THE POO DOESN’T SMELL
We don’t tell people Jen is pregnant for months.
This is fine with Jen. If my introverted wife has her way, we won’t tell anyone she’s pregnant ever. She’ll just have the baby and people will think, I guess they have a baby? But not telling people things is challenging for me. I stand up at strip malls and state fairs and give long monologues with segues like, “And another thing about me!”
So finally I say, “Clo, we have to tell someone you’re pregnant because you can’t just show up with a baby because everyone’s gonna say, ‘Whose baby is that?’ And then we’ll have to say, ‘That’s ours. Sorry.’”
The first person we tell is Barack Obama.
We’re lucky enough to be in line to take a photo with the president, and I see this as a tremendous opportunity.
I say, “Clo, we should tell the president that you’re pregnant.”
And Clo says, “Absolutely.”
So when we get to the front of the line I say, “Mr. President, this is my wife, Jen. She’s newly pregnant. But don’t tell anyone.”
Which, by the way, is a great trick if you ever meet someone who you know doesn’t really care about meeting you: Tell them a secret. If you ever run into Jack Nicholson, you shouldn’t say, “What was it like making Chinatown?”
You should say something like, “I have a weird thing about kiwi.”
Then he’d say, “Wait, what is it?”
Next thing you know you’re doing a deep dive with Nicholson on kiwi. But it really is a decent tactic. When we tell the president our pregnancy secret, he says, “Umm… am I the first to know?”
Obama is hooked. Not only that, but he is doing the best Obama impression I have ever seen.
Then Jen says, “Yeah. Do you have any parenting advice?”
Obama says, “Ummm… get some sleep.”
And we’re laughing but only because he’s the president. It isn’t that strong comedically but he’s, like, your boss times a million.
Then Obama says, “No, actually, I got something. When you bring ’em home, the poo doesn’t smell…”
The president says “poo.”
The moment he says “poo,” I think, This is the greatest day of my life. I could die right now and I’d be fine with it. Like, if I make a false move and the secret service accidentally shoots me in the head, in those final moments before my body hits the floor, I would shout, “The president said ‘poo’! We’re alllll… justttt… peeeeople!!”
The president says, “When you bring ’em home, the poo doesn’t smell. It doesn’t smell like adult poo. Adult poo…” He stops to think about it. “… smells bad.”
Then he looks at me for affirmation.
I say, “Absolutely, Mr. President.” Then I think, Adult poo does indeed smell terrible. A belief I hold to this day.
Then he says, “When you bring ’em home, the breastfeeding doesn’t always work out right away. It can be a little wonky. Don’t freak out. And babies crave structure. In their sleeping and their eating. And if it doesn’t work out right away, don’t freak out.”
Then he pauses.
And he thinks about it, and I start to think about how much I’m going to freak out.
Then he says, “That’s actually some pretty good advice.”
He compliments his own advice.
Then Jen says what I believe to be the funniest thing one could say to the president of the United States.
She says, “If you think of anything else, text us.”
CLEAN FORKS
Five months into Jen’s pregnancy, we begin nesting.
“Nesting” is a term derived from the process of birds building a nest with their beaks. In the case of human beings, it involves activities like childproofing coffee tables and building a crib. It’s a little bit like cleaning up for a houseguest, except this houseguest makes you repeatedly wipe their ass and then doesn’t leave for twenty years. Hosting houseguests is not our forte. Also, being houseguests. Also, having a house. Let’s just say, we don’t have a lot of clean forks. Or spoons. Look, no one really does the dishes in our apartment and that’s worked out just fine for the two of us. The dishes in our sink get cleaned on a need-to-use basis. But there are about to be three of us and we realize that roommate number three might want some clean forks.
When Jen is five months pregnant we host some of our zombie friends with kids for breakfast. They casually ask us, “Where do you think you’ll give the baby a bath? What you have upstairs might not suffice.”
Jen says, “I haven’t thought about that yet.”
I say, “Maybe the sink?”
Our friend Katie says, “You could do the sink.”
But judging by her tone Katie doesn’t seem convinced. It’s like she’s saying, “You could dry your hair by placing it in a waffle iron.” Like she’s really not into the idea, and her raised eyebrows seem beyond her control.
I say, “Maybe we could build a bathtub.”
Katie nods and says, “That sounds like a better idea.”
To be clear, when we initially rented our apartment, we had no plans for children, so our standards for what a bathroom had to be were nothing. It had to have an area where clean water enters and dirty water exits. Thus, our body cleaning device was technically used as a shower, but there was no way it was ever purchased as an item called “shower.” It was three walls underneath a spigot of possibly clean and occasionally warm water.
That was fine for us, but it’s occurring to us now that this future baby might be a “bath person.”
So we start calling phone numbers from those tear sheets on supermarket bulletin boards. Next thing we know, these two guys who for the sake of their anonymity we will call “the bathtub boys” show up at our apartment, rip our bathroom into a thousand pieces, collect a deposit, and then don’t return for three weeks.
After the bathtub boys run out of our money at a casino in the Bahamas, they return to our apartment with a bathtub and a drill. That’s when the dust storms begin. Did I mention that Jen is allergic to dust? Also, the sound of drills. Jen is coughing and sneezing and the drills don’t seem to be providing the kind of therapeutic soundtrack those baby books recommend.
We are nesting.
The bathtub boys say it’s gonna be a day. Then they say it’s gonna be a week. Then they start making jokes that it might be a year, and those jokes are not funny because we are having a baby in four months. All jokes are offensive to someone, but these jokes are offensive to me.
This is when we start to get scared. After all, as far as we can tell the bathtub boys have no qualifications except the ability to print out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven flyer and have a phone number.
When they change the time estimates, Jen has no patience for this and yells at me, I assume with the idea that I would relay that yelling to them. Like a game of telephone, but with yelling. It’s like “yell-o-phone.”
Jen says to me, “The bathtub boys are liars!”
I say, “I know the bathtub boys are liars, but they have the upper hand! They have a bathtub and we have nothing!”
She says, “I can’t deal with them because they’re liars. I cooked them chicken and veggies in honey sauce and they’re lying to me!”
I say, “First of all, do you realize that my whole job is to work with liars? Show business is practically ‘Liars Incorporated.’ I perform shows sometimes for four hundred people and I walk offstage and the promoter will say, ‘There must have been eighty people in there!’ and I literally just saw the people! Second of all, we’re the ones who told our landlord we were doing ‘minor improvements’ on the bathroom and then we hired two guys to come over and turn it into a pile of dust. By that logic, we’re liars too.”
We are nesting. But not with the graceful instincts of birds. It’s like we are flying around with the intention of collecting twigs in our beaks to create a soft, safe bed for our offspring, but what we’re actually doing is choking on th
e sticks and also we have no idea how to fly.
Eventually, the bathtub boys finish the bathtub. Then we install a dead bolt on the front door. Then we get the house childproofed by two other folks who come over and charge us $150 for what I believe to be $3.50 worth of foam bumpers. I don’t know if the childproofers are liars, but their explanation of why their foam bumpers are superior to other foam bumpers feels a little light on facts.
Our final nesting decision is to install a “landline.” If you’re not familiar with this term, there are “cell phones” and those are just attached to nothing, no one knows how they work. And then you’ve got your landline… no one knows how that works, either, but it’s attached to a wire, or “line,” and so for some reason it feels safer. In end times you’re going to want that landline. People are going to be running around screaming that their cell phones don’t work, and Jen and I will be home with our landline ordering pizza and reading Dickens.
So we get one.
But we don’t give the phone number to anyone. To this day, no one knows the phone number. I couldn’t call us. Which means that when someone calls the landline, it’s a mistake. One night I am alone, nesting, and the phone rings and I pick it up and say, “Hello?”
The man on the other end says, “Hey.”
I say, “Hey.” I’m trying to match his energy.
I say, “Who’s this?”
He says, “You don’t know?”
I say, “No.”
He says, “You better get to know.”
Now I’m concerned. I walk to the front window and I look outside because I feel like I might be in the opening scene of the film Scream.
I say into the landline, “No, really, I don’t know.”
The caller says, “Uncle Dreesh.”
I say, “Uncle Dreesh, I really don’t know you.”
He says, “Sorry about that, wrong number.”
So here we are with a landline and only one person knows our number: Uncle Dreesh.
As Jen and I nest, we check off various boxes in preparation for this future baby. We hire liars to build a bathtub. We install a dead bolt to protect ourselves from liars. We buy foam bumpers from childproofing liars and get a landline in case Uncle Dreesh ever needs to be in touch. Jen keeps reminding me to install the car seat—this is the one item you need in order to take your newborn home from the hospital.
I assure Jen that I have it covered.
I’m lying.
BLEEDING
One night Jen wakes me up in the middle of the night and says, “I’m bleeding. A lot.”
We jump in a cab and rush to the hospital. Jen’s feeling sick in the car.
She says, “You can talk to me. I just can’t talk to you.”
I’m not good at consoling people because I’m a cynical person. Jen is too. Maybe “cynical” isn’t the right word. We’re both some combination of cynical and skeptical. Cynical is: The glass is half empty. Skeptical is more like: Is that even a glass? Is this even water? Whatever it is I spilled it on my computer. Sometimes I tell Jen really dumb jokes to calm her down. I scramble to think of a “joke” joke. My friend Henry had recently taught me this old-fashioned vaudeville joke, so I say: “I’m thinking of going clothes shopping in that state over the bridge…”
I wait for her to respond. Jen says, “New Jersey?”
I say, “New Jerseys, new pants, a whole new wardrobe.”
Jen smiles and then she says, “I think she’s gone.”
I say, “I’m not 100 percent convinced she’s gone.”
These are not the two people you want in a car on the way to the hospital—one person saying, essentially, “Our baby is dead,” and the other saying, “There’s a 5 percent chance she’s alive.”
I’m struggling to come up with something to say. Jen is bleeding and carsick. The driver is veering from lane to lane. As we make what feels like a ninety-degree turn onto exit 7, I say, “If the baby doesn’t make it, that’s okay too. Because we have each other and I feel lucky to have found you in this vast chaotic world.”
We hold hands until the cab pulls up to the hospital. We fill out the forms. We wait.
People are giving birth all around us. We’re flashing them approving smiles, like, Good stuff, y’all! We’re gonna wait to find out if this one’s alive, but way to go!
Jen bleeds for ninety minutes before the Open Broken Gooey shows up and explains that Jen’s placenta is bleeding.
I say, “Is it gonna be okay?”
The doctor says, “It’s gonna bleed more or it’s gonna stop bleeding.”
I think, That’s what I would say if I were pretending to be a doctor.
We have a momentary sense of peace but a larger sense of instability.
We feel better but only better than the worst, which is still in the range of bad. We stay several more hours for tests, but each test result seems to conflict with the others.
One test says: “Great baby!”
Another test says: “Is that a baby?”
When Jen goes for these tests, the receptionist asks us to sign these elaborate forms. We don’t bother reading the fine print. As far as we know they say “We may accidentally kill your baby!” or “We may take photos of your fetus and put them on fetus fetish sites.”
We sign them out of complete resignation to this process, which, at this point, is wildly out of our control.
When we leave the hospital, Jen’s doctor says something that I’ll never forget.
She says, “The good news is, the baby doesn’t know this is happening—in there.”
I think, I wish I was—in there.
Magic Trick
I bled and bled. I thought of friends who have gone through much worse and I bled. I thought of women across the world and in our own country who have no medical care and bled. I thought of blood and its magic trick—flowing cell by cell through time without ever leaving the body. How differently it performs than other liquids—
girl, I whisper
to my belly,
before they tell me she’s a girl,
my body may fail you,
(sorry),
but know this: your life belongs to you
& our time together
it has already begun.
DANGER ZONE
Two nights after our trip to the hospital, Jen attempts to initiate sex.
It’s confusing.
I’m not confused that she wants to have sex with me—I’ve accepted after years of therapy that she’s attracted to me. And the blood itself doesn’t faze me because, as I’ve stated, I’m a vampire and Jen’s blood is an aphrodisiac. What confuses me is that we just had this traumatic physical experience at the hospital, which is ongoing and unresolved, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, she’s in the mood for love.
To be clear, I believe pregnant women are our sexiest people. Pregnancy is the hottest multitasking imaginable—having the confidence to think, I got another person inside me, but, yeah, I’ll bang you.
That said, sex during the pregnancy is hard to predict. Jen doesn’t really want to have sex. Or not have sex. Or eat. Or not eat. Or do anything. Or not do anything. Which stands to reason. There’s a person inside of her doing the amniotic backstroke and practicing mixed martial arts on her rib cage. That might throw off my rhythms as well.
Jen and I have always had an unspoken communication. We once went to couples therapy and I said, “I feel like you want me to read your mind.”
Jen said, “Right.”
I said, “Got it.”
Over the years I’ve figured out how to read Jen’s mind and now, all of a sudden, there is another mind too. And that’s what I don’t see coming.
Which is all to say, two nights after we return from an emergency trip to the hospital—I misread the romantic signals.
At 11:00 p.m. I take a shower.
At 11:13 p.m. I exit the shower and walk into the living room, wearing a towel.
Then Jen says, “You’re
not interested in me”—which is not true.
I say, “That’s not true.”
She’s clearly upset.
I say, “Did you want to have sex?”
She says, “Yes, but forget it now.”
I say, “How could I have possibly known?”
She says, “I offered to scrub your back.”
I jog my memory. Yes. She had said that. Fuck. I must have thought she meant she’d scrub my back.
So here I am. It’s 11:20 p.m. I’ve misread the signals, to my own detriment. I understand she’s hurt and insecure, but I can’t grasp the idea of begging her to ask me to make a sexual advance when that advance is entirely contingent on her health and not mine. I have no idea what her sexual capacity or interest is and I have no way of knowing—unless she tells me. Which she didn’t. Or did. In back-scrubbing code.
So now I’m standing in the kitchen, sulking.
Jen sits down on the couch, sulking at me for sulking.
Which is the greatest injustice in relationship dynamics in the history of humankind.
1. Person 1 gets mad at Person 2.
2. Person 2 gets counter-mad at Person 1 for being mad.
3. Person 2 apologizes for a thing Person 2 doesn’t really even understand and buys Person 1 a pint of ice cream.
So somehow she gets ice cream and an apology, but guess what? I’m still secretly mad. I exit the apartment on a mission. I walk to the grocery store to buy ice cream. No pomp and circumstance. No ice cream photo shoots.
I deliver her a pint of McConnell’s cookies and cream with my sweetest, softest-thread-counted voice and I turn on a movie.
Movies have always been a sure thing for me and Jen. They are almost our religion. The film is the gospel. Our discussion afterwards is the homily. The coffee and doughnuts are the coffee and doughnuts.
I will confess that I have, on occasion, lied about my opinion of a movie for the sake of our marriage. I have been known to tell my wife I love a movie when in fact I only like a movie. I once made the mistake of telling Jen that I only liked her favorite film Picnic at Hanging Rock and didn’t love Picnic at Hanging Rock. It nearly ended our marriage. If you’re not familiar with Picnic at Hanging Rock, it’s a 1975 Peter Weir Australian mystery drama hinging on the mystery of: Why is this movie so popular? Seriously, why?
The New One Page 6