She Says
Funny, I thought having a baby was Jeff’s idea. Sticky, whiny, mess-making machines with runny noses. It’s not that I don’t like kids; I’ve just always felt the same about having children as I do about communism and monogamy: sounds good in the abstract. I’ve never been one of those women who feel compelled to make a baby with all the men they sleep with; that’s like wanting to bring home a souvenir from every town you drive through. But then Jeff came into the picture.
Yes, I may have offhandedly dropped the hint that if we ever wanted to consider having a family, we should get going right at that very instant, but from the time Jeff and I were seriously dating, I was under the impression that he had already packed his own bags and was looking to hitch a ride out of Adolescentville and into a new life as an adult male.
In recent years, Adolescentvilles have cropped up inside many of America’s metropolises, but the Los Angeles enclave is its capital. Los Angeles is populated by man-boy Peter Pans sporting backward-facing baseball caps; driving late-model, gas-guzzling convertibles; and serially dating very young women with thong-line tattoos, superlarge sunglasses, and demo DVDs of their latest appearance on a reality show. Gertrude Stein astutely observed of California that there’s “no there there.” I believe that there actually may be a “there” there, but you can’t get “there” from here if your “here” isn’t in your twenties and bankrolled by a massive amount of cash. Clearly, Jeff and I had been “here” long enough to know that we didn’t belong “there.” Jeff was already renting a family-friendly house and his pursuit of me gave every indication of a desire for a long-term relationship, and to my eyes, Jeff Kahn appeared to be Mr. Baby.
Jeff has always had nicknames for everyone and everything, and kids are the perfect audience for his antics. His preternatural silliness makes him a pied piper to little sneechers, snoochers, yon-dermans, and herkimer children (his nicknames) who unfailingly giggle and jump into his arms. There is an undeniable effect that a man who is good with children has on women of childbearing age. This phenomenon, noted in numerous women’s top ten turn-on lists, was not lost on me, and Jeff’s kid appeal had the effect of kicking my eggs into high gear. If he didn’t really want to have kids, as he claims, then it was irresponsible of him to expose me to his baby wrangling. Add to this the undeniable fact that we weren’t getting any younger. Young in appearance, maybe, but saddled with aging body parts, our generation has had to accept the fact that you can’t Botox your uterus. Couples we knew were trolling for surrogate carriers. I had girlfriends who were spending a good part of their days evaluating egg donors with impressive degrees and the odd combination of skills, such as “I speak six languages and make my own deodorant.” That’s the real explanation for why we were on an express ride to parenthood.
At the onset of my pregnancy, I didn’t have a clue about the kind of family we would make together. Like Jeff, I entertained a fantasy of us as a globe-trotting, baby-toting artsy duo, but in terms of actual delineation of duties and plans … not so much. Not having had a picture of myself as a mother, my only plan was to be the opposite of my own mother, who had had the audacity to try to transcend her 1950s working-class upbringing in hopes of attaining a 1960s suburban lifestyle. She had worked at the onset, and then spent the rest of her pregnancies lounging in a peignoir, smoking, and stocking up on baby formula. My mother says she never really thought about having children; she just did what was expected of her, and following our births, the majority of important familial decisions were delegated to my father. To her credit, my mother had indoctrinated me in the kind of feminist rhetoric she had been denied, repeatedly assuring me from the time I was a little girl that I could have it all, so now that I was going maternal, I was determined that I would prove her right. I was going to distinguish myself from the women of her generation. I was going to be an engaged, educated mother, a successful businesswoman with a baby on my boob and my day planner packed in the outside pocket of my Kate Spade diaper bag. But before we could craft our new family plan together, Jeff was off to work in Texas. So much for all of our togetherness.
My first plan of action was to enroll in the same Los Angeles prenatal yoga class that Madonna and Cindy Crawford had attended. That class is led by a Sikh whose claim to have weathered a twenty-four-hour labor by continuous consumption of raw liver has made her an icon among the famously knocked-up of Hollywood. It’s true that birthing can be something of a competitive sport, and at the beginning of each session, each expectant mom would announce her intentions: “I’m having my baby vaaaginally” or “I’m having my baby vaginally at home with a midwife.” “I’m having a vaginal birth at home in a bathtub with Tibetan monks chanting kabalistic incantations, and Madonna is my midwife” is what I wanted to say, but instead I admitted that I’d be at Cedars-Sinai having a planned cesarean and I was really looking forward to the awesome drugs, which meant that I made not a single friend among the super politically correct breeders in that class. In what was to become a pattern, Jeff teased me mercilessly about my attendance. The class was relaxing and full of just the kind of motherhood tips I was seeking, but my husband is suspicious of anything being embraced by what he perceives as the trendy liberal elite class. Cognitive behavioral parenting techniques, attachment parenting, and the newly fashionable but-practiced-for-millenniums family bed were all things Jeff deemed too popular with the PC crowd to be practiced by the soon to be created Gurkahn family. I knew that anyone who talks about saving the environment while residing in a ten-thousand-square-foot home, people who drive Priuses,* and everything written by Deepak Chopra were fodder for Jeff’s cynicism, but I was beginning to be annoyed that every suggestion I made was met with the same disaffection. Jeff would reject breathing if he could, just because everyone else is doing it. For the record, the mothers in that class ended up having statistically the same rate of C-sections (approximately one in three) as the rest of the population in the United States. Meanwhile Jeff kept laughing at me and asked me to join him in Texas.
Of Austin in the summer I can only say it was like being in an oven. I was already an oven cooking up a baby. Now I was an oven in an oven. Jeff still refuses to acknowledge that he suggested we move to Texas, not just get an apartment down there.
Scientific research tells us much about the different ways that the male and female auditory systems work. Studies indicate that men listen with one hemisphere of the brain, while women listen with both.* Scientists are befuddled by the implications of this difference, but anecdotal evidence suggests that men simply don’t hear what we are saying. However, no evidence can explain why men can’t hear themselves. Like, Jeff insisting that he merely suggested a rental in Austin. Someone should research that phenomenon. Jeff also forgets that I grew up in the South, where I learned that every day south of the Mason-Dixon Line is a bad hair day for a Jewish girl. Whenever I return, my head channels Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born. Though I enjoy my meat barbecued, fried, battered, and buttered, I have no desire to live there again. As if that weren’t enough, Jeff had been sending photographs home in which he appeared extremely chummy with the support staff of the TV series: those supershiny, supple girls in tiny tube tops and good-ass pants. I was already trying to wrap my head around the fact that my boobs were exploding out of my body and my ass was expanding so fast it was like a Starbucks franchise. On every corner of my ass there was another branch of ass opening up. I was freaking about how my life was going to change, so now I was supposed to pick up and move to a place where everybody my husband works with is an MTV beach-house bunny and I know no one? No, thank you.
One lucky break for me was that one of Jeff’s numerous former roommates, Eric, was moving to Los Angeles and needed a place to stay. I found myself uncharacteristically thrilled to have company. In what was one of the high points of Eric’s stay, Jeff asked him to take me out for a really big steak for my birthday. Other patrons looked stunned and slightly disgusted at the speed and efficiency with which
I dispatched that meal, which quickly was absorbed into the hugeness that was my posterior. I had no way of knowing that that dinner would be one of my last meals out of the house for months.
Meanwhile, we had pressing issues in Los Angeles. Our lease on the Hobbit house was running out, so even if we couldn’t decide which configuration we’d be sleeping in, it was imperative that we find a new home. So there I was, knocked up, wearing Sea-Bands, puking my guts out at work on a TV series where I was hiding my pregnancy behind huge mixing bowls, and now I needed to buy a house. I was finding that “having it all” in reality just means doing it all. Before Jeff arrived back on the coast, I had picked out a home; arranged a mortgage; had it painted, reroofed, rewired, the floors refinished; and taken care of the insurances and inspections we were required to have. It’s true, the house I bought may or may not be sitting on top of a newly discovered earthquake fault, but I did get us a roof over our heads.*
Jeff devotes all of one line to a description of the period of time during which I was ordered to bed. This is probably due to the fact that he wasn’t the one who was reduced to lying on one side of his body for six weeks straight with strict instructions to rise only to go to the bathroom. The prospect of bed rest had sounded like fun, and it was, for maybe the first forty-five minutes. At that point, I would have preferred my mother’s pregnancy, which, lubricated as it was with coffee and the odd martini, had progressed completely uneventfully. I had numerous ambitious goals for my bed rest: make photo albums of our wedding, learn conversational Pashto, earn an online degree in animal husbandry; sadly, I accomplished nothing.* For the record, I did read entire chapters, if not entire books, on pregnancy, but by that time I could barely string a sentence together, much less read, because the side effects of the anti-contraction medication included anxiety, palpitations, and violent burping. The only horrible side effect it didn’t have was to make me fat and that’s only because I was already a big fat pregnant lady!
This may be the ultimate explanation as to why Jeff and I are still married today. That another human witnessed me in this condition and can still look me in the eye, much less find me desirable, is unfathomable. Perhaps the CIA will one day try “bed rest” in lieu of water-boarding and the other forms of torture they’ve employed, because after six weeks of being unable to move from my side, I would gladly have confessed to being a high-ranking member of the Taliban, the second gunman on the grassy knoll, and John Wilkes Booth’s getaway driver.
It was during the bed rest that I discovered that watching nature shows while pregnant could produce a hormone-induced weeping identity crisis. I would find myself sobbing into my copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, torn between whom to root for, the bunnies or the wolves, but by the middle of the programs all I could think was “I’m starving.” That’s how I knew I had truly gone maternal; any latent sentimentality had been transformed into survival instinct, and I was sure I would rip that rabbit limb from limb if my cub was hungry. Was Jeff even present? Did the papa wolf need to eat? Who cared? Jeff was right—my baby was my future now and I was hungry like the wolf.
It was in this ravenous state, and maybe because of it, that Jeff and I held the great pacifier debate. I had agreed with Jeff’s assessment of Fleiss, even though his office was within walking distance of our home, the holy grail of geographical desirability in Los Angeles, but I wasn’t about to give in on the pacifier. Jeff championed flexibility and said don’t make plans in advance, but I was not going to be like my mother, damn it; I was the decider. I was only adamant about a few things. Unlike my own mother, it would be the boob over bottle, the binky would be banned, and I was thinking it would be nice to have our baby sleep in our bed. Meanwhile, Jeff was under the impression that numerous chores were left to him, when in reality, the only things left for him to do were to see the few doctors I hadn’t yet visited and to keep my supply line of sausage pizzas unimpeded while I endured the last stages of the pregnancy in my new incarnation as a beached belching whale.* This seems to be the perfect time to debunk that canard that has crept into the lexicon of contemporary procreation: “We’re having a baby” or “We’re pregnant.” This phrase reflects the delusional gender-equalizing development that has betrayed us by improperly depicting reality. “Jeff,” I unattractively bleated, “we aren’t having a baby; I am having a baby and would be thrilled if you plan to stick around, and if ‘we’ were pregnant, both of us would have been here the whole fucking time and neither of us would be ambulatory, but one of us wasn’t, and one of us is, so you’re going to get me a pizza, and I’m going to decide if our baby gets a pacifier! And make that extra cheese!”
During the last few weeks of the pregnancy we went to the hospital three times. Each time I was given more medication, and told to wait it out. By now I had so little brainpower, I just lay there on my side, counting the seconds of every minute and then starting all over again, in between burping, bitching, and moaning to my husband. Jeff describes the moment I informed him “it was time” as though I were actively conspiring to stand between him and his work. I don’t need to remind any woman who has given birth that you just can’t hold in a baby, like gas, which I was also holding in at that moment. I was so stunned by Jeff’s response that I turned around and sat in the bathtub for an hour.* So I sat in the tub, contemplating how I knew it was going to be: me working full-time, the baby on my boob while I assembled the nursery furniture we’d ordered from IKEA, searching for Jeff’s hidden cache of pacifiers. But by the time I emerged, it was the middle of the night and I thought we should wait a little longer to give the doctor some more time to sleep, so Jeff did, in fact, have time to finish the assignment he was working on. But as they wheeled me into the delivery room, having been up for twenty-four hours and in bed for three months, I wasn’t terrified, I was freaked out: “I’m not cut out for this … trolls … hair on fire!” I cried. Suddenly I realized that I may have been hungry like the wolf, but Jeff had done his best. Jeff had been in an equivalent of the Arctic tundra, surviving show business purgatory in Austin, hunting down bucks not bunnies, and I was a jerk for not recognizing how much he had contributed in his own way. But had I known beforehand what we were in for next, I might have skipped the whole thing and bought expensive moisturizers instead.
“The majority of divorces occur in the first year after the birth of a child.”
—Rutgers University, 2005
Women who “self-silenced” during conflict with their spouses, compared with women who did not, had four times the risk of dying, according to findings published in 2007 in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.
reflections of love
Couples begin to look alike for many reasons including diet, environment, and general predisposition (or in Los Angeles if they frequent the same plastic surgeon), but psychologist Robert Zajonc and colleagues have published a study indicating that as couples empathize with each other, they copy each other’s facial expressions and thus actually develop similar facial features.
“When choosing a long-term partner … you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that you’ll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.”
—Psychologist Dan Wile, After the Honeymoon
in sickness and in health
Parents with chronically ill children are at significant risk for experiencing marital distress. Blame often becomes an issue. The time constraints alone of caring for a chronically ill child are very challenging to any marriage. The normal “escape” outlets—such as a simple evening alone—also are limited; simple fatigue becomes a big problem.
—“Chronically Ill Child Can Doom a Marriage,” USA Today
* I drive a Prius.
* This finding received wide attention in a 2001 study published by Indiana School of Medicine’s Dr. Michael Phillips.
* Jeff really dislikes this characterization of him as someone who can’t handle anything to do with home improvement. “But you can’t
change a lightbulb,” I often remind him. “I can too; I just can’t get the fixtures back on afterward” is his standard answer. I rest my case.
* Our wedding photos are still in boxes.
* According to the Wall Street Journal, men’s domestic role has changed little in the last twenty years, though women’s working hours outside the home have increased significantly, which means either we’re all living in filth or, as the report suggests, the ladies are picking up the slack, so why should the prenatal preparedness be any different?
* I wasn’t in the agonizing labor contractions that probably would have made me punch Jeff as I called a cab; they were those pesky preterm labor contractions. We had been told that the next time they increased, it would be time to deliver the baby. If you’ve ever tried to wear three pairs of Spanx at once and still considered breathing an essential activity, well, it was kinda like that. For the record, at 36½ weeks, our baby was not considered a preemie.
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• • • •
The Years of Living Sleeplessly
“Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.”
You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up Page 9