fortuitously, she couldn’t get out of bed. This having a baby wasn’t transforming us into enlightened beings freed from the antiquated notions of the vox populi, emancipated from the mistakes, ignorance, and shackles of procreations past; instead, it was more like an iron curtain coming down between us. Leaving us to argue who represented freedom and liberty (me) and who was dogmatic oppression and tyranny (her).
One night we lay at opposite sides of the bed, Annabelle belching, I engrossed in a nature program where a snow wolf chased a snow rabbit halfway across the snow-covered Arctic tundra before killing it and bringing it back to his mate and their wolf cub. The “wife” of the hunter wolf took the bloody rabbit out of his mouth and she and the cub eagerly sauntered away to eat it, leaving father wolf exhausted, alone, and hungry. Annabelle had, and I’m not exaggerating, tears streaming down her face watching how the mother wolf took care of her cub. “What about the papa wolf?” I exclaimed. “He did all the work and got nothing. What kind of mate wants her spouse to die of starvation? Shouldn’t she give him at least the bunny tail to nibble on?” Annabelle thought that was absolutely ridiculous. It was a biological imperative for a mother, any mother, to sustain herself and her offspring. I was getting very upset. “I thought we were going to be different. I thought we were going to be a progressive, forward-thinking couple having a baby together.” Annabelle turned toward me with what seemed to be her incisor teeth dripping with saliva and growled, “Together? You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! I’m pregnant, I can’t move, and I’m starving! Go to Hard Times Pizza and get me two slices with sausage, pepperoni, and ham!”
A few weeks later, after returning from yet another Annabelle pizza run, she informed me it was time to have the baby. This came as a bit of a surprise because her C-section wasn’t scheduled for another two weeks. I was working on a script deadline with my writing partner, so I casually asked if it was possible she could keep it in there a little longer? She serenely informed me that if I really wanted to keep it in longer, I could shove it up my ass and keep it in there for as long as I wanted.
On the way to the hospital, a wave of dizzy, light-headed existential nausea came over me. In my mind I was screaming, “Not ready for this! Not ready for this!” My brain was racing. What were we thinking of, having a baby? Annabelle and I, parents? We could barely manage our own lives. How would we be able to care for some helpless pod creature? How were we going to do all the extra cooking and laundry and buy the diapers, groceries, and baby food? How were we going to be up all
night when he cried and couldn’t sleep? Shouldn’t we have been talking about all this instead of arguing about the philosophical ramifications of paci-fucking-fiers? And how could I be the wolf daddy bringing home the rabbit and just watch them eat it? I happen to adore lapin à la dijonnaise.
By the time we got to the hospital, I could hardly catch my breath. For God’s sake, all I wanted to do was have sex without a condom for a little while; now we were moments from bringing a new life into the world!
Once inside the hospital, Annabelle was prepped and ready for surgery. Then suddenly, there he was! I started snapping photos: bloody Annabelle stomach, bloody baby, and incandescent blue umbilical cord.
I felt as if I were hallucinating. It was way too quiet in there. The baby wasn’t crying. One of the interns moved our infant’s arms up and down and said, “Breathe, Ezra, breathe.” Yes, I was definitely hallucinating.
Then, finally, baby Ezra began to cry. Involuntary tears started streaming down my face as I kept repeating “Oh my God” over and over. I cut the umbilical cord, and Ezra was wheeled away into an examination room. I stumbled over to Annabelle. “Is everything OK? Is the baby all right?” she asked as they were sewing her gut back up. At that instant I knew Annabelle had been right about the wolf mom and cub getting the food. I knew I’d do anything to sustain the new life brought into the world, even chase a rabbit all over Los Angeles, in my car, during rush hour, if I had to. Annabelle was right and I was a jerk for even thinking otherwise. Trying to be a hip, enlightened, postmodern couple having a baby was just as preposterous a myth as flying unicorns, fire-breathing dragons, or “The insurgency is in its last throes.” They may all sound good, but no matter how strongly you believe they are real, they’re not and never will be.
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 8