She was right. A week later, Lana wasn’t feeling well. We Googled her symptoms and it was okay, unless it got worse. Over the course of the day, however, we couldn’t write off what was happening to her as “normal.” We’d moved into “call your doctor immediately” territory.
Losing that pregnancy was hard, and we grieved. But we both took comfort in the idea that this particular one, for whatever reason, was not meant to be. As far as miscarriages go, it was the best of all possible situations. It happened very early in the pregnancy and resolved on its own. Lana didn’t suffer physical pain. And she was only thirty-two. We had plenty of time to try again. The hardest part was calling our families with the bad news only a week after we’d delivered the good news. Our families reacted the same way, nothing but positivity, love, support, and encouragement.
I’m not even sure the second miscarriage counts. We are the type of couple that can’t wait for anything. If I get Lana a Christmas gift in November, I have to run home and give it to her within two hours. If I have a surprise for her, I cannot hold it in, and vice versa. I think Lana was doing a pregnancy test just about every hour. Every CVS and Rite Aid within a five-mile radius was cleared out of e.p.ts and First Response tests because of us. One day, the sticks had a faint double line in the window. The next day, the line was gone. If we hadn’t been testing obsessively, we might never have known or even gotten our hopes up.
So now we were oh for two, but contrary to my usual default setting, I wasn’t worried. I headed off any anxiety by trying to figure out how to make a miscarriage story funny. I don’t touch a lot of social issues or politics in my standup, leaving those topics to people who are better informed than me. But in my act I am drawn to dealing with awkward and awful situations in one’s personal life, and the puzzle of how to turn tragedy into comedy. What would be the angle? How could I tell a joke about illness, death, or divorce? What observations could I make about miscarriage that other people would relate to and laugh at? It’s not like Lana and I were the only people dealing with it. Serial miscarriage is devastating and frustrating, and when it’s happening to you, it is all you can think about. But people don’t talk about it. First, you keep the pregnancy a secret for twelve weeks. If you don’t get that far, you have a second secret on top of the first. Since a miscarriage is sad and upsetting—and rolled up with self-blame and feelings of inadequacy—you swallow the bad feelings instead of airing them out.
Sometimes, it’s better to leave bad experiences untouched. Let it alone. But for me, as a comedian, my mind automatically goes there. How could I turn a sadness like that into something funny in any way, shape, or form? I’d be airing it out for my own sake, but also for anyone who’d been there, too. I haven’t worked our miscarriages into my act yet. I may never. But it’s worth thinking about.
After the second false alarm, Lana’s ob-gyn told us to wait before we tried again. She said that Lana’s body needed to recover and reset itself to be ready for a new pregnancy.
“How long do we have to wait?” asked Lana.
The doctor said, “Until after you have a normal cycle, which could possibly be a few months or more.”
It seemed like a long wait. Too long. Another doctor told Lana it was fine to go ahead and try. We didn’t intend to go against her ob-gyn’s orders, but we figured you can plan on it all day long, but if and when the timing is right, it will happen.
Literally three weeks after the doctor told us not to try, Lana said at breakfast that morning, “I think I’m pregnant.”
Immediately, I drove to the nearest pharmacy and filled up a basket with dozens of pregnancy tests. I had to get the digital one, the one that says “pregnant,” instead of the ones with the lines. These are not clear enough for me. In a world of emojis, I think they need to come out with the iPreg, an app where you urinate on the camera lens, and if you’re pregnant, a digital infant will dance across the screen. Drugstore tests are too subtle and need an update!
Lana basically spent the morning on the toilet, drinking water and peeing on every stick in the bag. Parallel lines, plus sign, they all said the same thing: definitely pregnant.
We were thrilled, but based on prior experiences, we didn’t let our hopes get too high. We wanted to be excited, but we knew the harsh truth about what could happen. I wouldn’t say we were pessimistic, more like cautiously optimistic. We lived for three whole months in that limbo between allowing yourself to be happy and keeping your emotions in check. We told no one close to us. The only people besides the doctor who knew were the nail lady at Pampered Hands (Lana had to make sure she didn’t use any harmful products), her Pilates teacher (no harmful exercises), and the guy at the juice shop (no harmful ingredients). We got the official go-ahead at eleven weeks, along with the gender, a girl! Lana intended to wait three days until she saw her mother in person, but who were we kidding? We FaceTimed her mom immediately and then shared the news with the rest of our family and friends.
Our next big project was in development. We were having a baby!
IF ONE PERSON in a relationship goes on a diet, it’ll never work. It has to be both of you.
Once, I told Lana I wanted to do a juice cleanse, and she said, “But I don’t want to.” I wasn’t asking her to do it, but by her logic, if I did a weeklong juice cleanse, we wouldn’t be able to go out to restaurants. We wouldn’t cook together, which we love to do, or have wine at night. Forget dinner dates with friends, or sitting around the kitchen table with coffee. I wouldn’t have the energy to take long walks or go for a run with her. By doing a cleanse, I’d be depriving her and us of the things we enjoy doing together.
By the same token, if one person is eating no-holds-barred, including stuff she’d typically avoided like ice cream and doughnuts, then the other person has to eat it all, too. I made the decision early on in the pregnancy that I’d partake. So if Lana said to me, “I’m going to order some ice cream to be delivered. You want?” The answer was “Yes!”
Ordering ice cream at night became a pattern during the pregnancy. If a wife is going to have a bowl of it in bed at 9 p.m., then, as a good husband, you better be right there next to her. Pregnancy gave me the excuse to feel liberated to eat whatever I wanted without guilt. There were no juice cleanses during this time to say the least. We basically did a world tour of cuisines from the comfort of our home, thanks to Postmates, a delivery service where you can get any meal from any restaurant brought to your door.
Lana’s only food restriction was no raw fish or rare meat. So when she got the craving for sushi, we’d order from Nobu, and she’d have rolls of cooked fish like eel and shrimp. She often craved steak, so I had recently learned how to cook it properly. I used to just throw a steak on the grill, and it always came out uneven. The outside would burn, and the inside was raw. I researched online the perfect method for getting a nicely seared, evenly cooked medium rare steak by doing it slow at a low temperature to allow the meat to retain the juices. My recipe:
Step one: Preheat the oven to 275 degrees.
Step two: Season the steak with salt and pepper.
Step three: Put it in an oven-safe pan and roast for forty-five minutes.
Step four: Take it out and let it rest for fifteen minutes.
Step five: Sear the meat on a dry, hot cast iron pan—no oil, no butter—for two minutes on each side.
Always juicy and delicious. Try it!
Our favorite nighttime snack is popcorn. My wife makes an unbelievable batch in the Whirley Pop (a pot with a churner inside for perfect popping). She puts a little vegetable oil in the pot, heats it up, and then pours in Boulder Popcorn’s Cambria’s Cream small kernels, and starts whirling. When it’s done, it goes in a bowl, lightly salted. During the pregnancy, we were knocking down bowls of it every night.
I know some expectant fathers complain behind their wives’ backs about how much they’re packing away. I was glad Lana was indulging! I figured, if she was eating, the baby was eating, too. And so was I! The res
ults were all too predictable: When Serafina was born in April 2016, I was the heaviest I’d ever been, at 208 pounds. I gained 23 pounds during the nine months of Lana’s pregnancy, which was nearly the same amount she gained. (I’m down to 198. Only 13 pounds to go. Ideally, I’ll lose it before Lana gets pregnant again, before I go right back up.)
Our pregnancy was all about staying home and eating, watching ourselves get bigger, and charting the baby’s growth. I went to every doctor’s visit and saw each sonogram. I would make commentary videos to send around. I was fascinated by the heartbeat and the changes on the monitor from visit to visit. Lana subscribed to a pregnancy website that described the baby’s size in utero week to week. “At eight weeks, the baby is the size of a clove of garlic.” “At twelve weeks, the baby is the size of a lime.” “At sixteen weeks, the baby is the size of an avocado.” Why was I suddenly craving guacamole?
TOWARD THE MIDDLE of the pregnancy, we hired a doula. A doula, in case you didn’t know, is a woman who talks you through the pregnancy and childbirth, explains things, answers questions, and gives you emotional support.
I asked my wife, “Is the doula a nurse?”
“No,” she said.
“Is she a doctor?”
“No.”
“Is she a trained expert?”
“She’s had a few kids of her own.”
“And how much does this cost?”
“I’m not sure. But it’s priceless!”
What? I knew better than to argue with a pregnant woman, so I just casually asked if we really needed a doula, and Lana insisted that yes, we did. My wife’s family does a lot of things that are unfamiliar to me. They’ve got staff. They hire a gardener, a housekeeper, and, apparently, a doula. Goes without saying that when I was born, the doula was my mom.
So this woman shows up at the house with yoga balls and diagrams of the female reproductive system. The icing on the cake was the stuffed animal placenta. She showed us different techniques to help with the birthing process and gave us an overview of how the delivery might go down. Lana and I acted like thirteen-year-olds in sex ed. We literally were dying laughing the entire time.
The doula was around thirty-eight and was very soothing, a real earth mother type. Lana intended to try to give birth without drugs, so the doula taught her techniques to lessen the pain of childbirth, and she had Lana do exercises on the yoga ball. She’d sit on it and spread her legs, to take pressure off the hips, and roll around on it. For weeks, the doula came over and taught Lana a bunch of techniques. Would any of them work? We’d have to wait until she went into labor to find out. I sat there watching all of this, thinking it was a scam. When my mom gave birth to me—I was ten and a half pounds—she had no drugs, no doula, and barely a husband.
Lana’s due date was May 1, but on April 24, a week early, the doctor said she was concerned about Lana’s fluid levels. If they got too high, the baby could be in danger. She suggested inducing labor, and Lana was all for it at that point. My wife was ready for the baby to come out and didn’t need to wait one more week for labor to start naturally. So before it even started, the “no drugs” labor was getting a medical intervention.
We didn’t go over that decision with the doula. There was nothing to discuss. If the baby was at risk at all, the all-natural plan got thrown out the window. We arrived at Cedars Sinai Hospital at 12:40 p.m., Lana was treated with Cervidil to get the process started, along with a Foley balloon in her cervix to open it up. I realized that all the discussion and planning about how the birth was going to go was really just something to do to prepare mentally. When it came down to the pure physical labor, none of that mattered, or even came into play.
Lana started having bad contractions right away after she was induced, but she wanted to hold out as long as she could without an epidural. After an hour, she said, “This is ridiculous. I need something.”
“The yoga ball?” I asked.
“Fuck the yoga ball,” she said. “I need the epidural!”
My wife is extremely strong and tough. She can run for five miles straight uphill, and she never mentions anything about pain. So for her to say she needed relief told me that she was in agony. I knew the contractions were killing her, and all I could do was stand there and watch it happen. I wanted to help, but how? Every father must feel as frustrated and powerless as I did in that room. I couldn’t wait for the anesthesiologist to show up with the needle. When he finally arrived, I was almost as relieved as Lana.
I’d heard that the epidural needle was six inches long. It had to penetrate her skin and muscle and go between vertebrae. Medicine was injected into the spinal cord, and any pain she felt below the waist would be gone.
My mother didn’t have an epidural. Maybe they gave her a leather strap to bite down on, I don’t know. In those days, fathers weren’t in the delivery room either. Matter of fact, I think my father was at the salon in the middle of a perm. I wasn’t going anywhere, but that didn’t mean I wanted to watch the needle go into Lana. They put a sheet up to keep the area sterile, and I stayed on the other side of it. I guess I could have been the dork who says, “I’m curious how it all works. Can I watch the procedure?” No way. If I’d have seen the procedure, I might have passed out, and then there would have been two patients in the room.
Lana’s relief was immediate. The pain wasn’t completely gone, she said, but it was a lot better. She got a “walking epidural,” so she could get out of the bed and move if she needed to go to the bathroom. I was so relieved that my wife was comfortable, I could finally relax.
Believe it or not, after the epidural, we actually slept for a few hours, Lana in the bed and me on the couch in the hospital room. I remember my mother-in-law shaking me awake to tell me that things were progressing fast, and that it was almost time.
Based on what I’d seen in movies and on TV, I’d thought the room was going to be packed like a sold-out show, with ten or twelve people in there, nurses running around, orderlies, candy stripers. But it was nothing like that. There was just the doctor, two nurses, Lana, me, and my mother-in-law, Simone. Lana started to push, and in my head, I was thinking, Where is everyone? Who’s working the monitor? Who’s going to dab Lana’s brow with a cold compress?
By now, the contractions were coming every two minutes. Lana would say, “I feel one coming,” and the graph on the screen would confirm that she was accurate.
“Push!” the doctor said. “Push like you’re taking a poop!”
So she’d push and do the breathing, and when the contraction subsided, she’d catch her breath and we would hang out and talk about things like the stock market or if we needed a few more throw pillows on the couch. Then push push push push, and I asked, “What are you in the mood for for dinner? I’m sort of in the mood for tacos. Or ramen.”
Lana said, “As long as it’s not hospital food! Okay, here comes another.”
Then push push push push, and relax. “Hey, baby,” I asked, “did you talk to the gardener about our agave plant?”
“Yeah, we need to change the sprinkler settings,” she said. “It’s getting too much water.”
“Okay, great, honey. I’ll get right on that.”
“Oh, I think I feel another one . . .” Push push push push . . .
Like that. Shockingly casual.
I also thought, based on movies, that two pushes would do it and the baby would just shoot out. Not true. After ten cycles of pushing, I stopped counting. I thought there’d be chaos and people shouting out hospital code and monitor readings. It was actually extremely quiet in there.
I remember I was holding my wife’s foot and the nurse was holding the other one. During one contraction in the beginning, I was looking up at Lana’s face and she said, “You can’t look at me while I’m doing this.” She made Simone and me look out the window, because she said it’s too awkward for us to see her shit face.
So I kept on holding her foot, and when she had a contraction, I’d look out the window. Then,
she’d say, “Okay, done,” the contraction passed, and I could look at her again. I kept this up, gazing out the window like a fool and then back at her, for an hour and a half. I remember seeing the Hollywood sign out the window and thinking, Wow, I came out here eighteen years ago with nothing, wanting to give the comedy business a try. Never did I imagine I would be looking at that sign and holding my wife’s swollen ankles while my daughter’s head was halfway out of her vagina.
When the baby crowned, I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch. But I looked anyway, and saw Serafina’s head emerge. It was just the top at first, and then the whole cranium popped out. The doula had warned us that the baby’s soft skull sort of collapsed to fit through the birth canal. Serafina was a Conehead. I thought, Holy shit, that is a huge head! Was it going to stay that way? Lana needed to plan some hairstyles that would flatter a pointy head.
A couple pushes later, the body came out. That’s my daughter, I thought, and started bawling. Bawling. At moments like that, I can’t control my feelings—and why would I want to? Seeing my daughter’s birth was beautiful, unforgettable. I can only describe it as uncontrollable joy.
The nurses and doctor start wiping her down, getting the mucus out of her nose and mouth, cleaning off her little body. It happened really fast. Then the doctor put a pair of scissors in my hand and told me to cut the umbilical cord. I was nervous to do it, thinking it might hurt Lana or Serafina, but I did it anyway, while still ugly crying with my mouth open. When I realized what the texture was like, I thought, I got this. The texture felt just like a piece of calamari.
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