When Jen is pregnant we eat the same food. Cakes and bagels and croissants. One morning we walk to a café and ask for a chocolate croissant and the barista says, “We don’t have the chocolate croissant today.” As we walk away I say to Jen, “When else would we want the chocolate croissant? If we had twenty-four hours to think about it, we probably wouldn’t purchase a candy bar wrapped in bread. We want the chocolate croissant now.” Jen laughs. We’re on the same page. We’re bad eaters.
In the third trimester Jen starts eating like a college freshman—hot dogs and ice cream and mayonnaise. One day she’s on the couch eating three hot dogs all at once and she looks up at me and says, “I feel like I understand you now.”
I say, “I think that’s the most offensive thing you’ve ever said to me. Is that how you have viewed me all these years? Just this ogre who swallows buckets of hot dogs and ice cream and mayonnaise? Sure, that’s a part of me, but it’s not the whole picture.”
One day after a trip to Jen’s OB-GYN in Manhattan, we make a special trip to Wok 88 and eat a Chinese feast for ten. Spareribs and fried rice and beef with broccoli. We put ourselves into a food coma, though I find that term a little offensive to people in an actual coma.
“How’d you end up in a coma?”
“I was knocked unconscious by an oncoming motorcycle.”
“How about you?”
“Rice.”
We work up such an appetite sitting in a taxi ride home from Wok 88 that we walk into our apartment and order more food.
When the food shows up we play a game we call “Who Is Less Naked?”
This is a competition to see who is more appropriately dressed to open the door for the food delivery. To be clear, I almost always win this game yet still open the door—making the true loser of the game the food delivery man.
One day we’re on the couch and I say, “Have you seen my car keys?”
Jen says, “Cookies? Who has cookies? Do you have cookies?”
I don’t have cookies, but I quickly find the car keys so I can drive to the cookies. This is who we are.
Together we eat pizza and pastries and potato chips and potato bread and potato pancakes and regular pancakes and spoonfuls of mayonnaise and peanut butter and double hamburgers and triple hamburgers and triple-chocolate ice cream sandwiches. My sympathy is overwhelming.
Even when I’m alone on the road I go big. One day I land in Chicago for a gig and I order a Lou Malnati’s pizza during the taxi ride to my hotel. I lie in bed, eating this platter-sized pizza with a bath towel on my lap.
After I finish the pizza I roll off the bed to jump in the shower before heading to my show. I wander over to the bathroom scale. The needle of the scale springs to the right with a ferocity I have never witnessed. It’s the heaviest I’ve ever been.
I think, It’s fine. I’m pregnant.
Maternity Pants
I always look a little pregnant
but this is ridiculous.
One part titty-porn/ One part maternity pants.
I have the libido and appetite of a college freshman dude.
Hormone-soup & sleepless,
I misread the word “mega-drought” as “mega-doughnut.”
I am a hotdog-eating-vegetarian.
I can feel my belly grow when I walk
into a home improvement store.
I am a silly result
of blood flow.
When it flows to my uterus:
I am a silly sex.
When it flows to my result
I am a poem.
NATURAL HISTORY
One morning Jen and I are lying on the couch and I’m rubbing her shoulders and we’re sharing a pint of double-peanut-butter-chocolate-chip ice cream and Jen says, “It’s hard for me to breathe or speak or move.”
I say, “That really limits your options. That’s my big three.”
She says, “I feel…” She pauses, then takes a long, deep breath. “Like a mammal.”
I say, “You are a mammal. We’re both mammals. What do you want to do?”
Jen says, “I want to go to the Museum of Natural History to be with the other mammals.”
So we go to the Museum of Natural History.
We start at the Hall of Human Origins. We stare at the exhibit of humans and chimpanzees who both evolved from hominins. Next in the human chain comes Orrorin then Ardipithecus then Australopithecus then Homo erectus then Homo sapiens. Don’t quote me on any of this because “the mystery remains unresolved.” But there’s something about staring at these fossils that gives me and Jen a sense of peace. We’ve visited this museum scores of times through years of dating and marriage, but it never gets old. Or, rather, it already is old. It can get older but not that much older in relative terms.
We love the museum. There’s something calming about staring at dust and thinking, We will be dust someday as well. Dust isn’t so bad! I just hope to get my bones some decent placement at the museum. Hopefully they don’t mistake me for Australopithecus. I’m five foot eight and a half and have terrible posture so that kind of mix-up would be understandable.
We also take solace today in the idea that all of these ancestors gave birth. And lived. And died. And did their best. With much worse health care plans.
We wander over to the Hall of Ocean Life. This is one of Jen’s favorite spots. She loves fish. She writes poems about fish. She also enjoys small portions of food as well as swimming. I take photos of Jen with porpoises and walruses and dolphins.
Jen stares at the orca and says, “This is the happiest I’ve ever felt.”
We get to the big blue whale. Jen looks up at this luxury bus–sized creature and then looks at me. She has something big on her mind.
She says, “I know that you didn’t want to have a kid and I want you to know that I’m going to work hard so this baby won’t change the way we live our lives.”
The next morning at 10:04 a.m. our daughter is born.
IV.
MONKEY ARRIVES
A REALITY-BENDING EXPERIENCE
Our daughter’s birth is a reality-bending experience because two colossal events occur simultaneously. One is that a human being enters the earth for the first time.
The second is that my wife, this person whom I love and cherish and know better than anyone in the whole world—in front of my eyes—becomes a mother.
And I pretty much stay the same.
That’s the strangest part because I’m watching this whole thing go down and thinking, Well, this is nuts. I don’t know what I could possibly do to help. I guess I’ll just write an email to everyone we’ve ever met.
Which is the chief responsibility of the dad. The mom births a living fire hydrant through her vagina, and then the dad knocks out an email to his list. She does the physical and he does the clerical.
I forget to write the email.
I’m not proud of that. It’s just that for those first ten hours, I’m stunned by the trippy hospital lights and this chlorine smell, and I’m wearing one of those art school smocks and a shower cap, and at a certain point they hand me this monkey.
And I think, But we’re humans.
And they give me this look, like, This is what it is.
And then you have to take it home.
It’s completely frowned upon to leave it there. And the nurses try to dress it up. They’re like, “We’ll put a striped blanket on it and a beanie. We’ll make it look like E.T. You can give it a name!” So we call our monkey Oona, which means “one,” as in, We’re only having one.
I’ve been very clear.
In the eleventh hour we decide Jen should get a C-section. The fear of Jen possibly breaking her hip feels overwhelming. We want to be the perfect soldiers for natural everything, but in the final moments we make the judgment call for Jen to not risk breaking her hip.
The quirky by-product of the C-section is that we have already hired Natural Birth Audrey the doula, whose main qualification is that she isn’t a
n asshole and something about swans. NBA’s job is to guide us through the wonders of natural childbirth, but then that’s not really what this is.
This is literally the opposite of natural childbirth. This is medical childbirth. There are no natural wonders, but there are medical wonders that I am quite impressed by. So NBA sort of stands there as we all witness a non-natural birth.
Jen’s C-section takes about twenty minutes. And the doula is usually there for twelve or fifteen or sometimes even forty-eight hours. But I’ll tell you something about the doula: If you have a short labor, you don’t get a price break. You don’t get deep doula discounting. We pay the full natural price. No matter how awestruck we are and how deeply in the moment we feel in this once-in-a-lifetime high of we just had this baby, it’s still a little awkward when Audrey says, “I think I’m gonna head out.”
But this isn’t the time to worry about money. This is the time to worry about monkey. We have achieved our goal of getting the monkey out of Jen’s body. That said, the monkey is furious. And she isn’t wrong. I’d be furious, too, if I came out of the womb. It’s just better in there. The womb is like an all-inclusive resort. You’re sipping amnio-tinis, floating around in the lazy river. It’s soft and wet and warm and everything is taken care of through the cord. The womb is so much better than the earth.
So it stands to reason that when we pull Oona out of the womb, she’s miffed.
She’s like, Do not cut the cord!! If you cut that cord I will ruin your life for seventeen years!!
And that’s how it starts.
But Oona is healthy. For that we are so deeply relieved.
Oona has big blue eyes like her dad, a smile like her mom, and miscellaneous other features like monkeys in Africa, India, and Japan. Oona moves and smiles and feels like she did in her mom’s belly. She looks exactly like she did in the twenty-five-week scan. Her head is the same shape, her legs curled in the same way. She feels like the same person. As though she wasn’t just born, she has only changed locations. Like she just had a really bad flight.
I’ve never seen Jen so happy in my life. It’s almost like I have witnessed fifteen years of my wife’s fake smile and now I see the real smile.
And that feels weird.
And beautiful.
And weird.
Just when we’re able to have a quiet moment and breathe a sigh of relief—our visitors start to arrive. My introverted wife does not want visitors. In my typical bodyguard role at social events I would explain that we had to leave. But at the hospital there is nowhere to go, so I say, “You’re gonna leave. We’re gonna stay here. With the baby.” It feels bad to push people towards the exits, but there’s a part of me that thinks, Why do people visit hospitals? It seems unnecessary. A word of advice about pregnant introverts: They do not want you to visit the hospital unless they explicitly invite you. A second word of advice: Don’t ask to be explicitly invited. Explicit invitations from introverts are like shooting stars. They happen or they don’t.
In bouncing loved ones out of Jen’s hospital room, I have many surreal conversations. Those kinds of conversations where you haven’t computed the enormity of what has just taken place but somehow you’re expected to say the exact right thing.
One family member says, “You must adore the baby!”
I say, “Yes!” but I think, It’s a monkey.
Another family member says, “You’ll be a great dad.”
I say, “Thanks!” and think, My job is to convince you to leave.
I’m not immediately in love with our monkey. I’m committed to our monkey. I start trying to figure out how to finance our life with the monkey for the next twenty years. If someone tried to take the monkey, I would have punched that person until they killed me. But I’m not attached to the monkey. I’d like to tell you that I was. Because some people are. And some people aren’t. And the ones who aren’t generally don’t tell you that they aren’t. I would do anything for our baby monkey. But it doesn’t mean I understand our baby monkey.
For those first two days, Oona won’t sleep unless Jen is holding her. Jen is up all night with Oona but is exhausted and scared that if she falls asleep holding Oona she will drop her. So every hour or so she hands Oona to the nurses to take care of her, but Oona is inconsolable in the nursery and so the nurses bring her back to Jen, which is difficult because Jen has extreme pain from her surgical stitches and is groggy from the painkillers. It’s possible that at that moment they both want to be in the womb.
Three days later we bring Oona home. As I’ve mentioned, the other chief responsibility of the dad in addition to the email blast is to install the car seat. It is literally the only thing a parent has to do to leave the hospital with their own baby. It’s the ultimate deal breaker or dealmaker. With a baby and a car seat you are officially a bona fide parent, ready to take your private trainable monkey into this crazy car-filled world.
I forget to bring the car seat.
A toast to the car seat on my bathroom floor
To the car seat on my bathroom floor—
this is how I take my showers—
itsy-bitsy-peek-a-boo with one foot in the air
and the curtain half-drawn—
If the bathroom starts to fly away the baby is secure!
To the lullaby of blue whales and looping rainstorms,
which aid her infant sleep—
She sleeps in no more than 90-minute cycles—
I carry the feeling of being underwater around with me
on a sunny July morning—I tell time
by counting whale songs.
To the backflip she does off the bed—
I move like a character
from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to catch her.
—stick my fingers in her toothless mouth—
Pull out a piece of poop—
No idea how it got there—Her? The cat?
No idea whose poop.
To the scar shaped like a smile at my vaginal hairline
where they pulled her from me—
And the moon-sliver she claws from my cheek-flesh
when I try to put her in a crib—
The girl WILL NOT SLEEP IN A CRIB—
To my poor husband, he would like to go on a date with me,
sorry luv, I’m exhausted—
I hold her all night and the scar that is a smile speaks to the scar
that is a moon.
A RENEWAL OF VOWS
A day after we bring Oona home from the hospital, I get a call to play a role on a series that might or might not end up on television. It’s for a cool network, filmed in New York City, and directed by someone I respect.
That said, Jen just gave birth, and I know that this is the type of quintessential sacrifice that parents make when they have children. It’s something I would enjoy, but I say, “I’m not gonna do this.”
And I mean it.
Just in case tone isn’t clear on the page—despite my many flaws—I am always very clear.
I say, “Clo, I’m not gonna do this gig.”
Jen says, “I feel strongly that you should do it. This is exactly what we’ve talked about. We aren’t gonna let this change the way we live our lives. We won’t hold each other back.”
A quick refresher on the informal vows we took over thousands of hours on the couch:
A. We would never hold each other back.
B. I would be allowed to talk about us onstage.
C. Jen could disappear when she felt like it.
We broke Vow B when Jen forbade me from talking about the pregnancy onstage. But that was a mulligan. Everyone gets a mulligan. For nongolfers, that’s the extra stroke you allow yourself when you accidentally duff a ball into a lake. Vow B was in the lake. But Vow A is here to stay. We are not going to hold each other back.
I take the gig.
A SLEEPWALKER AND AN INSOMNIAC WALK INTO A BED
When we bring Oona home she won’t sleep for a few days.
> Then a week.
Then two weeks.
Then a month.
She’s the bathtub boys of sleep.
She’s vying for the triple crown of sleep deprivation. She won’t sleep, she hates to sleep, and she doesn’t want us to sleep.
And that’s when I remember I didn’t want to have a kid.
To be clear, she sleeps.
I think they die if they don’t sleep, but she doesn’t sleep in the time slots we’ve arranged. There’s an expression, “sleep like a baby,” which I thought meant “deeply” but apparently means “doesn’t.”
And sleep isn’t exactly our family’s strong suit to begin with.
I’m a sleepwalker and Jen is an insomniac—which feels like a variation on “a man walks into a bar.”
It’s a challenging combination of elements:
Me: sleepwalker, sleep apnea. A fidgety, joint-cracking, mumbly, talking-to-myself, breath-holding, heavy-sighing, tossing and turning and turning and turning and walking and running and breaking whatever’s around freak.
Jen: insomniac. Barely sleeps, always writing, always manically thinking. You know how bees have those five eyes and specifically two large compound eyes that contain about 6,600 facets that are designed to detect movement? Jen has that with all five senses and can feel and see and hear and touch everything around her acutely at all times. Even when she’s asleep.
You can see where this is going.
I’ve never been on a dating app, but I’m guessing they wouldn’t match a medically diagnosed sleepwalker with a severe insomniac. But as Jen once said to me when we were first dating, “You can’t choose who you love.”
Oona won’t sleep and my friend Nick has a lot to say about this.
Nick tells me, “After three weeks their bodies start to settle.”
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