So here I am. It’s almost midnight and I need to deliver a movie that is a sure thing. So as Jen sits on the couch, downing a pint of cookies and cream, I turn on what I believe to be one of the most feel-good films of all time: Top Gun.
As I press “play,” I say to Jen, “I really think you’ll love this movie.”
Then, as an afterthought, I say, “It’s sort of who I am.”
Jen says, “It’s who you are?”
I say, “It was a big part of my childhood.”
One piece of advice: Don’t force your partner to watch a film you haven’t seen since childhood and don’t remember that well and preface it with the phrase “this is who I am.”
I had forgotten that Top Gun is a homoerotic fighter-jet film. We’re watching this scene where the handsome fighter-jet pilots are playing beach volleyball and they’re shirtless and oiled up. They don’t look a whole lot like me.
And my pregnant wife leans over on our green/gray couch and whispers, “Is this the movie that’s who you are?”
I try to explain it. I say, “I was eleven years old. I was at John Casey’s birthday party. After the movie ended we all danced to the theme song ‘Danger Zone.’” The more I explain, the more I feel myself becoming less sexy in real time.
But by the time the film ends and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” reprises, Jen offers to scrub my back.
This time I do not make the same mistake. We had momentarily lost that loving feeling, but now it’s back.
Top Gun wins again. Great balls of fire.
Maybe it’s the exact level of escapism we need to take our minds off the pregnancy.
Maybe it’s the toe-tapping soundtrack that brings back that loving feeling.
Or maybe, just maybe—in that moment—Jen looks within my soul and spots my inner shirtless fighter-jet pilot who merely yearns to blow off steam with a little beach volleyball.
Maybe this is who I am.
DADDYMOON
When Jen is six months pregnant I go on a solo vacation. Not on purpose. That’s just how it goes down.
I had planned a “babymoon” up the coast of California. If you’re not familiar with the term “babymoon,” it’s a trip where you take your pregnant wife on a vacation to celebrate that you’ll never be alone together ever again. Ever. Again, ever.
Jen and I had gone to the beach on our second date twelve years ago so I could establish that I was a “beach person,” and then we never went to the beach again.
That said, I plan this trip up the coast of California and figure out how to pay for it with gigs along the way. So every three days on our “vacation” I have to do a show. That way we don’t go broke before spending our savings on diapers, babysitters, and therapy.
Unfortunately, Jen is still bleeding when the babymoon date arrives, so her doctor suggests she not fly because she classifies Jen’s pregnancy as “high risk.” Obviously, it’s a tough pill to swallow when someone cancels on “the last time you’re ever going to be alone together for the rest of your lives.” Somehow I make my wife’s high-risk pregnancy of our unborn child about me. Nevertheless, I booked all these gigs so I have to make the trip alone.
Now it’s a daddymoon.
Every night I’m alone in the honeymoon suite of a different beachside resort, and after the shows I sit alone in a heart-shaped tub eating chocolates and drinking champagne.
So one morning, I find myself sitting poolside on a lounge chair overlooking a beach in Santa Barbara. I’m sitting there without my shirt. On the table next to me is a tube of Banana Boat SPF 50. Somehow I can’t muster the energy to put it on. It’s always hard to justify applying sunblock because I know that I cannot reach every square inch of my skin, so putting on sunblock becomes amateur body painting. A day after I get heavy sun, my body looks like a red-and-white abstract painting. People look at my back and say, “Is that a cloud? Is that a bunny?”
I have to explain, “That’s an area where my arms don’t reach.” Shit. I have short arms. I hope my kid doesn’t get my short arms.
I look across the pool at another couple rubbing sunblock on each other. I think about asking to join their team.
Room for three at this sunblock party?
Probably not the best idea.
If Jen were here I’m not sure I’d even subject her to applying my sunblock. It’s an involved process. My body has all kinds of dips and grooves. It’s like asking someone to butter a walrus.
I’m sitting on the lounger, and a seagull sits on the chair next to me. He’s huge. I’m not gonna say he’s the size of a person, but it feels like he’s the size of a person. It’s possible that the Klonopin has not worn off at this point in the morning. So a seagull who seems like he’s the size of a person is sitting on a chair next to me eating home fries. Someone has left their half-eaten plate of food from earlier. I’m starting to get worried that the seagull might abruptly leave his breakfast and flap his enormous wings in my face. Or maybe accidentally whack me with one of his enormous talons. Do seagulls have talons? As I mentioned, I don’t know anything. I get up to shoo the seagull from his chair.
I shout, “Come on! Get out of here!”
I’m shouting at a seagull. Even worse, I’m shouting at a seagull as though the seagull speaks and understands English. There might be a lesson in that. We all ask for things in ways we understand and expect other people to understand, instead of entering their perspective. Maybe I’m doing that with Jen right now. Or maybe I should learn how to speak seagull.
I get up off the lounge chair and walk towards the cliff overlooking the beach. I have a pain in my psoas muscle—that’s the one that extends from the lower back to the femur. My brain immediately converts this thought into the worst-case scenario. Maybe the psoas pain will get worse and, in combination with my aging and tightening ligaments, make me a debilitated old man. I didn’t even plan to be old in the first place. Fuck. I wake up tired every day. My moods pivot from manic to sad and in so many ways depend on how much caffeine I’m drinking. Now I’m having a kid. Fuck.
I walk to the edge of the cliff and there’s no obvious way to get down to the beach so I climb backwards down these enormous rocks. The smell of the beach and the precariousness of the rocks transport me to my childhood when my parents would take me to Cape Cod and I’d climb down sand dunes at the national seashore.
I think about how my ten-year-old self didn’t even imagine a forty-year-old self.
Perhaps the most baffling thing that occurred in my thirties was that I started living in the oblivion I had not imagined as a child. As a young kid I wanted to be a comedian and a rapper and then, in my twenties, I realized I could actually do one of those things.
In my thirties I realized I hadn’t planned to live until my thirties.
That’s a strange space to live in.
The great beyond.
It’s not outer space but it’s close enough. It’s outer time—which is even scarier because you can’t draw a picture of it.
Did people plan to have children when they were children? I guess I knew kids who would play with dolls and pretend that the dolls were their babies but, Jesus, we weren’t serious about that, were we?
The end has always felt near. My friend Mitch was dead at thirty-seven. My friend Greg was dead in his forties. Neither of these was from natural causes. I always thought there was a decent chance I would go too. When I started to make a living in my late twenties, Joe encouraged me to start a 401(k) and I thought, Okay, but who is it for? I’m not going to be old. Maybe he’s trying to trick me into saving money for him when he’s old. He seems like someone who could be old.
Aging is like climbing to the top of a mountain and then you either jump off and die or inch your way down until you fall to your death. I never imagined the inching part, just the climbing. Not to mention, if God wanted me to die, sending me through a double-paned window in my sleep at a motel in Walla Walla, Washington, might not b
e the least obvious sign.
He must have been watching me jump through that window and thinking, This motherfucker can’t do anything right. I look around at people my age and I think, Now what do we do? We’ve peaked. We’re like soft avocados. We should have stickers on us that say “ripe ready to eat.”
I arrive at the bottom of the rocks, and my feet hit the beach. The physical act of standing in sand has always shocked me into the present. I walk down the beach, staring out at the waves and the cliffs in the distance.
The beach has always appealed to me. The simple act of walking into the ocean reminds me that I’m alive.
The beach has always been exciting because it’s a force larger than myself. I never really believed in God, but I believe in the earth. I believe it is bigger than me. In case you didn’t look at the author photo, it is.
I’m standing on the sand and my phone vibrates.
It’s Jen.
I pick it up and immediately enter a world of dropped syllables and static. It’s amazing how your phone signal can be so clear when it’s ringing and then, the moment the connection is made, it drops out like a messenger who travels the world on foot just to say, “There’s a message for you.”
And then dies.
Jen explains through patches of static that the bleeding has continued and that, to make matters worse, the doctor noticed that Jen has hypermobile hips. The doctor expressed concern that Jen might break or dislocate her hip during labor, which is obviously not great timing.
I say, “Clo, I’m so sorry.”
Jen says, “Thanks. How are you doing?”
I say, “Things are fine.”
Things aren’t fine. I’m away from the person I love most, who is bleeding and anxious about giving birth, and I didn’t even want to have a child in the first place.
I say, “I love you. It’ll be okay.”
We hang up.
I don’t know if it’ll be okay.
A Fish Calls a Human on a Cell Phone
Hello] I’m a—]
]] Hell—
] I’m a ]]
a fish.
A FISH.
hell
—
o?
]] damn phone
there is no animal like you]
]] hello
]I’m a
[I’m a
]]
] ffff ]hello!
[damn fffff—
I’m a—[[
Hello.
BABY’S EYES
Jen and I are so nervous about her hypermobile hips that we sign up for a holistic birthing education class, which isn’t a great fit.
For starters, it involves a lot of class participation, and my beloved introvert isn’t eager to share.
The instructor opens the class with the question: “What’s the most exciting thing about having baby?!”
She looks around the room for answers.
I don’t have anything. Jen doesn’t either. I’m also thrown when people don’t use the word “the.” Apparently, they don’t say “the baby” or “a baby.”
They just say, “Baby!”
We’re so nervous that we’re thinking, We just want baby to live! We don’t have high hopes for this thing because we went to hospital and we talked to doctor who did test and it’s touch and go at moment.
Apparently our classmates feel differently.
One lady says, “I wanna hold baby skin to skin!”
Another lady pronounces, “I just want to see the world through baby’s eyes!”
I think, See the world through baby’s eyes? How did you make this about you? It’s another person and now you’ve invented this futuristic eye surgery? Get ahold of yourself! What happens if the baby’s blind? He feels terrible about himself, like, “My mom only had me for my baby’s eyes and they don’t even work!”
After our classmates empty their clichés into the cliché basket, the instructor begins a speech about “the fourth trimester.”
“The first few months of baby’s life are ‘the fourth trimester.’”
I think, I’m not sure you understand math. You can’t just make up new numbers. You can’t be like one… two… three… goat cheese.
Then the instructor says, “When baby comes out they’ll try to take her away to check her vitals, but don’t let them!”
I think, I’m pretty sure I’m gonna let ’em! They’re called vitals, not optionals! I think we might go with the grain on that one!
Then she says, “The doctors might tell you that baby’s heartbeat is slow, but don’t listen to them. This is not a medical event. This is a natural event.”
I think, Um, so is death.
Jen and I start writing notes to each other with snarky comments, like bad kids in fifth grade. I think, We should not be having a kid. We are bad kids!
Everything in birthing class feels wrong. Two hours into the class we take a break and share communal snacks—which also feels wrong, but that’s a whole other topic. But this snack break feels like the moment we can discreetly mention the hypermobile hips to our instructor.
We pull her aside and I say, “Jen’s doctor says that she has hypermobile hips. We’re thinking of considering a C-section so she doesn’t break her hip during labor.”
The instructor looks at us like a dog being taught math.
To be clear, the C-section is the enemy of natural birth, though it’s a one-sided rivalry like the Red Sox and Yankees. The Red Sox hate the Yankees and the Yankees are like, “Right. We’re the Yankees.” In this case the Yankees are modern medicine and the Red Sox are natural childbirth. (This analogy is offensive to all.)
When we bring up the idea of possibly having a C-section, our birthing instructor doesn’t answer. She just gives us this look that says, Why would you do that? I hope you break your hips.
Fish Doctor Play
DOC cuts into FISH’s abdomen.
Her purple-silver scales form a rainbow
under operating lights.
DOC removes a plastic bag from FISH’s gut.
“DOC?”
“Yes, FISH?”
“How many hearts is it that beat inside me?”
DOC removes part of a rubber tire,
then a syringe.
“Do you feel pregnant?”
“All my life.”
To be clear, we’re still committed to a relatively natural childbirth. Earlier that week we even hired a doula. Which wasn’t the easiest thing to do because we didn’t fully understand what a doula does. It was like if you hired a swan wrangler for a wedding. You’re basically interviewing someone to not be an asshole and to know more than you do about swans.
We hired Audrey. She seemed friendly and knew more than we did about swans. I privately called her Natural Birth Audrey (NBA). NBA had doula’d (fake word) hundreds of births. That seemed good. And she was very expensive so at least we’d have a reason to complain if she failed. Fear of failure is a recurring theme.
Everything in birthing class feels like something we will fail at. The instructor does a three-hour lecture on breastfeeding: “If baby doesn’t latch in the first four days of breastfeeding, don’t give up. Don’t give her formula. Keep trying.”
I think, We’ll probably give up! Is that cool too?
“If the hospital tries to give you packets of formula on the way out, don’t take them!”
Awesome! I think we’ll take them. Especially if they’re free! By the way, is there anything else that’s free?
One night we’re walking home from birthing class and Jen starts making out with me because the same hormone that causes hypermobile hips sometimes causes people to crave sex, so when we get home we have this magically pregnant sex with all these contractions and these very loose hips. It’s like having sex with Space Mountain.
I say, “Hold on!!”
We’re both so afraid that at any moment Jen might give birth into my penis, which they never discussed in birthing class:
No one
ever said: “I just want to see penis through baby’s eyes!”
In the third trimester the bleeding stops, which is a huge relief, and the morning sickness goes away but every day contains some combination of relief and pain, sometimes both at once.
One morning Jen wakes up and says, “I didn’t sleep all night because the baby’s head was pushing into my rib cage and also through the side of my stomach and I couldn’t breathe or even really lie down.”
I say, “Clo, I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”
Jen says, “This is the greatest feeling of my life.”
SYMPATHETIC EATING
At the start of Jen’s pregnancy, I weigh 180 pounds. That’s before Jen starts eating for two and I start eating for six.
I’d like to think this is “sympathetic eating.”
If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s when you see the person you love eating a pint of double-chocolate-chip ice cream and you sympathize with them. You think, I’d like some of that ice cream as well because I’m sympathetic to your ice cream plight.
Other examples include:
Oh my God, I’m so sorry you’re having cramps—are you gonna finish those fries?
Oh no, you’re having back pain—we should order Chinese food.
You couldn’t sleep all night because of the baby kicks? I like French toast also.
Jen and I have a lot in common. But one thing we’ve never had in common is food. Jen likes lettuce. Jen likes greens. Jen likes food that is non-artificially green. I like FD&C yellow #5 combined with FD&C blue #1 (green).
Jen enjoys apples. I spend more time with apple derivatives: apple juice, applesauce, apple cider doughnuts. If there’s no sugar added, I don’t get it. In both ways. I don’t understand it and I don’t purchase it. Often in the course of our relationship we have divided up one single serving of food. I will order a chicken sandwich with everything on it. I will eat the chicken and the mayonnaise and the bread. Jen will eat the onions and the lettuce and the tomatoes. That is a family meal.
The New One Page 7