“What would have been so difficult about throwing away that bright red dildo, Rachel?” “Bzzzz BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!”
“OK. Knock it off, Dratch. You’re being ridiculous. No, you’re being ridickulous. Ha! That’s—”
“Excuse me, Rachel?” said the producer for the segment, poking her head out of my bedroom.
“Yeah?”
“We’re putting up the partition and they were wondering if, to make it secure, they can drill a hole through your dresser to attach it to the partition.”
“Oh, sure.”
“OK, so they’ll just have to drill one hole, so they’re just going to need to remove the top drawer.”
“BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!”
I wish I were making this up.
If I were using the thing. If I were one of those girls who was like, “OK! But don’t mess up my sex toys! They’re all in order! Ha-HAAA! Cackle Cackle Donkey Laugh HAAA!” Fine. But I’m just not that girl! I went into fight-or-flight response. Milling around my room were two Latino workmen, several underlings, and producers, and there was about to be a horrifying reveal of the Telltale Dildo.
Oh God! What COULD I do? BZZZZ BZZZZ. BZZZZ BZZZZ. BZZZZ BZZZZ. Was it possible they heard not? No! No? Almighty God! They heard!—They suspected!—They KNEW!
Fooling absolutely no one, I told the producer I needed to get some things out of the drawer. She kindly shooed everyone out of the room while I did some of the worst acting of my life (and that’s saying something), pulling decoy items out of the drawer to fill a shopping bag—bras, bathing suits, you know, things you would just die if some people saw…. What! Underwear!?! Oh no! You would hate for a roomful of people to see that you wore underwear! Cast away your eyes, Latino workmen! For my dainty underthings you shall not see! No. I’m sure everyone in the room, including the Latino workmen, knew I was squirreling away some sort of sex device. Only they probably multiplied the actual item by a drawerful and threw in various shapes and sizes and colors and attachments in their imaginations.
Eventually, I did dispose of the Telltale Dildo, though it sat in my living room for a few weeks in that bag of bathing suits and bras, among all of the baby gifts that had started to pile up. Finally, the fear of a second discovery by my mom or some helpful friend offering to put away all my baby gifts made me put it in a bag and then another bag and drop it down the garbage chute. It’s probably lying in a landfill somewhere now. And some say, when the moon is full, you can still hear its angry roar. Hark! Louder! Louder! LOUDER!! It is the buzzing of the Telltale Dildo! BZZZZ BZZZZZZZ! BZZZZ BZZZZZZZ! BZZZZ BZZZZZZZZZZ!
’Tis ’Mones
I had the good fortune of being pregnant at the same time as my friend Amy Poehler. Amy had been through pregnancy before, so she was helpful and gave me lots of good advice. She didn’t follow all the strict rules about alcohol. She ate sushi, for God’s sake. One night, we went to a restaurant. She was more visibly pregnant than I, and the waiter asked if I would like a drink and then turned to Amy and said, “And you can’t have a drink!” To which Amy shot dagger eyes and said pointedly, “Yes, I can!” Don’t stand between a pregnant lady and her wine.
I didn’t have too many problems with hormones. Usually, I felt like I had happy hormones running through me—I took everything in stride in a new way. But if Amy was having a hormone day, she would say, “’Tis ’mones, my friend, ’tis ’mones!”
I did have one incident of ’mones. John and I were at a wedding in Wisconsin. We were sitting at the bar after the rehearsal dinner. Some of the guests were singing karaoke. I was six months pregnant and drinking a seltzer with lime. John had a beer. The familiar strains of the harmonica came on the speaker system—the beginning of the Billy Joel song “Piano Man.”
“Oh no! This song makes me sad,” I said.
“I love this song! Why does it make you sad?” said John.
“Why does it make me sad? Have you listened to the words?”
“Not really,” said John.
“You’ve never listened to the words of ‘Piano Man’?!” And I started singing along, staring at him pointedly to emphasize the tragedies he’d been missing out on by not listening closely enough.
“He says, ‘Son, can you play me a memory? I’m not really sure how it goes. But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man’s clooooothes!’”
“OK, OK. So? I still love this song!”
I continued singing along, banging on the bar with my hand for emphasis.
“He says, ‘BILL, I beLIEVE this is KILLing me,’ as a smile ran away from his face. ‘Well, I’m SURE that I COULD be a movie star if I could get out of this place!’” I was looking John right in the eyes and laughing, but at the same time my eyes were filling up with tears, welling up right there in the bar.
John started laughing. “OK! OK!”
“It’s sooo sad!!” Next verse. I was not letting up. No siree. “Now Paul is a real estate novelist, who never had time for a wife. And he’s talking with Davy, who’s still in the navy, and PROBABLY WILL BE FOR LIFE!”
“Oh my God! Okaaay! Take it easy!”
At this point, in spite of my laughter, I had tears of melancholy streaming down my face. I was wiping them away with my hand. I grabbed John’s wrist with my free hand.
“‘SING US A SONG, YOU’RE THE PIANO MAAAAAN! SING US A SONG TONIIIIIGHT! WELL WE’RE ALL IN THE MOOD FOR A MELODYYYYY. AND YOU’VE GOT US FEELING ALL RIIIIIIGHT!’”
Now I had a bar napkin to wipe away my tears, crying and laughing uncontrollably. I was like a hysterical woman out of an old movie who needed to be slapped across the face.
A week later, I heard the song come on the radio again. I texted John—“Guess what song is on right now. ‘Piano Man’!”
He texted me back. “I used to like that song ’til some girl ruined it for me.”
What can I say? ’Twas ’mones, my friend. ’Twas ’mones.
The Day I Became a “Baby Person”
The baby was due September 20. About six weeks out from that date, I learned Herc had turned around and was breech, poised to come out feetfirst, which usually means you have to have a C-section. There are homeopathic remedies to get the baby to flip. I’m not sure what was making me all nature girl about this stuff, but I was trying to avoid having a C-section. I went to a chiropractor who specializes in baby flipping. I went to an acupuncturist—a different acupuncturist than the Chinese storefront place, needless to say. (That’s “needless,” not “needle-less.” Ba-dum-bum.) According to the world of acupuncture, one of the ways to get your baby to flip—and this is for real—is to hold up lit incense a few inches from your pinky toes for twenty minutes a night. This is actually some ancient, 2,000-year-old Chinese secret called moxibustion. Something about the heat channeling into that particular meridian can flip your baby. (OK, at this point, I may as well just own that maybe I am into the idea of a metaphysical, other-plane, nonscientific world. Damn, as I look back, I’ve talked about prophetic dreams, channelers, messages from pigs, Blue Dot spirit guides, and now smoking up your toes—maybe I need to reconsider my self-perception.) Anyway, John was along for the ride: The guy who last year at this time was at the San Fran Food and Wine Fest, wearing a Vineyard Vines shirt, now found himself holding incense up for twenty minutes a night to the toes of a Jewess.
By now, Amy Poehler had had her baby, Abel, a week prior, and I went over to see him. There he was, newly born, tiny and frail and birdlike as any week-old baby would be.
“Here, do you want to hold him?”
“Noooo!” I thought. “Yes!” I said.
Mind you, my baby was due right around the corner; I was going to be in charge of one of these baby birds in five weeks! What if I let the head flop back? How do I hold the head? The head! The head! The neck. The head! I instantly wanted to toss him out of my hands like I was in a game of Hot Pot
ato, but social decorum and human ethics prevailed. I held him for about two minutes, all the while having what would be my last panic attack on the topic of Whatifisuckasamom? I left Amy’s apartment full of anxiety and self-doubt. The topic of panic trended with me for the rest of the day: Whatthehellamidoinghavingababy?
A week later and about four days into our toe ritual, I went in for a routine doctor’s visit and he saw that my amniotic fluid was low. This can mean your placenta is conking out and you have to have the baby right away. I had had a completely normal pregnancy up until this time. John had been in New York on a visit and was at the airport to fly back to San Fran. I called him from the doctor’s office. “Um, they’re saying I might have to have the baby tonight.” He got on the phone with the doctor, who told him, “If I were you, I wouldn’t get on the plane.”
John came back from JFK, skeptical that this was going to be a “thing.” By now it was six P.M. and we went to get the ultrasound to get further info. The radiologist came back into the room and said, “Well! You’re havin’ a baby tonight!”
We’d had a stroke of luck: When I called John to tell him the fluid was low, he was at the gate, and his plane was about to start boarding. Another ten minutes and he would have missed the birth of his son.
This was a month before the baby was due. I hadn’t even packed a bag yet. We took a cab back to my apartment, where I frantically threw stuff into a tote bag. Umm, pajamas, some baby clothes to bring him home in, uh, an iPod. John said, “Do you want to bring a book?” “No.” I continued my frantic packing. Toothbrush! Phone charger! “You want to bring a book!?” “No.” Underwear! Camera! Slippers? “Now you’re sure you don’t want a book.” “I don’t know how to make this any clearer—I DON’T READ!” (Sometimes when you are so frantic, you need to boil yourself down to your basic bullet points. Sure, with more time and in calmer circumstances, I may have elaborated that I don’t read as often as I’d like, and I fritter away my time on the Internet or watching bad TV. I snapped out “I don’t read!” instead, as I certainly couldn’t imagine recovering in the hospital as the time I was suddenly going to want to tuck into one of the ol’ classics. (“Ms. Dratch, may we check your catheter?” “Hold on. … I’m in a particularly riveting chapter of Middlemarch.”)
We got to the hospital. This was happening whether I was mentally prepared or not, so I could just coast along for the ride, as I had for the whole process. I had buried my head in the sand about all things birth-related. I am supersqueamish about medical stuff and this was the mother lode. I was going to have a C-section because the baby had to come out ASAP. I didn’t know this, but if your placenta is failing, it can’t sustain through a labor process. The decision had been made for me by circumstance. As I lay there waiting and just hanging out, I could hear the screams and moans of pain from a woman in the next room. “AAAAGGGGHH!” she cried. “AAAAAGGGGG-HHH!!”
Huh. Maybe I was lucky I was escaping from the natural earth-mama way after all.
I was brought into the operating room and was surprised by its stark and clinical quality. I was expecting a delivery room, like with some plaid curtains and maybe a poster of some badly rendered flowers. No. This was an OR. Metal instruments everywhere. Cold. No flower posters, ladies. I’m telling you all this because it’s the kind of stuff I always avoid reading. I had tuned it all out.
You get an epidural, which really wasn’t bad at all. Nothing hurt, but the anaesthesia makes you really cold, so I was shivering uncontrollably, shaking as if I were having a seizure. Then they lay you down on this table with your arms out in a Christ pose, throw up a curtain so you can’t see your guts out on a table, and start the operation. I kept shaking and shaking and had the worst heartburn I’d ever had in my life. And I could feel a tugging in my guts … but nothing truly heinous. John was sitting up near my shoulder, being very sweet. “You’re doing great.” He also kept telling me to breathe, which is what you tell people who are going through labor. I wanted to tell him to stop telling me to breathe because it had nothing to do with my situation, but all I could bark out was a quick “Sh!” At one point, John stood to readjust his chair. Big mistake. He saw over the curtain—his Viet Nam experience, as he calls it. I’ve still never asked him what he saw, but I think it was my intestines.
Then we heard it … the Cry! The Cry from behind the curtain! It was so sweet and little and high! They brought The Baby, for he was still The Baby until we laid eyes on him, under some heat lamps to work on him because he had a little fluid in his lungs. I couldn’t quite see him where they had him, but John could. He looked over and aptly described our son upon seeing him in the first minute of his life. “He’s beautiful! … He’s a charmer!” Even having spotted him for mere seconds and from ten feet away, the fact is, John was exactly right.
Though I waited until the last day in the hospital to fill out the birth certificate, there was one name from my list that John liked as well, and it never lost its number one position, no matter what other names were tossed about. I officially let go of the name Herc, though it will forever have a place as his in utero nickname. My mother’s head remained intact. We named our baby Eli.
When we were sprung from the hospital, we waited at the elevator with two other couples, who seemed as dazed and clueless as we were. We were all being set free to care for these tiny creatures and just figure this out on our own. Looking at our faces, I wondered how the human race continues to survive.
“Do-It-Yourself Infant Care”or, If You Live Outside Manhattan, “Infant Care”
I opted not to have a baby nurse when Eli was born. If you live anywhere but New York, you are thinking, “What the hell is a baby nurse? Was something medically wrong with your child?” Well, in Manhattan, it seems like everyone gets a “baby nurse.” A baby nurse is someone who is an expert in all things baby and who is there twenty-four hours a day for at least the first two weeks, although more often for a few months if you are really living it up NYC-style. With my one-bedroom apartment, I didn’t want to be negotiating around a stranger and a cot during this time. Same with a nanny. Everyone has a nanny here. But without a job to go to, there was really no need, and I wanted my space. I wasn’t reporting to a set, where my baby could hang with the nanny while I was off shooting a scene. I was home, and I thought I’d feel weird having a stranger give my baby a bottle while I sat four feet away, nonchalantly watching TV and pounding Doritos. Besides, caring for my newborn was a whole new adventure—I finally had a project, a purpose, a something-to-do!
At this point in my life, I was glad to be doing things this way. If I were younger and still climbing the career ladder, if I hadn’t traveled as much yet, if I were still craving the party scene, I might feel differently, but because the baby came so late in the game, I didn’t feel torn about staying with him all the time. The big slowdown of my career, which initially felt like such a curse, actually felt quite fortunate now. I could truly say: “See that, Hollywood!? Mwah hah hah haaa! I’m the winner here! I get to stay here with my baby all day if I want to, all day, every day, and not leave him with my staff or a nanny. I don’t have to leave the house at six A.M. and get back at all hours of the evening. I get to be here day after day and not miss a moment! What’s that, Hollywood? You don’t care? Oh yeah? … Well … OK. Well. You just … you! … OK, forget it.”
John and I figured out everything as we went along—fascinating stuff like belly button maintenance, proper burping, and bottle sterilizing. If I had doubts about my child-care abilities, I’d think of teen mothers to make myself feel better. (There are sixteen-year-olds doing this on MTV! Surely, I can do it!) Without any outside help, there were definitely times when I was totally overwhelmed by all of my own little tasks that needed a couple minutes. I didn’t understand before I had a baby that, except when they are asleep, you have no time to do anything. I don’t mean time for luxurious things like reading a magazine or talking on the phone or cooking yourself dinner. (We ordered delivery on a nightly ba
sis for about six months, I believe.) I mean you don’t have time for such basic things as taking out the garbage or doing the dishes or taking a shower. Until he was about four months old and could roll over, Eli lay on a little pillow and watched me take a shower every day, so he may be scarred for life.
Eli was so tiny and delicate and sweet. At the beginning, I checked him obsessively as he slept in the bassinet next to the bed. “What are you doing?” John would whisper.
“I’m just checking him.”
“He’s fine,” came the voice from the darkness.
“Well, I’m a Neurotic Jew!” I retorted.
“Well, take it easy, N.J.”
One night, John was asleep and I crept over to Eli, trying to make out his figure in the bassinet and just make sure he was breathing. I crept back silently into the bed, thinking my check went unnoticed. Two seconds later, I heard a whisper from half-asleep John.
“What’s going on, N.J.?”
Busted.
I was never getting more than four hours of sleep straight for a stretch, if that, and this went on for two or three months, yet everyone said I was glowing. I felt like I was glowing. The SNL schedule was perfect training for motherhood; I was used to crazy nighttime hours. Being awake at three in the morning, in the dead of night when the streets are pretty quiet, didn’t feel at all weird to me. It actually felt quite normal. And I was fortunate enough to avoid the ’mones that make you crazy and sad after giving birth. If anything, I was feeling euphoric. Sure, I had a few meltdowns when I could not get Eli to sleep after trying for hours. One morning at around five A.M., when Eli was about two months old, I was sobbing, walking around the apartment with him screaming and me just saying, “Please go to sleeeeep.”
Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle Page 16