Mommies Who Drink

by Brett Paesel

  Dr. Sammy looks at him and returns to me. “Any questions?”

  I bury the ones burning to be asked, the ones he cannot answer. Will I be able to lose the weight? Will this baby be a crier, like Spence? Will I be able to juggle the needs of two children and still be able to write? Is a Roth IRA the best way to go? Is painting my bedroom a dark blue going to make it look smaller? How can I get rid of the ants in my house without spraying the baseboards and poisoning us all? When Spence is fifteen and yells at me that I’m a bitch, how will I be able to bear it?

  I look at Spence kneeling to inspect the bottom of the chair.

  I breathe in. “What are the chances of my having a C-section again?” I ask.

  Dr. Sammy leans against the counter.

  “Well, we’ll go over your options when we get closer to delivery,” he says. “You can try for a vaginal birth if you want. But you have a higher possibility of rupturing, since you’ve already had a C-section. Doesn’t mean you will.”

  “Rupture” sounds catastrophic to me, like a blood-soaked near-death experience. “Near death” being the upside. What about death death? What about machines screeching a flatline while my screaming baby is whisked away and blood gushes out of me like a fountain, as Dr. Sammy yells, “Code Blue, I’m losing her. I need some fucking assistance here, stat.” I’ve seen the shows.

  Dr. Sammy flips through my chart. “There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a vaginal birth.”

  That’s okay, I’ll take the C-section, I think.

  “You’ll probably want to go over your options with Pat,” he says.

  C-section is fine.

  “If you decided on the C-section . . . ,” he continues.

  C-section, yes, that’s the one I want.

  “. . . we’d schedule it a week earlier than your due date.”

  “A week earlier,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take the C-section.”

  “Well,” he says, “as I was saying, we can talk about it in depth at your next appointment.”

  “If it were up to you, what would you do?” I ask.

  Dr. Sammy closes my file.

  “Well,” he says, “if it were up to me . . . Look, I’m always going to err on the side of being conservative. So I would go for the C-section.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “But,” he says, “a lot of women really want to go for a vaginal birth. It’s important to them. Me, I’m not really into vaginal heroics.”

  I want to tell him that the only remotely heroic thing my vagina ever did was pity-fuck Tom Goldenhirsh my senior year in college, after he told me his sister had cancer.

  Truth is, if my vagina did anything heroic, it would be the first of my body parts ever to do so.

  I blame my mother for my cowardice. Take away her fears and she is only half a woman. It took two Valiums and a double gin and tonic to get her on a plane when I was a girl. On walks through our neighborhood she shoved me between her and big dogs like a human shield. There were no matches in our house, or sharp knives, for fear of someone hurting themselves. I didn’t see a neatly sliced tomato until I was in my teens. The bits of tomato that were added to our salads looked like tiny globular internal organs.

  My fears range from the physical fear of pain to social fears to a fear of being trapped alone in a small room with a boring person who has a tic and likes to talk. When I was around ten, my mother read one of those popular seventies books about being your own best friend and being okay while others are okay. She told me that the book didn’t help much because its advice about confronting one’s fears was to ask yourself, “What is the worse thing that can happen?” And her answer was always, “That I will die.” It wasn’t an answer that gave her much comfort—or courage.

  Maybe my fear of just about everything is a cellular ode to my mother. If so, I am the only child of hers to sing it. My youngest brother is quite the opposite. Risking his life is his hobby. He and his wife go off into the wilderness exploring unpopulated places with names like Dead Man’s Cove, Last Resort, and Crazy Joe’s Rattlesnake Prairie. Every Christmas they send a picture of themselves smiling as they jump off a cliff into something that looks like molten lava or a Nordic void.

  I get a phone call from Nurse Charlene. I can tell she still hates me.

  She tells me that my C-section appointment is for December 10 at noon. A familiar blast of adrenaline rushes through me as I write “C-section” down in shaky handwriting on a notepad. I’ve elected to have this surgery, it’s true. But that doesn’t ease my terror of the needles, slicing, and bloodletting that a C-section will involve. My eyes blur as I start to pant.

  “Will that work?” she asks, her voice tight.

  “Huh?”

  “Can you confirm noon for your C-section?”

  “Right,” I say. “Is there . . . can I . . . drink the night before?”

  “No liquids after midnight,” she says.

  “But up until then, can I have alcohol? To calm my nerves.”

  “I’ll have to ask the doctor,” she says. The whole sentence an exasperated sigh.

  “Okay,” I say. “If not, can you ask him if there’s a pill I can have? Maybe something that numbs me from the neck down before I get to the hospital. My husband can carry me in.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything like that,” she says.

  “Would you just check?” I say. “You’d be surprised. My dentist gives me something called, I don’t know what the medical term is, but he calls it green gin. It tastes like peppermint and wipes out your fear response and your memory.”

  “Green gin?”

  “Yes. Just ask him for green gin.”

  My panting increases and I grab onto the kitchen counter.

  “So you’re confirming December 10,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say. “I have to go now and find a paper bag.”

  Pat comes home to find me prone on the couch counting backward from 100.

  “Looks like you got the appointment,” he says.

  “December 10,” I say, waving the paper bag around.

  “Do you need a pan?” he asks. “Are you going to throw up?”

  “No, no,” I say, starting short staccato breaths. These are yoga breaths called breath of fire, meant to help calm the system. I try them, even though usually they make me lose all feeling in my fingers, which starts a panic that I have MS.

  Pat sits down and watches me.

  “Okay, look,” he says. “The baby has to come out. And this is the safest thing. Now, what is it you’re worried about?”

  I stop breathing fire and gasp, “That I will die.”

  “We could all die tomorrow,” he says.

  “I know,” I say. “And I can’t figure out why everyone is so calm about it.”

  But through all this hysteria—through all my very real, heart-stopping fear—I know that I will have this baby, C-section or not. I will do it shuddering, spitting, peeing in my pants, undoubtedly highly medicated. But I will do it. I will enter my own Dead Man’s Cove—and return with the exhilaration of having survived. And I know that I will do thousands more things that quite literally scare me shitless. This I inherited from my mother as well, the choosing to do it—the thing that terrifies you—anyway. Because choosing not to do it is like dying. And I’m not ready yet.

  Friday

  I sip from the straw of my Diet Coke and put it down on the bar, which is quite a stretch past my belly. It’s too boring to complain about my state. Everyone but Michelle has been there. My aches and pains are no worse than any other woman’s at seven months. But, oh, I really want to complain. I want to complain and complain and complain. Then I want to take a nap, get up, and complain again.

  Instead, I say, “I think a guy hit on me this morning.”

  “Really?” says Lana, putting down her tall vodka tonic, two limes.

  “Yeah. I didn’t really think about it until he was gone.”

  “I got hit
on all the time when I was pregnant,” says Katherine.

  Michelle shifts. “Why would guys hit on a pregnant woman? Nothing says ‘taken’ more than that.”

  “Maybe that’s part of it,” says Katherine. “The kink of poking another man’s girl while she carries his baby.”

  “Jeez,” I say. “I was just hoping this guy thought I was cute.”

  “You are cute,” says Lana. “But I agree. Something about taking everything another man’s got really appeals to guys. In this case he gets the wife and the unborn baby.”

  “And I thought I was cynical about the motives of straight men,” says Michelle.

  “So how did the guy hit on you?” asks Lana.

  “Well, as I said, it didn’t occur to me until he was gone. But he kind of appeared beside me while I was walking and said that I looked great. I thought he was just being nice.”

  “So what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Thanks.’”

  “That’s all you said?” asks Lana.

  “What was I supposed to say?”

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘I look better in just my panties.’”

  We all laugh. Michelle holds up her empty. Mack nods.

  “So that’s it?” asks Lana. “He said you looked nice and you said thanks?”

  “Then he said that he had seen me several times before.”

  Katherine shudders. “That’s creepy.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think that now. But at the time I thought that he was just a neighborhood guy who really had seen me here and there.”

  “Jesus,” says Katherine. “You are so naive.”

  Ouch. I know Katherine means this in a protective, affectionate way. But it hurts all the same. I wiggle in my chair, trying to get comfortable.

  “I don’t think I’m that naive,” I say. “It just didn’t occur to me that he was hitting on me because I’m so huge. Being pregnant is not sexy.”

  The women grumble a bit. And I wonder if I’m the only one who thinks this. I feel a bit prudish. I’ve heard women giggle about how orgasmic they are when they’re pregnant. Lana said that her pregnancy increased her sexual drive. The only drive increased by my pregnancy is my drive to nap and complain.

  “I felt so hot when I was pregnant,” says Katherine, “like I was filled with female juice.”

  “What?” asks Michelle, cocking an eyebrow.

  “I felt all sexed up,” says Katherine.

  “Female juice?” asks Lana, biting into one of her limes.

  “Jesus,” says Katherine. “All I’m saying is that all those hormones and all that stuff around the baby, sloshing around, made me feel juicy.”

  “Okay,” I say to the others, “I don’t think we’re going to get much more clarification of female juice than that.”

  “You know what’s really sexy is your boobs filled with all that milk,” says Katherine.

  “Oh, no,” I say, louder than I meant to. I turn to Katherine. “You have tiny breasts, so it’s fun for you to have bigger ones. When my big boobs get filled up with milk, they look obscene. And not in a good way.”

  “Obscene is good,” says Lana.

  “I said not in a good way. In a something-we-really-don’t-need-to-see kind of way. In an underside-of-the-ball-sack kind of way.”

  Michelle’s dropped out of this, so I really can’t tell what she thinks. Maybe we’re talking too much about being pregnant. I wonder if that makes her feel left out.

  “When Jake was about six months old, we left him with friends for a weekend,” says Katherine. “Slim and I drove to the Grand Canyon and camped. Obviously, I was new at the breast-feeding thing, so I somehow forgot or didn’t think about my breasts filling up with all that milk. We got down in the canyon at, like, dusk and my breasts were practically bursting. I told Slim that the best thing I could think of was for him to suck out all the milk.”

  She takes a sip of her black and tan, as she looks off remembering this, I assume.

  “Man,” she says. “What a great night.”

  Whenever Katherine tells stories like this, I think that there must be a whole chunk of human experience that I’m missing. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am naive.

  “After that,” says Katherine, “Slim wanted to do it every day. But I had to put a stop to it, since I was worried that he’d drink up all of Jake’s milk.”

  “Aw. You didn’t need to do that,” says Lana. “You would have eventually started producing enough milk for two.”

  “Eww,” I say. “Sorry, but ewww. I try not to be an ‘ew’-type girl. But this whole thing deserves an ‘ew.’”

  Lana and Katherine laugh.

  “I don’t understand why sucking breasts is such an ‘ew,’” says Michelle.

  “It’s not the breasts,” I say, “it’s the milk.”

  I look to read Michelle’s expression. Is she upset with me? Did she think I was slamming breast-sucking lesbians?

  “Well,” says Michelle, putting her Amstel on the bar, “Sarah and I are having dinner. So I’m off.”

  “So early?” I say.

  “Sorry,” she says as she grabs her purse from the bar. “We really do have dinner.”

  After she leaves, I say, “God, I feel awful. Did I say something bad?”

  Katherine says, “No, it was me. It was something I said. She looked funny when I said that thing about having big boobs full of milk.”

  “Don’t be silly. It wasn’t anyone,” says Lana. “She just had a dinner.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the breast milk or breast-sucking,” I say. “Maybe she was upset because we spent so much time talking about being pregnant. Maybe she’d had enough.”

  “Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that,” says Katherine.

  “You guys,” says Lana, standing and sliding her empty toward Mack. “You’re making something out of nothing here. She just had a dinner.”

  We think for a second. I look at my watery Diet Coke, tiny ice cubes looking like glass pebbles. I think about how often I make something out of nothing.

  Lana’s probably right, I think. She probably just had a dinner. But I feel lousy anyway. I resolve to call Michelle later. It wouldn’t surprise me if we all did.

  Free Bird

  If there’s a pill for it, it will be prescribed to me. I must look like a woman who needs a lot of medication, because doctors are keen to hand it to me, even when I don’t ask for it. For a ghost of a symptom, I’ve been offered codeine, Demerol, a festival of antidepressants, Xanax, Vicodin, and seemingly hundreds of other pills that my friends would pay big money for. I still have a small stash of Valium that my dentist insisted I take before each visit, for fear that without it I would bite him. I’m surprised that I haven’t been prescribed medical marijuana for my athlete’s foot.

  “Jesus, for an ingrown hair, they’d give you a morphine drip,” Lana says when they wheel me in, stoned to the bone, after my scheduled C. After Lana’s C-section with Daisy, her doctor refused to prescribe anything stronger than extra-strength Tylenol.

  All I know is that I feel fabulous. My trusty friend the catheter dangles off the edge of the bed, ensuring that I won’t have to get up for at least twenty-four hours. I’m surrounded by friends and family, buzzing around me like drones.

  I can’t wait to get to the Jell-O.

  Murph lies in the crook of my arm, warm as a promise.

  Lana tells me later that right after the birth Pat came out to tell Spence that the baby was a boy. She says that Spence took in the news, then walked up to Daisy and said, “I have a brother, and he’s a boy.”

  The morning after the first night, I am alone with Murphy, who sleeps in his plastic box. Pat has taken Spence to school, and my parents are at the cafeteria. I eat Jell-O, the taste filling my mouth, stinging the insides of my cheeks with sweetness. Whatever drug combo I’m on causes a sensory overload that is often pleasant. I marvel again at what a perfect and compact food Jell-O is. Hugely underrated.

  I finish the
cup and consider ringing for another but am vaguely embarrassed to ask for a fourth. I lie back on the incline of the bed, adjusting it slightly to the perfect angle for a post-Jell-O nap. I press the buzzer for the nurse to reel away Murph so I won’t be interrupted by his gurgles and chirps—since every time I hear a peep or imagine hearing it my eyes pop open, making sustained sleep impossible.

  As I gaze at the flowers on the nightstand, awed by the density of their color, I wonder again why so many new mothers are desperate to leave the comforts of the hospital. I’m so content that I keep thinking about how I can break open my stitches or give myself a concussion so that I can stay another day. I fiddle with the phone cord as I consider smashing my head on the metal bars of the bed.

  I barely notice a new nurse entering until she writes her name with a Magic Marker on the whiteboard: Yana.

  “What do you need?” she asks in a Russian accent.

  Yana looks like a plush art refrigerator, her white uniform pulled tightly across her square frame.

  “Can you take my son to the nursery?” I ask.

  I ask this weakly. I’m never sure how to address nurses. I certainly don’t want to sound like I’m ordering them around. They might retaliate by denying me medication.

  “When do you want me to bring him back?” she asks, unsmiling.

  “Back?”

  “In two hours, correct?” she says more than asks.

  “Whenever he cries is fine,” I say.

  “It should be every two hours.”

  I lift my head with effort and stare at her.

  “I’m feeding on demand,” I say.

  She looks back at me. “I’ll bring him back in two hours.”

  She gives a stiff nod, pivots, and leaves.

  What? Even in my drug haze I gather that my most basic child-rearing choices are being overridden by Yana, the day nurse. I turn my head to the wall and consider my options. Maybe leaving the hospital isn’t such a bad idea.

  Whenever I’m in the company of strong women, I buckle in the face of their decisiveness. The fact that they are so sure makes me question my own path. The fact that they issue orders with unblinking clarity makes me eager to follow them. I have been a willing submissive to ballsy women all my life. I give over power partly out of insecurity and largely out of laziness.