Wyatt: The Hippie vs. Yuppie Guide to Parenting

2005-10-14T00:20:00.000-07:00

Apparently my friend Gajohnson saw a program on 20/20 claiming that top blankets at motels, like the colorful one pictured here, have a very high fecal content.

Magic crystal

2005-10-14T00:12:00.000-07:00

Wyatt was the picture of health, at both ends. His healthy diet announced itself like a tricycle horn. His body regulated the rapid intake with frequent spit up, mocha schmears, and adult-sized farts. At first I assumed that adults have more ferocious gas and poops, but then I stopped to really consider the theory. I would hold Wyatt on my hip as he let out a big roar. I stopped to think: Did I ever fart so big that it made my whole body vibrate like a cell phone? Did I ever fart so hard that it woke me up? Or have I ever taken a crap so suddenly and powerfully that it turned a crying fit into a smile. OK, well maybe that one we’ve all experienced, but Wyatt was releasing unprecedented gas in our house. He forced us to second guess each other when the thunder erupted. Was that you? That was Wyatt? Seriously though. Are you sure?

Wyatt would eat and poop. Eat and fart and sleep. Another fart would wake him up, then he would eat and sleep, and wake up later so that he could eat and poop. Nature’s cycle fell happily in line with the sun and moon, the changing tides. And then one day he just stopped – stopped pooping. He continued to ingest milk, but his body was no longer expelling it. Breast milk bloated his soft body, leaking out where it could as pee, or small milky drops that escaped as tears. Farts whined and squirmed their way out, white clouds of excess. No poops. Days went by, and then a week. Wyatt seemed content and hungry. He continued to feed. Deep creases formed around his wrists and ankles, and his chin jiggled atop a stack of Michelin tires that functioned as a neck. Two weeks passed. No poops. We began to remember fondly the burnt brown taffy of earlier days, the surprise chocolate soup that could make Wyatt and the person holding him have to change their pants. Wyatt was inflating fast with no release valve, no overflow hole. I worried that he would swell until he exploded.

At almost 3 weeks Wyatt seemed a little fussy and we consulted a doctor. She seemed overly nonchalant about the whole episode. Perhaps she failed to complete the math that projected Wyatt’s rapid expansion. Or maybe she just wanted to hustle us along so that Wyatt wouldn’t explode inside her office. She did offer one possible solution, if we decided that it was necessary. She unraveled an old cloth like a black market jewel dealer. Inside was a small clear rock. Small for a clear rock, not for a hard item that might get placed into an infant’s bum. It had a tear-drop shape and a soft shine. It was a beautiful royal heirloom, hanging from the gold chain of a princess with hereditary constipation. The magic crystal promised to solve all of our problems. It was the object of fairytales, a magic bean that would turn Wyatt into a golden goose: except this magic crystal wouldn’t make Wyatt drop golden eggs, it only promised to make him drop something.

The following weekend we decided to take Wyatt on his first mini-vacation. We went away for one night, about an hour from the house, sort of a test run. I looked at maps to pick a random city that was a short hop from San Francisco, a quiet escape from the big city that would have shorter must-do tourist lists and cheaper motels. I booked a motel deal online, settling on Petaluma. We would spend hours in a dark motel room with brightly covered beds, considering Wyatt’s predicament. The Casa Grande Motel. Roughly translated, The Big House. As good a place as any to consider sticking a suppository in your son’s butt.

From the time we checked in, Wyatt seemed fussy and backed up. This was probably a common response to the bathroom facilities at the Casa Grande. But Wyatt’s blood runs thick with love for questionable roadside motels, and we suspected that his crankiness was unrelated to our reservation at the Big House. In fact, when we first entered the room, Wyatt playfully rolled around on the carpet-covered bureaus, perhaps sensing my excitement. Soon Wyatt began to stare at the vinyl bathroom floor like so many constipated truckers before him. He whined and growled, and pushed a couple of thick farts through, but nothing that stained the diaper. We searched for signs of poop to come, begging for a small stool sample like a Kaiser nurse.

We walked to the park across the street, catching the end of a street festival celebrating the town’s farming industry. A parade of kids passed by, dressed as eggs and giant pads of butter. They were hustled along by a giant scary cow, snapping its utters at pads of butter to keep up with the eggs in front of them. Wyatt continued to fuss, and the effect that this surreal nightmare would have on Wyatt’s bowels was hard to say. We returned to the security of the Casa Grande, trying to think of something besides giant dancing pads of butter.

Wyatt made tense, red faces and began to cry. We worried that he needed help, but didn’t want to resort to the suppository. We were told that the magic crystal would magically disappear on impact, but I couldn’t help thinking that we were using Wyatt to smuggle a balloon full of drugs back from Petaluma. Our infant son was in made need of a poop, but we worried that the cure was as bad as the constipation. Or worse, we might prematurely torture Wyatt when all he really needed was a little patience. We had heard that some infants can go a month without pooping and not have any real problem. But that seems a little ridiculous. Stuck in a cheap motel with a bloated baby and a magic crystal, we considered our options.

I would like to take a moment to formally apologize to my dear son, Wyatt. With all the compromising details and images I have set forth in these pages, all the wrong things I have said about you in your first year of life, I apologize specifically for this: You were grouchy, and all backed up, stuck in a strange roadside motel about to be impaled by a crystal. For this I apologize. If we were about to follow through, I apologize. If we did not, again I apologize. Regardless of our decision and the outcome, you lay constipated on cheap, starchy sheets, with visions of a ragged cow yelling at bratty eggs and butter pads, while your insides screamed to get out and your body was in violent conflict with itself. After spending almost a year sloshing around in another person’s body, and enduring a few weeks of hospital bureaucracy, this was your first vacation. I am sorry.

Meanwhile, back at the Big House. We used the tip of a Q-tip, saved the magic crystal for another desperate bottom, and Wyatt left smiling. Most people leave cheap motels with more than they came with: a greater sense of self, a stolen towel, or a splotchy rash. Wyatt left a little piece of himself at the Casa Grande Motel, returning home in better spirits, and a few pounds lighter.

2005-10-09T21:47:00.000-07:00

Neck cheese

2005-10-09T21:40:00.000-07:00

Back in the comfort of his own house, Wyatt flourished – he slept and pooped and cried and giggled; but mostly he ate. Wyatt’s bony frame focused on fattening up, a skinny gremlin with a voracious appetite. The five and a half pound old man took to eating like most old men do, sneaking salt and candy and cigarettes when their wives are not looking. As the weeks went by Wyatt’s contemplative thin face was replaced by a chubby, silly, much younger looking creature.

Wyatt mocked the literature warning about fussy babies unwilling to feed off the breast, or from a bottle. He fed from two boobs, countless bottles, syringes, with no hesitation. He would have slurped breast milk from a spoon, an old shoe, and puddles on the kitchen floor had we allowed it. I read a book that discussed the importance of matching the rubber bottle nipple to the mother’s nipple, easing the child into the bottle by impersonating his mother’s boob. What struck me most about the nipple matching was not the concept or the article, but a diagram of pencil drawings, almost 40 individual shapes and styles of natural nipples and the rubber scabs which counterfeit them. Nipples ranged from manhole covers to pencil erasers, tapered leg or boot cut. But a few varieties were beyond my experience. One rubber nipple in particular had more sharp angles and sudden curves than San Francisco’s Lombard Street. I felt a sudden desire to seek out this gifted woman, with a bizarre nipple that bent around itself like a dancing flame, a jagged piece of coral resting awkwardly atop a round breast.

But Wyatt’s food supplier had no such irregularities. With my newfound spectrum of nipple shapes, I began to realize why the nurses were so impressed with Diane’s. They were simple, elegant, and functional. Wyatt had no complaints. Diane alternatively fed Wyatt and then the breast pump. Wyatt and the machine were constantly attached to Diane. At times they would feed together, Wyatt nursing comfortably next to a plastic horn with a lawn mower engine, man vs. machine.

Sometimes he cried when he wanted milk, but mostly he quietly mouthed for it, made a circle with his mouth and searched around for it, a goldfish trying to catch food flakes. If Diane was holding him and he was hungry, he would push his tiny head around in search of a well-shaped nipple. Then he began to squirm around other people’s chests, trying to find sustenance. Mostly mine. Signs of hunger became very clear. Wyatt would begin to roll his head around on my shoulder, then start gently banging his head against my chest. When that failed to provide him with an appropriately shaped nipple he would squirm until he found some flesh and begin to suck. Our once miniature figurine was quickly turning into an insatiable baby zombie. A flesh eater. If milk was not immediately available he wouldn’t cry. He would warn me with a brief head banging and then wrestle his way to my neck. I would rush to find Diane’s boob or a suitable replacement or become the meal myself. Of course countless studies have in depth research on the benefits of breastfeeding. But has anyone ever considered a possible connection between breastfeeding and a tendency toward cannibalism. Waiting for Diane to come from the bathroom, or rolling over in the middle of the night, I would detach Wyatt from my neck, or arm, or chest. One morning I awoke with three tiny hickeys on my neck, and found a fistful of my chest hair in Wyatt’s clenched fist.

Wyatt’s undead appetite soon surpassed his capacity for processing food. Wyatt swelled just as big as his newborn frame could hold him, and then began to reject the excess. I suppose babies tend to spit up a lot. But he began to spit up mid-feeding, and then continue on, like his body had agreed to a weight limit but his appetite refused to sign the deal. He always seemed unfazed by his spontaneous throw up. It was a quick interruption in the middle of a casual sentence, a slight cough not worthy of changing the flow of a conversation. We called him the Spit Up Master. Little gurgles were harbingers of dangerous lava flow. We bought more spit up rags, then moved up to towels. Clothes that were strewn about the room were regularly checked for puke smell before being sorted into piles of dirty and sort of clean.

Wyatt began to rapidly grow out of clothes, increasing his neck size at a rate normally attributed to steroids. Fat rolls emerged where there was previously no fat. Our cute little Michelin baby was rapidly bloating into the Michelin Man. Neck fat became a common subject for discussion in our household. Specifically how to care for it. Cleaning Wyatt now included moving furniture, separating flaps of skin where old milk tended to hide. Breast milk, spit up and drool had a habit of slipping down Wyatt’s chin and disappearing into his newly formed neck fat. The milk would find hairs and produce lint, trapping other strange objects in its sticky string. We found forgotten household items there, like moving a couch after 8 years.

I have heard that the cleaning of those wrinkle dogs can be a very time consuming affair. I wondered too about Marlon Brando’s late years and if someone had been kept busy cleaning food that was hiding where his neck used to be. Perhaps Brando used the area for storage, a convenient place to store snacks for later. As I lifted the skin to wipe shiny milk from under Wyatt’s chin, I wondered if he too had a secret purpose for storing this neck cheese. With the disappearance of his neck came a rapid improvement in his ability to hold his own head up.

The littlest patient

2005-09-21T22:12:00.000-07:00

When we arrived at the San Francisco hospital, a 300 pound nurse immediately tried to grab Wyatt out of Diane’s arms. I called it the SF big butt takeover. With a little resistance we were able to stay with Wyatt, but she exacted her revenge by giving him a catheter. He seemed surprisingly unfazed. Another procedure that is harder on the dad than anyone else. The nurse explained that we were not required to stay with Wyatt and that we could go home and get some rest if we wanted, leaving our 5 ½ pound baby with 300 pounds of mischief – it seemed an unfair fight. Adding our combined weight to the mix leveled the playing field, one united family against the big butt of hospital tyranny.

Our fiasco in Daly City followed us to the new hospital. Just before the failed spinal tap, the hospital had taken a vial of blood which could be tested for infections. This would be a valuable sample because it was the only blood taken from Wyatt before he received the antibiotics, which still enabled doctors to determine the source of the infection. Unfortunately, we found out later that the vial had been broken in the lab, requiring more elaborate methods to determine the source of the infection. I guess the best thing I can say about the Daly City ER is that all of the nurses had on their white sneakers, and they were a nice, bright white.

The SF hospital continued a battery of tests and began to introduce medicine into Wyatt’s IV, referring again to a list of unlikely diseases which could be life threatening. The big butt nurse explained, for example, that they wanted to give him a medication just in case he had herpies.

"Herpies?" I replied. "You think he has herpies?"

"Well, it’s possible. And for a baby his size herpies can cause brain damage; it can be life threatening."

I somehow felt that the nurse was making vague accusations about my two week old son’s sexual relationships. "Don’t you have to contract herpies from another individual?"

"Yes, that’s true."

"And so you think he could have gotten it from?"

"His mother."

Diane scowled. "I don’t have herpies."

The nurse sighed. "It’s possible to pass it on to your child without being aware that you have it."

I stepped between the nurse and Diane, knowing however that I was no match for the big butt nurse. "OK, thank you," I said, then tried to explain to Diane that the nurse was not calling her a slut. Sure I’ve picked up scabies before from a hippie’s couch, but we have a clean record when it comes to STDs, and Wyatt hasn’t even really dated a whole lot yet.

My confidence in the doctors’ ability to determine Wyatt’s illness was fading quickly. The basic philosophy seemed to be try a medication, and if he gets better, then we know what was wrong. If nothing happens, try another one. We could have gone instead to a high school kid with a chemistry set. The potential diagnoses were getting more far fetched. How can we be sure he doesn’t have polio, or shingles? Let’s treat him for the Gout, just in case.

In addition to blood tests and close monitoring, the hospital yearned again for urine, and feces. The fascination they had taken with Diane’s output before the birth was now transferred over to Wyatt. They charted his pees and poops, and confiscated his dirty diapers. Another nurse arrived for a pee sample, this time suggesting that they could try touching Wyatt’s penis with a cold cloth to make him pee, rather than giving him another catheter. I applaud more casual medical techniques like trying a cold cloth first, especially when it involves not shoving a tube up my son’s urethra. Sadly, they shot down my idea of putting his hand in a warm glass of water while he slept. As soon as the cloth touched Wyatt, he shot a long stream right into the cup the nurse was holding. "Oh by the way," I told the nurse, "it looks like my son is able to pee a foot in distance."

Our night in two ERs turned into several days back at the San Francisco hospital. We stayed in a children’s wing, and Wyatt was by far the littlest patient. All the nurses were going crazy over Wyatt, some of them sewing him hats and doting over him, others anxious about his tiny size and having difficulty performing the necessary tests on him.

Diane and I settled back into our hospital motel mode. The first night we were told that only one parent could stay in the room, and that Wyatt would have to sleep in his clear plastic crib. The nurse who explained this policy had no knowledge of my mom’s ability to negotiate, using sit-ins to earn mileage at airport counters. The easiest way to overcome authority is to completely ignore it. I returned with a blow-up bed, and Diane slept with Wyatt on her chest in the one pull-out chair. The nurses were initially upset about Wyatt sleeping with Diane, claiming that her potential to roll over and crush him was a liability for the hospital. Eventually they agreed to allow it if Wyatt was attached to a heart rate and pulse monitor. He slept with three wires attached to his chest with round, sticky patches. Together with the giant foam hand and his IV, Wyatt and Diane slept tangled in a web of tubes and wires. The sticky patches would move about as Wyatt tossed and turned during the night. They would end up stuck to blankets or each other. One morning a nurse rushed in loudly to check Wyatt’s irregular heart beat. Diane rolled over with a sticky patch on her forehead, the wire hanging like a strand of hair across her face.

As the days wore on, we played house in the hospital wing, watching movies and ordering take-out. The hospital provided food for patients only. As Wyatt dined exclusively at Diane’s boob, she was given special permission to eat the hospital meals. This luxury meant that the hospital’s international cuisine was available to her at no cost. However, Diane claimed that the hospital only served one meal: rubbery chicken. Different ethnic foods were differentiated only by the color of the sauce which smothered it. Mexican food was rubbery chicken in a brown sauce, while Italian rubbery chicken came with a reddish hue. We were happy to have a cart of movies on our floor, but we were almost the only adults sleeping in the children’s wing. People are always willing to rent worse movies than they would see in a theater, and will watch almost anything that comes on TV. Planes are also notorious for their poor selection, leaving movie snobs to say: "Yeah I saw that movie, but I was on the plane." or "It’s not that bad for a plane movie." The category of hospital movies established a new low for me, and we watched a few brutal ones that had found their way into the children’s wing movie cart. Perhaps the worst one was Mercury Rising, a political thriller featuring Bruce Willis. The plot untangles around an autistic kid that reads code and has infiltrated a code which protects U.S. government agents all over the world. Sounds pretty good so far. Bruce Willis is trying to protect the little kid’s life, while the government wants to kill him to protect the lives of their agents who could be exposed. The movie roots for Bruce Willis to stand against the odds and protect the boy. About an hour into the film, the movie is so bad that I start to think: well, the code does protect all sorts of CIA and FBI operatives, maybe they should just kill the little brat and roll the credits.

But back to our little brat, who we were protecting against the gang of nurses -- they were convinced that Wyatt was excreting some kind of top secret code into the diapers they were confiscating. After several days of tests and close monitoring, we were told that Wyatt had a bladder infection. All the spinal taps, blood tests and viral medications turned up nothing more than a rather routine bladder infection, which was cured by the initial antibiotics that he was given on his first night. Apparently, the infection was caused by ecoli, probably some feces getting into his urinary tract. This was rather common, we were told, "with everything being close together down there in the diaper." I had heard about ecoli mostly in relation to the fast food industry, and I wondered where Wyatt may have picked up a shitburger.

Wyatt was finally allowed to disconnect the IV that had been attached for about 5 days. He flailed his arms around while I danced him along Diane’s belly, singing "I got no strings to hold me down . . ." We had spent most of a week wheeling an IV next to him, and he was free again, wireless.

We were a few routine check-ups away from going home again, and I headed downstairs to deal with the latest fallout from our trip to Daly City. We had been informed that they were having trouble verifying our medical insurance, and that our trip to the ER, ambulance ride, and 5 night stay may not be covered. I went downstairs to member services in a t-shirt, pajama pants and slippers. They sent me across the street and a few blocks down to another office. Cold grey clouds choked out the last blue light as I shuffled down the block in my slippers. A friendly employee looked over my case and told me that we almost got snagged on a technicality, and that we had a couple more forms to fill out to put Wyatt on the insurance under his own coverage. For the first month, we were still allowed to file the charges under Diane’s insurance, but in a few days Wyatt would have been uncovered without the new forms. Somehow in the mound of insurance paperwork we filled out at Wyatt’s birth, adding him to our insurance had not been covered.

I thanked the hospital worker, who admonished me for going outside in the cold with no jacket or socks on. Luckily, we had slipped into a loophole just before another loophole could swallow us up financially. I scuffed my slippers along, smiling at the dark steel sky, looking a bit crazy and homeless. I had a credit card tucked into the string of my pajama pants, and I wandered into a nearby flower shop. As I considered the flowers, thunder showers shaded the street. The store had a high credit minimum and I filled my arms with flowers. I pushed through the doorway. The rain had frozen to hail, and I could barely see the hospital behind the curtain of ice. I ran between the shop awnings, then under the plastic bus stop. Ice pelted the clear roof overhead. I watched for a minute then raced across the street, ice chunks crashing against my bare arms and nestling in among the flowers. I stepped through the automatic hospital doors and turned to watch the hail. Streaks of light blue pierced the sky and halted the storm. Wyatt had been alive only 3 weeks, but had spent almost half of that time in a hospital. I headed upstairs to show him everything else.

2005-09-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

More fun with Kaiser

2005-09-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

Just three weeks after he was born, we were rushing Wyatt off to the emergency room. He was running a high fever, so I called the hospital advice line. Considering his premature birth, a high fever was called potentially life threatening and we were told to bring him in immediately. I asked the advice nurse which of two hospitals we should go to; she said that they were equal and she would recommend the closest one. The hospital in Daly City, just on the edge of San Francisco, was a bit closer to us than the San Francisco hospital where Wyatt was born. We knew that the Daly City hospital didn’t have pediatricians, but we had been told that the emergency rooms were equivalent. We bundled Wyatt and I sped down the highway, a little indecisive about which hospital to drive to. I decided on San Francisco because it seemed like a bigger, more legitimate facility which was only another 5 or 10 minutes away. A construction detour appeared, blocking our way to the San Francisco hospital. I turned toward the closer one, the Daly City ER.

As it turns out, that was a big mistake. After excessive stacks of paperwork they admitted Wyatt and took his temperature. The nurse introduced Wyatt to his first rectal thermometer, which is usually more uncomfortable for the dad than the baby. His temperature continued to rise. As we passed through the waiting room into the guts of the facility, professionals in white coats reacted as if they had never seen an infant. Nurses were scrambling around the hospital looking for equipment small enough to use on Wyatt. We were taken to a small room where one nurse explained the difficulty of finding an infant’s veins while another repeatedly stabbed Wyatt’s arms with failed attempts. A doctor arrived and tried to reassure us by suggesting that they didn’t have all the appropriate tools for an infant as small as Wyatt.

I offered to take him to the other hospital but the doctor was adamant that they follow through with a spinal tap. We were given the following scenario which would be repeated with minor variations over the next several days:

Dr: Your son is a premie, and less than a month old, which means that many diseases could be potentially life threatening. He has a very low chance of having this particular disease, but if he does have it and it goes untreated, it could quickly lead to his death. We strongly urge you to conduct this test so that in the unlikely event that he does have this disease, potentially life saving measures can be taken.

Me: What percentage of infants with his symptoms have this disease?

Dr: About 6 to 8 percent.

Me: And what makes you think that he may have it?

Dr: He is running a high fever and high fever is one of the main symptoms in newborns of this life threatening disease. You should also know that the test itself carries a low risk of infecting your son with dangerous diseases.

Me: I’m thinking maybe we should forego this test.

Dr: It is my strong medical opinion that the test is necessary under these circumstances, and bypassing the test could prove fatal for your child.

This rationale was used to justify continued torture of our two week old infant. In truth, not all of the tests were that bad. But it is difficult to watch your 2 week old baby shrieking while nurses continually test for low risk diseases with seemingly little cause. Then again, how can you reject an educated doctor’s advice when he claims that skipping a test may prove fatal for your child? With all the hospital’s exaggerated concern for Wyatt being a 2 week old premie, it crossed my mind that perhaps constant, invasive testing could prove detrimental to a fragile premie still two weeks from his original estimated birth date.

The result of a CBC showed that Wyatt had some kind of infection. His symptoms were now an infection and a high fever, which we were told is common with any infection, and both could be the result of a minor bladder infection. Antibiotics would likely cure the infection, but the doctor wanted to wait because the success of the antibiotics would prevent accurate test results for meningitis. Meningitis was one in the long string of scary, potentially fatal diseases that Wyatt was showing very little symptoms of, but the doctor claimed there was a standard battery of tests in this situation. The concept of withholding the antibiotics to ensure a successful test began to seem a little ludicrous, and I wondered if it was more an issue of hospital procedure than patient care.

After witnessing several failed attempts to give Wyatt an IV, we were asked to wait outside for the spinal tap. "This is usually too hard on the parents, so for your sake I think you would be more comfortable outside," the doctor told me.

"That’s okay, I understand that he will be uncomfortable and in pain, but I would prefer to sit in the room," I replied.

The doctor then asked us to wait outside.

Just outside the door, I comforted Diane as she cried on my shoulder, listening to Wyatt scream. He wailed louder than we had ever heard him for several minutes, and then the door opened. "I’m sorry," the doctor said, "but the spinal tap was unsuccessful."

"Meaning?"

"We were unable to accurately access the spinal chord."

Meaning that we were listening to Wyatt getting repeatedly jabbed with no progress.

"And the antibiotics?"

"We will give them to him now and then complete the spinal tap at the other hospital."

The doctor finally came to the conclusion that had been evident to us since we walked in the front door: this facility was not equipped to handle a tiny infant. We were sent to the hospital in San Francisco where Wyatt was born. We were not allowed to drive him, but were told that he would be transported in an ambulance.

We were allowed to enter the room and console Wyatt. We watched as nurses searched for something to help keep an IV in Wyatt’s tiny hand so he could receive his antibiotics. They settled on a soft arm brace, a small cushioned board meant to isolate a small hand. It surrounded Wyatt’s hand and ran down past his elbow, almost to his armpit. He waved it around his tiny body like a giant foamy finger at the Superbowl.

I was instantly reminded of the first night Diane and I ever fooled around. We went with a few friends to this rustic town in the woods that has a tiny mountain and a cheap snowboard and motel package. Diane fell on her hand on her first run of the day. The mountain medic took a look at it, put her arm in a sling and sent her to the lodge for a pitcher of beer. She seemed satisfied, and the rest of us snowboarded for a few hours before taking her to the local hospital. The hospital took x-rays and decided she had a small fracture requiring a cast. Unfortunately, they said they were unable to give her a cast at that facility and that she would need to go to the big city to get one. This seemingly full functioning hospital did not make casts. I made them in art class in the third grade. I thought we could probably whip one up in the motel with a couple of supplies from the AM/PM. Not only did they send her along without the cast, but they made a temporary soft cast for her which looked like a second grade school project, and I began to comprehend their reluctance to attempt cast making. Diane’s arm was wrapped in a couple of small towels, covered with a cloth sling and plenty of medical tape. She looked like a victim of some overzealous boy scouts anxious to get their good Samaritan badge. I called it the giant foam hand, and the man hand. Diane was hopped up on vicodin and found my jokes hilarious, and we made out while assorted friends were lying about the bed and floor of our divey motel room.

And from that first kiss we had come full circle, so proud to see our 5 ½ pound son now wrapped in a sports fan giant foam hand, receiving the same poor hospital treatment that had brought his mom and dad together years before. Wyatt and his man hand were placed in our car seat, which was then strapped down to a long board. Diane took her seat in the ambulance as they raised the board. Wyatt’s head and arm were strapped down to the board, leaving him almost immobile. I kissed his forehead and he looked toward the EMTs that were passing him into the ambulance. Wyatt’s middle finger was slightly raised above the rest of his hand. I nodded to the EMT, "He doesn’t like this."

She pretended to smile back at me, "Yeah, I know."

I kissed Diane and headed toward our car to meet them at the other hospital. I felt proud of Wyatt’s early defiance. Two weeks old and already flipping people off. He’s very advanced.

2005-07-16T10:40:00.000-07:00

Hindenberg

Boobs

2005-07-16T10:34:00.000-07:00

These days a fine line separates new moms from spring break girls. I guess in our case Wyatt is that fine line, creating the distinction between a girl who is flashing, and a mom who is breastfeeding. Attach a hungry infant to any wild co-ed and suddenly topless in Cabo becomes an act of nurturing. But men can be easily confused, especially when boobs are present. Diane is a laid back mom, placing Wyatt’s needs way above any hesitation toward public nudity. Some of our male friends aren’t quite sure how to react. They enter the house to meet the baby, and discover Diane breastfeeding in the living room, or sitting casually in some state of undress. The reaction typically goes something like this:

Whoa, hey there. I wasn’t really looking. I mean it’s totally natural, a beautiful thing. I’m not purposefully looking away. I just didn’t want you to think that I was looking, like really looking. Keep doing what you’re doing. That’s great . . . for him. I just, I don’t know. I’ll go sit over there. Just let me know if I’m doing something wrong.

People that have been around a lot of babies have extremely casual reactions. Boobs. Good job. Whip ‘em out. I don’t see what the big deal is. They’re just boobs. Inexperienced friends look away from Diane as she takes her boob out, or suggest that they’ll wait to hold Wyatt until his neck gets better, scared about the way his head seems to flop around. Giving birth just weeks after the Janet Jackson half-time nipple scandal was convenient. Most people had recently thought long and hard about their personal opinions of public displays of nipple, or the act of flashing one boob. A lot of people feel that one boob at a time, in the appropriate circumstances, is comfortable. But flashing two boobs simultaneously is definitely sexual, and possibly vulgar, depending on the scenario and I suppose the boobs themselves.

My friends were mostly comfortable with Diane’s newfound exhibitionism. One friend confessed that it was a little sexy. Another felt weird trying to have a normal conversation with Diane while her breast was exposed. Our gay friend Baby Boy, who often tells us how much he hates women’s breasts, declared that he actually likes watching the baby breast-feed, because it’s like watching a nature show. Mostly she just took them out to feed Wyatt, but in her exhaustion sometimes Diane roamed the house with one breast exposed. She looked like Spartacus with her shirt pulled diagonally across her chest, wandering aimlessly after a heated battle at the Coliseum. As Diane’s boobs became sore from breastfeeding, she spent more time with them exposed. She would let them both hang over the top of her shirt, like torpedoes, waiting for them to dry or letting a fan soothe her sore nipples. I began to feel my friends’ confusion as the scenarios got more weird. Watching your girlfriend massage her nipples with lube, for instance, takes on a strange meaning when her parents are in the room.

The last and most intriguing aspect of Diane’s breastfeeding was our introduction to the breast pump. Because Wyatt was born premature and less than 6 pounds, ensuring his quick weight gain became more significant. Even though he took to breastfeeding immediately, the doctor wanted us to supplement those feedings. Diane used the pump to fill bottles with additional breast milk, which I then squirted into his mouth with a syringe, like feeding a baby bird. It was a slow process but a pleasure for me, as close as I could get to breastfeeding without embarrassing contraptions or illegitimate science.

Our first breast pump was a loaner from the hospital, an industrial grade pump. While it lacked the warm, comforting style of home models, it made up for it in sheer size and strength. The giant, metallic, industrial pump connected through skinny tubes to two, roughly boob-shaped cones. We would later see all kinds of fancy, portable breast pump models: from leather briefcases to flowery handbags, small contraptions that tried to disguise the idea that you were strapping a motor to your breasts. But with our first pump, I felt like we were hooking Diane up to a car battery.

The concept is simple, a machine that pumps the breasts and releases milk into a bottle for a later feeding. But closely watching a breast pump work is one of the most bizarre elements of becoming a new parent. The breasts are placed in plastic cones, and the nipples look out a frosted window, poised and ready, and a bit scared when they see the power of our industrial grade motor. As the pump starts the nipples begin to perk up and then relax, like twin soldiers. The nipples begin a synchronized dance, behind frosted plastic, which is accentuated by a rhythmic pounding sound as the nipples pop back into place. The pounding of the nipples. The perfectly synchronized dancing. Like little soldiers saluting on command. Pop. Pop. Forceful yet graceful. I was enthralled. It’s not sexual, though it has a sensual element. I like to think that science and nature have transcended sexuality and motherhood, finding an artistic motion, a poetic rhythm: the nipple dance.

Then again, I don’t see what the big deal is. They’re just boobs.

2005-07-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

Poops

2005-07-11T17:40:00.000-07:00

The early days of diaper changes were a breeze, small deposits gently pushed onto a diaper. A generous portion of mocha shmear from Noah’s Bagels. It fascinated me that Wyatt would do his poops all in one moment. I am quite the opposite, really taking my time. Wyatt shot them out in a single burst of thundering poop. We nicknamed him Thunderpants. When I held him, I could feel the reverberation like a shotgun. His body would kick back into my shoulder with a soft squishy sound and I knew immediately that the job was done. Pretty simple. Then after one week Wyatt created his first poop explosion. I came home to find both Wyatt’s and Diane’s clothes in the tub.

We began to use a diaper service that drops off cloth diapers and picks up the dirty ones. The cloth diapers are supposed to reduce diaper rash, and seemed a little softer for Wyatt’s fragile, thundering bottom. As in most decisions, we found ourselves floating somewhere between my yuppy brother and hippy brother-in-law. My brother’s kid had plastic diapers, like most kids these days, and the hippies were washing out their own cloth diapers. I wanted Wyatt’s bum to stay fresh, but not bad enough to rinse out poo shmear in the kitchen sink, not bad enough to throw his khaki stained cloths in with my khakis.

The diaper service came with a video and a monthly newsletter, to welcome you into this cloth diaper community. The video featured a woman talking about the diapers, standing in front of a landfill dump site to show their concern for the environment. Her huge mane of hair and white jacket with giant shoulder pads showed me that they had been around for a while, at least since the mid 80s. The newsletter provides parenting advice to comfort your child in a soft, cotton, environmentally-friendly kind of way. The first one came with a two page cover article called Handling Unwanted Advice. It provided practical tips for dealing with friends and family that give too much input on how you will raise your child: "You can respond to unwanted advice in a variety of ways" . . . "simply smile, nod, and make a non-committal response, such as ‘Interesting!’ Then go about your own business . . . your way" . . . "If your brother is pressuring you . . . then distraction is definitely in order, such as, ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’" Under the section titled Memorize a Standard Response, they even provided complete reactions that could be cut and paste from the newsletter into your head: "Here’s a comment that can be said in response to almost any piece of advice: 'This may not be the right way for you, but it’s the right way for me.'"

I thought about writing a letter to the editor, a thoughtful article that thanked them for the advice and showed how I made use of it in a practical situation. It would go something like this:

Dear Editor,

Thank you for your recent, brilliant article on Handling Unwanted Advice. I wanted to share with you the success that I have had with your methods.

Recently my brother Ray came over to visit and see how things were going with our new son, Wyatt. Wyatt was just coming out of the bath tub when he arrived. Wyatt was laying on the bed, about to get his cloth diaper on. Ray walked in and I got distracted for a moment.

"You better get a diaper on that kid before he squirts," Ray suggested.

I smiled, nodded, and made a noncommital response. "Interesting." Then I went about my business, my way. I moved some clothes, restacked a few books, anything to keep from falling prey to his unwanted advice.

Ray continued to badger me, pressuring me. "Do you want me to put a diaper on him? Usually, if I’m going to leave my kid naked for a minute, I at least hold a cup above him to protect myself from getting soaked."

I looked around the room for some kind of good distraction as Ray reached for a cup to shield himself.

"Would you like a cup of coffee?" I blurted, just as Wyatt began to shower the coffee cup, my brother, and our bed with his golden fountain. My brother looked concerned as he headed to the bathroom to rinse out his shirt.

"This may not be the right way for you," I called after him, "but it is the right way for me."

Again, thank you for your support and ideas. Armed with soft cotton and solid wisdom I think we are prepared to raise our son in a healthy and positive environment.

Sincerely,

Pat Carey

P.S. Do you have any suggestions for a memorized response to this kind of harassment: "Why are you asking me if I want a cup of coffee? I already told you no, and we’re nowhere near any coffee right now."

Most of the advice we got came from the hospital, keeping in close contact with us because Wyatt was born premature. An English nurse came to the house for a visit. After a brief hello she moved right into the questioning like a harsh detective. "How are your nipples?" she barked at Diane. "Have you been peeing and pooping?" she demanded. "So your output has been normal?" she continued.

Then the focus shifted to Wyatt. Again she grabbed one ball as she counted the other. "1, 2," she counted. "So he’s got everything there." She saw a picture of my mom and her eleven sisters on the cover of my book. She looked over the lot of twelve girls dressed up with their parents: "That’s a real kickpopper!" She went on to tell us about her family of four siblings in England, and how they all shared the same bath water to save money.

"Five people in one bath?" I asked.

"No, one at a time" she said. "Really, you wanted to get in near the top of the order, before the bath got real dirty."

Before she left, she had a list of specific questions about all of Wyatt’s stats: his eating, peeing, pooping. There became so much interest in his daily input and output. All the former interest in Diane’s output had shifted to Wyatt, as he became the Dali Lama figure.

The hospital gave us forms and charts, wanting us to keep track of Wyatt’s poops and pees, and Diane’s medication. Check this box when Wyatt poops. Diane can have a Vicodin every 4 hours. Make a mark when Wyatt pees. Diane can have a Motrin every 6 hours. Our friends and family helped us monitor and keep track, and nothing was too private for other people to know about. Except for Diane’s stool softener, which I later learned I shouldn’t bring up in front of company.

2005-06-29T21:28:00.000-07:00

Ethiopiar

2005-06-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

I should explain the absence of my parents. They have taken a year long sabbatical to teach in Ethiopia. My dad has spent almost thirty years teaching history and coaching track at the same Catholic high school where he attended. My mom joined the school about fifteen years ago as a chemistry and biology teacher. After never traveling more than 30 minutes for a job in 30 years, they have decided to move to Africa for a year.

My mom has pushed adventure into their lives in recent years, a sort of Xtreme educator constantly looking for opportunities to travel. My dad is a reluctant participant, eager for the experience but often missing the comforts of home. When my mom says she really wants to experience the local culture, she means that she hopes to sleep on a mud floor, even if most of the locals are snoring away in soft beds. While my mom assumes that culture and comfort are opposite destinations, my dad is always hoping that the two can collide in some way. He has no desire to stay in a Hyatt in the middle of Ethiopia, but he wouldn’t mind seeing a Sealy mattress in the center of his remote shelter. We worry that our mom, in contrast, will be living in a bustling city and refuse to sleep in the comfortable room that has been provided for her.

They were initially placed by a program to live in two separate cities in Ethiopia: my mom was placed in the bustling city, while my dad was put in remote village hours away. My mom quickly renegotiated her position and found herself living with my dad after a couple of months.

My dad has a dual reputation at the Catholic high school: he is a solid part of the foundation that the school is built around, and a constant rabble rouser who is revolting against the school. He brings social consciousness into a conservative school and they accept it grudgingly. When he started a gay-straight alliance and a Jewish club at the school, they applauded his openness and compassion through gritted, Catholic teeth. Then he started a race and gender course, initiated a diversity committee, and brought in openly gay guest speakers. When he invited a comic into an assembly who alluded to the high number of gay priests in the Catholic church, they mostly ignored it, and went about their gay business with a watchful eye on my dad.

Once in Ethiopia, my dad began sending me journals, detailing the experience. He continued his battles against the high school administration, waging them now on an entire country. In one of his first journals he told me that the program training had advised against open discussion of homosexuality in Ethiopia. My dad’s response: "So I have taken every opportunity to bring it up since my arrival." My dad’s journals reveal his struggle to learn the culture and become a successful educator. They are marked by his unique sense of punctuation, most notably an overuse of quotation marks. Like the rumors of CIA involvement in Peace Corps programs, everything my dad is involved with seems suspect. He has been talking to the "Dean" of the school about "classes" he will be teaching, and is writing this journal at the table in his "home" where he now lives with my "mom." Everything I thought I knew about my dad has been thrown into question by those delicate quotation marks. I read the journals for subtext, and spy references. I have learned a few solid details about their stay. My dad writes: "So far I’ve seen a camel, a dead hyena, an ostrich, an African cat, and a foot and a half long bird that I took a picture of just outside the house."

I still believe that they are probably "teaching" in a remote part of Ethiopia, but I worry that my dad will be regarded as some sort of "gay missionary."

2005-06-29T00:56:00.000-07:00

Year of the monkey

2005-06-29T00:40:00.000-07:00

Of course our roommates were at the house waiting for our arrival home. My sister Julie, the cat Akasha, and the dog Spartacus. Having spent weeks lounging with Diane in front of animal birth specials, the pets were anxious to meet and lick the newest member of the family. Spartacus greeted Diane at the door, lunging with long nails at her fresh C-section wound. Then our roommates sniffed the baby a bit and walked off, not overly impressed. Well, Julie was pretty impressed and sniffed the baby a bit longer than the other two.

I thought about Akasha’s bad attitude, Spartacus’s general lack of training, and Julie’s willful independence. Wyatt would be our smartest pet. Just imagine a small creature that will eventually walk and talk. What kind of tricks can Wyatt do? Well, he can dribble a ball, or start his own business. He can come home drunk after his curfew and call me an asshole. We have so much power over this tiny, beautiful new life. He’s like a really smart pet monkey.

Our first days home blurred together with blissful exhaustion. I woke up hard in the middle of the night when Diane tried to get some assistance. "Yeah, yeah, I just changed him," I murmured, a sleep talk lie that I wouldn’t remember in the morning. Diane caught me consoling a pillow, and rocking a folded blanket to sleep. Diane’s hormones were in an equally confused state: laughter turned to tears and back to laughter with soap opera speed and intensity. All the little reminders of Wyatt made her cry. Phone calls from family, cards from friends, his cute expressions in bed, the socks that kept slipping off his curled feet, his little knit hat that read Baby Girl.

Those few days rolled around each other in a soft haze. We barely left the house, wandering to the corner store in our pajamas, roaming around in a happy, confused state as if we had all been pushed out of the womb together and were just finding our way.

The best advice I can give an anxious parent is to stay away from statistics. The doctor will stress the importance of the baby gaining weight, but won’t tell you that most babies experience a few days of weight loss before they start to fatten up. Beef eaters will try to scare vegetarian moms into steak dinners to help the baby gain weight. The largest baby I have ever seen was the hippies’ baby, nursing off of a vegan boob. He was enormous to the point where I was glad his mom was not eating meat, worried he would have developed into some kind of flesh eating monster. My yuppie brother was told at one point that his son was in the 98th percentile for head size. If you continue to keep a 98th percentile head into school, you will not only be at the top of your class, you will be the top of your class.

DOCTOR: I’m sorry Sir, but your son is currently operating a 98 percentile head on top of a 2 percentile body. If he keeps growing at this rate he’ll never walk correctly. In fact, he’ll surely fall over.

PARENT: Is there any hope?

DOCTOR: Maybe he could drag his head around for short distances.

I assure you, my brother’s kid has grown into a normal sized head, and my brother-in-law’s kid is not a vegan monster, he is a regular sized vegan in training. The doctors will also warn you about the baby’s color, worrying if they are too yellow, threatening that they will become just like Billy Reuben or John Dis (also known as jaundice). After talking to many parents with newborns, I have this to announce to the medical community: Babies are born small, and a little yellow. After they eat, they get bigger. If you let them get a little sun, they get less yellow. Some people run into complications, but basically newborns are small yellow creatures with sometimes disproportionate body parts. That’s what happens when you get shoved out of a small tunnel. And in a few days, they are just fine. There is one more question which seems to fascinate the doctors, which we were repeatedly asked: Is he peeing at least a foot? If anyone is sitting around and watching how far their newborn can pee across the living room floor, the baby’s health is probably the least of their problems. But I would like to think that Wyatt could do it. I want to be a proud dad. I looked one doctor square in the face and said, " Oh, I think he could pee at least two feet."

Despite my aversion to baby stats, I would like to mark a couple of Wyatt’s major developmental events during the first week or two, the moments that I found most significant. At about 8 days he lost his belly crust. We woke in the morning to find his chunky, dry belly nugget missing. After searching the sheets, we decided that the dog had probably eaten it. Hey, a lot of hippies eat the baby’s placenta, so the belly nugget is like a nice snack alternative. And two days later I noticed that Wyatt had little round nipples, which up through day 9 were merely slits in his chest, space savers for nipples to come. Our pet monkey was coming along quite nicely.

2005-06-23T00:19:00.000-07:00

Back home

2005-06-23T00:11:00.000-07:00

It is a strange and incredible feeling to leave the hospital with your own child. We bundled Wyatt up against the cold outside wind, which painted his fragile cheeks pink for the first time. I drove home with two hands on the wheel, like a nervous student driver, ready to start our new family.

Getting back home I remembered we were already part of a big family, a motley crowd of insane blood relations. My dad’s side of the family was generally pretty relaxed. My uncle Kevin left a message saying "Give me a call when you have some free time, which will probably be in about ten years." My mom’s family mostly wanted calls back in about ten seconds. My Aunt Jane’s message said, "Call immediately, I want all the details. Call collect. Now!" She followed up several phone calls with some emails, written in giant bright blue font. It was the first time I had seen someone yelling in an email. Mostly the family calls and cards carried the same message of love from the Boston area, 3,000 miles away: Congrats on the baby. GO PATRIOTS!!!

My favorite reaction came from my friend Ben, in response to a naked picture of Wyatt that I had emailed. He sent one email saying that he was confused because Wyatt looked like a girl. Apparently the picture was a little fuzzy near Wyatt’s balls. A couple of days later I received an apology email, saying that the first one was sent in a drunken stupor and he was very sorry. At the time I couldn’t remember what he was apologizing for. Days later I recalled that he had ridiculed my son’s genitalia. He had not only called Wyatt a girl. In essence he had said: Congratulations, but your son’s penis looks like a vagina.

Diane’s family had been in town, transforming our bedroom into a nursery and giving the house a surprise make-over. Diane’s mom, Garryann, has asked that I refer to her as Ruby to protect her identity. Ruby is convinced that our messy lifestyle is simply due to a lack of shelves and baskets. Somehow she thinks that more organization will make us more cleanly. Towels, for instance, are always lying about the bedroom. We returned from the hospital to find four towel racks hanging in the bathroom.

Diane’s dad, Nick, who I will refer to as Nick, is an accident prone handyman taking blood thinner medication. We arrived home to find both of them with fingers covered in band-aids. Nick had put together an attractive wooden Ikea toy chest, which had the slightly morbid design of human blood smeared along its side.

The day they were leaving, Ruby sat me down for a quick lesson in priorities. "Now remember, Wyatt is number one, Diane is number two, and you are number three." My first desire was to be number one, or even two, just for a little bit. Later I found myself more concerned about protecting my status as number three, wondering who could enter the line-up and take over my spot. Akasha the cat, Spartacus our dog, or maybe Ruby. She would later call the house and leave messages as Number Three. By the time they left, the number I was most conscious of was seven, seven towel racks hanging in our messy bathroom.

2005-06-17T23:50:00.000-07:00

Kaiser motel

2005-06-17T23:28:00.000-07:00

Our first three nights were spent in that hospital room. Our days were filled with nurses taking tests and assigning numbers to all of Wyatt’s behaviors. He breastfed at a 9, and his color dropped to an 8, but he kicked and screamed during some of the tests at a perfect 10. And at 2 days old, I believe he was reading at the level of a 3 week old baby, which is to say, absolutely nothing at all.

The nurses were generally sweet, but office politics were evident in many of the shift changes. "Hello, and how are you?" a nurse would ask, smiling as she arrived. "Oh, I see that your last nurse didn’t bother to change the sheets."

Diane would try to remain neutral. "Yeah, well, I’ve been in bed all day."

"Yes, dear, but any good nurse can change a bed while the patient is in it."

The shift to shift bickering seemed unnecessary, but I was impressed by the idea that a person could change the sheets of an occupied bed. Some of the comments were a little more disconcerting, like "Hey, who put that IV in there? That’s no good."

But our hospital stay was pretty enjoyable, about a 6 or 7. Visitors came through to bring us a touch of the outside world. The hippies arrived with bags of nuts and grains, and my brother showed up with a duck pillow and a cigar. By the second night, some of our adrenaline had faded to exhaustion. Diane suggested I had been sleeping a lot, referring to a 3 hour block where I was allowed to sleep non-stop. The third day we were rejuvenated by Wyatt’s first fart. I wrote this note to myself:

audible, stinky
followed by a little poop –
first green brown after 3 black tar offerings

Somehow Diane accused me of not being excited enough. When farts inspire poetry, I think any more excitement should be diagnosed as an emotional problem.

Our last night I fell into a comfortable deep hibernation. The alarm went off, Diane called the cell phone next to my head with the hospital phone, and then she began to throw objects at me from her bed. I got up briefly to address the ambush and help with Wyatt. Diane made me move the chair closer so she could whack me if she needed something. Somehow I slept a little less peacefully after that. The threat of violence has a strange effect on my sleep.

Hours later I woke suddenly as Diane reached out from her hospital bed, with Wyatt latched onto her boob, and smacked me repeatedly in the leg. She pointed just above me to the window, where an old woman was pressing her face up against the glass. Old faces were not meant to be pressed against glass, late at night where my headboard should be. I tried to talk to her through the thick window. It seemed that she had walked through the wrong door and found herself locked outside in the courtyard. Diane buzzed the nurse for help, as I tried to figure out how to let her back in.

The overnight nurse brushed through the room to the window. "Don’t worry, we have security. She won’t get you." She reached over me to shut the curtain.

Humanitarian considerations aside, I had no real fear of this 80 year old woman. Even with such little sleep, in my weakened condition, I think I could’ve taken her.

By the next morning we were anxious to bring Wyatt home. We had served out a mandatory 72 hour stay for premie births, and were hoping the doctor would clear us to leave. The last test performed on Wyatt was the most brutal; it seemed almost barbaric. And Wyatt screamed like we had never heard him before. "He’s got quite a pair of lungs on him," said one of the nurses. A very upbeat student nurse replied, "He’s the most alert baby I’ve seen all morning."

It was a state mandated tests for diseases. Sounds normal enough. The test sheet had 5 nickel-sized circles on it which need to be completely filled in, with the baby’s blood. The nurse pricked Wyatt’s heel and then squeezed his tiny foot to use it like an ink pen, carefully filling each of the 5 circles. It’s the devil’s scantron, coloring in circles with newborn baby’s blood. We wanted to get back home before they brought out the leeches.

Perhaps the state mandates a brief period of art, and torture, to convince nervous parents to take their baby home. And so we did.

2005-06-16T23:01:00.000-07:00

the pope meets furilla

First night

2005-06-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

Having Wyatt all to ourselves in the hospital room was miraculous. It feels as if nobody has ever done this before. Finally the swarm of nurses settles in for the night, the visitors go home, and you are left alone in a room with a small creature.

Wyatt spent his first night almost exclusively in his mom’s and dad’s arms. We had no desire to put him in that little plastic box, a microwave tray on wheels that looked like the future of baby production. We held him while he slept, and even as we changed him. Late that night I lay in the dark on a brown pull-out chair. Wyatt slept on my chest as I thought about being a dad, and my dad. It felt funny not to have our parents, or any other adults around. I had the strange feeling of being the adults in the hospital room, the start of a new generation. This is our little creature, and we can do whatever we want with him. Who will tell us not to misbehave?

Neither of us had slept much the night before, and our first night with Wyatt didn’t start until about 4 a.m. The next morning arrived rather abruptly, and the events unfolded in a sleepy haze. (The following events are recollected through a few scribbled notes on the back of an envelope. I appeared to be an overly conscious spouse with all of my dutiful note taking. The nurses didn’t realize that most of my notes were less about the care of my baby and more about the quirks in their personalities and hair styles.)

7:45 am
I was woken up from a deep sleep by a frenetic doctor. He rummaged through a pile of papers. He spoke real fast like the voice on the end of radio ads muttering disclaimers. "Great . . . sign here . . . and here. I’ll be back in 15 minutes to pick up the forms." I crawled off of the chair, just now realizing that Diane had already taken Wyatt and was feeding him. The stack of papers were birth certificate forms. 15 minutes to officially write down our baby’s name. The name Wyatt had been decided for months, but the rest of the name had been frequently debated. We had talked about giving him my middle name, Joseph. But the last name was definitely a matter of contention. We each envisioned a beautiful baby boy that shared our last name. Wyatt Joseph Nicola or Wyatt Joseph Carey. Diane was still hopped up on medication, and weak from her Magnesium IV and recent surgery. I took full advantage. As two nurses came in, and the phone was ringing, I slipped in a suggestion of Wyatt Joseph Nicola Carey, and she agreed.

The last page in the stack was a paternity form. I immediately thought of all those cheap talk show formulas that involve surprising a guest with paternity test results. It made me pause, but I signed on as half of Wyatt’s gene pool.

8:50 am
This scrawled note again took the form of a short poem, an almost haiku:

First poop!
My brother warned me
Black tar, sticky taffy, clinging to his bum

9:40 am
A head nurse arrived with several students at her coattails to perform Wyatt’s health check. She instructed the trainees in a long, strange series of tests. It involved a lot of poking and bending poor little Wyatt, naked and helpless in the plastic box. The head nurse sat him up, held his hands and then dropped him backwards. "Wow, he did great with that," she declared. It seemed more a test of the room’s gravity, which apparently was up to par. Then she began a full body inspection, which included an inexplicable titty twister, and a careful count of his testicles. "Check one at a time to make sure there’s two," she advised. "Hold one while you check the other." Apparently you can easily recount the same one several times. The policy of holding one while you check the other was probably a procedural change put into place after some careless miscalculation by a student nurse. Perhaps she scared a new set of parents by yelling out, Hey, this kid has seven balls.

2005-06-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

A man intact

2005-06-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

Even in the emotional blur of seeing your son for the first time, you quickly notice his enormous balls. For some parents, who don’t yet know the sex of the baby, it’s almost the first look you take. I have heard all sorts of claims about the large size of a newborn boy’s testicles. Someone told me once that boys are born with fully grown balls, and that the rest of the human body sort of grows around them and catches up in adulthood. Dads seem to talk far too much about their newborn sons’ balls, and there is always a strange pride that goes along with it.

Wyatt’s were no disappointment. He arrived pink and screaming, with big flat balls and a little uncircumcised penis in the middle, like a lily. I emailed some of my friends an early picture of Wyatt naked, getting his sponge bath. The balls were so big as to almost disregard the penis that lay atop them. In fact, a friend of mine named Ben actually responded with this message: "Congratulations. But I’m confused, I thought you said you were having a boy."

Several of the nurses asked if Wyatt would be circumcised. We told them that he would not be. They were as impressed with his penis as they were with Diane’s nipples. "Good for you," one of the nurses declared. "Well, I mean good for him." The nurses seemed united in their support of uncircumcised penises. I pictured teams of nurses striking at local hospitals against the practice of circumcision. They carried signs like We won’t come in, if it ain’t got that skin. The crowd erupted in cheers of "1, 2, 3 . . . 4skin . . . 1, 2, 3, foreskin." Speakers led a march on the capital building, the whole crowd chanting together: "What do we want? Penis! How do we want it? Covered!"

The nurses referred to it as an unnecessary operation, but I have seen even stronger reactions against circumcision. The most outspoken critics I have ever seen appeared together on a public access, local TV show. It was a documentary about people who had felt violated, almost as if a small piece of themselves had been taken away. They talked about efforts to replace the skin with plastics and fabrics, a false turtleneck for the winter months. They mourned the foreskin’s disappearance and felt it’s absence, the way amputees feel the pain of missing limbs. They invented their own terminology to express their longing for a foreskin: circumcised people were referred to as cut, and uncircumcised penises were described as intact. My favorite quote was a poignant moment in an interview with a man who had been cut as a baby. The camera zoomed in close to his face. "The first time I saw a man intact, I cried."

We couldn’t be sure if Wyatt’s penis would ever illicit such a dramatic response, but as new parents, we can only hope that our children will have a profound effect on the world. We do not have such intense feelings about the decision. Basically, we have heard that medical reasoning for circumcison has largely been abandoned, and that it decreases sensation. So why bother? Outside of cultural and religious rationale, most people today consider circumcision primarily for one reason: they worry that their son’s penis won’t match the penises of other kids at school, and more importantly their own. Matching penises? I’m not much for coordinating colors in my living room or posed family photos, though I can almost appreciate it. But this current trend of matching family genitals seems a little extreme -- matching your son’s penis like a family Christmas sweater. What if the dad has a strange hook shaped penis, or one testicle. Isn’t he just a gorgeous little baby. Oh look, he has his mother’s eyes . . . and his dad’s penis.

At this early stage, I don’t think it matters much if Wyatt’s penis is circumcised, or retains its natural hood. Right now, Wyatt is all balls anyway.

2005-06-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

Not bad, for a premie

2005-06-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

Wyatt was squirming and making noise, looking around a bit. Apparently he was very alert, and the nurses were impressed. He took to breastfeeding right away. A nurse paused by Diane with a clipboard: "He looks good breastfeeding. I would say a 9 or 10."

"Of course he does," I laughed. "He’s got an Apgar of double 9s."

But the nurse was otherwise occupied. She watched Wyatt closely then turned to Diane. "Wow, you got great nipples."

"Thanks?" Diane muttered, then looked at me.

I shrugged my shoulders. "I’d give them at least an 8."

Nurses continued to flutter about the room, gathering around Diane like moths to a porch light. And they were all quite impressed with Diane’s boobs. A student nurse concurred, "Great nipples," then gave Diane’s nipples a thumbs up and headed back down the hallway.

I assumed that her eraser-shaped nipples were particularly suited for the job. I felt Darwin’s evolution creep into the room and settle on my girlfriend’s chest. Then another nurse told Diane, "You’re doing good, you have a nipple for him to suck on." Perhaps these nurses were just easily impressed, handing out 9s and 10s to almost any misshapen pink nub that passed as a nipple.

Later a lactation expert came to verify the nurses’ reports. She was younger than the boob expert that had run our class, and spoke about breastfeeding with a thick, Mexican accent.

"Ah, very good nipples." She showed Diane several different breastfeeding positions. "You might want to hold him sideways, like this." She stood with one arm out, in the classic Heisman trophy stance. Well, a Heisman trophy for breastfeeding, which I began to think Diane might be a strong contender for. The nurse struck the winning combination of boobs and football, perhaps inspired by Janet Jackson’s recent superbowl nipple exposure. She held her Heisman posture and smiled at Diane, "You have big breasts, that’s good. Because you have big breasts, you can do football holder."

My sister Julie leaned over and whispered, "If you have big titties, you can do football players."

2005-06-10T02:04:00.000-07:00

Panties

2005-06-10T01:50:00.000-07:00

For over an hour we stared at Wyatt’s lifeless picture like a little wooden Pinocchio, and then he miraculously came to life. He arrived with soft, puffy features in his face, and long, wrinkled fingers and toes. He looked the tiny figure of a life in its last phase, an old man awaking to find a new vessel for another life. We all cuddled and kissed him before the nurse arrived for his sponge bath.

Then other nurses began to traffic the room again, catering to Diane and Wyatt. The solemn mood shifted for me slightly as nurses began to talk about putting "panties" on Diane. An older woman crossed the room to Diane, then turned to yell into the hallway with the utmost delicacy: "Hey, can you bring in some panties for her."

"Sure, panties are on the way," came booming down the hall, then an echo of "panties for room 12" that crept down the corridor like a soft breeze.

I must have heard the word panties about 10 times in the next few minutes. I have a certain sensitivity to the word panties. However, this crowd of nurses saying panties to each other was, well, not quite how I would have imagined it. When the infamous panties finally arrived, they were not the kind of panties that have earned the word its power and reputation. Hospital panties are actually large, grandma undies that ride low on the hips. They are made out of gauze, and when not in use appear completely rectangular in shape, like a cheese cloth or a dish rag.

Wyatt took his first sponge bath. He whimpered as the nurse scrubbed him down. I’m sure he’ll look back in time and feel that he was misinformed about the concept of a nurse’s spongebath. I believe there is a lot of false advertising that nurses pedal about their panties and sponge baths. And the public has been seduced into using their hospitals.

During the birthing process we experience the collapse of sexual mystery, and the foundation of family that replaces it. I kissed my clean baby as Diane lay snuggling him in her panties, then turned away to call my mom and dad.

I managed to get in touch with my parents, who were in Ethiopia at the time. Talking with my parents on the phone almost brought them into the room. The time and space between us collapsed in the moment, and I felt as if they might be waiting at the end of the hall for the nurses to let them in. The connection had a soft crackling, and a five second time delay, but my mom and dad came through clear enough. My dad was real emotional, passing the torch of being a dad. My mom wanted all of the numbers and details: "What was his height? And weight?" She paused like she was punching them into some formula. "And what about his Apgar?"

"His epcar?" I repeated.

One of the nurses called over, "It’s 9 and 9, and they don’t really give out 10s."

"Oh, wow," my mom replied. "That’s excellent."

"Yeah," I said, "my son has a damn good Nascar rating. And the judges never give out tens."

"No, they usually don’t," my mom responded, as if she had been in the room when the nurse said it. "That’s great news. Double 9s! He must have a good color."

Indeed he did. Nurses had been coming in the room and commenting on his color. "Great color," they kept saying. "Wow, for a premie he has an excellent color." I guess pink covered in white scum is considered a really good color for a newborn.

Smash and grab

2005-05-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

The traveling circus packed up and squeezed through the thin doorway: the bleeping and flashing machines were shut off, the gaggle of doctors and nurses stumbled out, and then the lady with the swollen belly that had a person living inside her was wheeled out of the room on a bed. I was left alone in the hospital room, with a neatly folded pile of baby blue scrubs. I had been told to put on the scrubs and I could rejoin the madness. I stripped down and put on the shirt and pants. I looked in the mirror and felt like I might try to perform the C-section myself. Hell, other folks were trying weird shit on my girlfriend, supposed doctors dressed as medical clowns trying to make balloon animals in her uterus. I considered wearing an undershirt but decided to stick with the Dr. Chest Hair look. Then I added the scrubs accessories – puffy blue shoe covers that stretched over my slippers, and a baby blue afro shower cap.

I circled the room, and looked at my watch though I didn’t know what time Diane had left. I opened the door and peered down an empty hallway. Just as I was closing the door over, a small Chinese woman peered in: "I come get you. Wait. I come get you."

I returned to the mirror. A big flat baker’s hat drooped into my face, over a stubbly chin. I spent a few minutes standing there, then realized that I was playing dress up and making faces at myself while my girlfriend was about to give birth down the hallway. I looked through a crack in the door. "I come get you. I come get you," I heard and shut the door again. I had felt pretty sure that she was going to take me to the surgery, but now began to second guess the scenario. Had I seen her in our room before? Perhaps she was a visitor or a patient that was just threatening me. I paced the room, wondering how long Diane had been gone. I returned to the bathroom to look in the mirror and play French pastry chef. I was trying to ease the tension with a little comedy, break a serious moment with a little old fashioned psychosis. I guess I was just anxious for the birth of my son, nervous about my girl alone in the operating room, and a little afraid of the Chinese woman that might come get me.

A new character in white knocked on the door, then led me down the hall to the operating room, leaving certain questions unanswered about the Chinese woman’s intentions. The room was big and bright, with high windows overlooking San Francisco hills. It was separated in half by a stretched blue sheet, which in turn separated Diane’s head from her body. Just under the tall windows, a team of doctors addressed a table covered in chrome tools, near the feet of a decapitated body. I was led to the other side of the room, where Diane’s head emerged from the blue wall. I then met the kind of guy they call Slim, a long and slender gay anesthesiologist with a Texan waxed moustache. He shook my hand and cracked a quick joke. A hairy chest flared up from beneath his thin blue scrubs. I reconsidered my own chest hair and silver chain in this new environment. Maybe undershirts are a little more in order than people think in these scenarios. Slim rocked back in a comfortable chair. A wide satisfied grin crept along his face. Once the medicine is going, there’s not a whole lot for me to do. If Slim had been wearing an undershirt, I felt pretty sure it would have read across the chest: I get high on my own supply, maybe with a little graphic of a dancing mushroom.

I sat on a stool stroking Diane’s forehead and holding her hand. I peered over the sheet as the operation got underway. I was the only person really connecting the two sides of the room, the sterile operating room and Slim’s Club Med opium den. Well, unless you count Diane whose head had been severed to accommodate the space, the way hippy cafes are built around existing trees. I peered over the blue sheet as doctors sliced through Diane’s stomach and began holding her organs in their hands. Someone was holding the wide crevice of skin and fat open with two silver spatulas. I remembered this was a training facility for student doctors. The spatulas held Diane’s flesh apart like textbook drawings of the earth’s crust. One doctor held a beige, oval organ in his hand. In a quick, almost panicked voice, another one said, "Hey, don’t take the bladder out yet." Not a good time for training, I thought. Then I looked back on our side, caught a hang loose sign from Slim and somehow reassured Diane that everything was looking great. Soon the fluid sack was broken and Wyatt began to emerge. Wyatt’s little face stuck out of Diane’s stomach first. His squished features rested for several seconds on her belly. Then he was pulled from her womb like a ripe vegetable, skinny roots dangling behind a round red face.

Wyatt was skinny and gray, like a porcelain doll. A porcelain doll that kicks and screams a lot. He weighed only 5lbs 5 oz. I left Diane to go be with him for a minute, and cut his umbilical chord, feeling forever responsible for the shape of his belly button. (It seems that everyone these days has an inie. What ever happened to outies?) Wyatt was brought to Diane for a quick look. Because he was five weeks premature, he was then scurried off for a few tests in the ICU.

The whole operation took less than 10 minutes. It seems like such a simple concept, like a smash and grab jewelry heist – if the baby isn’t coming out, we’ll just cut a hole in her stomach and go get him out. A handyman’s response to a difficult birth, no balloons required. With a few stitches and two thumbs up from the gay Texan anesthesiologist, Diane was wheeled back to her room.

I jotted a few words on a scrap of paper, first memories of our new son. Diane kept asking the nurse to see Wyatt, and minutes dragged by. My little sister Julie showed up with flowers. Then another nurse arrived with a Polaroid of Wyatt, in a diaper that draped from his knees to his nipples. Written underneath was the date, time, and the name Baby Boy. The motley crew of doctors and nurses seemed to be holding Wyatt hostage. Meet our demands if you want to see Baby Boy alive. Do what we say or we will have to swaddle your son in ridiculously large diapers. We sat together with our flowers, throwing a party for an imaginary friend. I held Diane’s hand, looked down at our two-dimensional baby resting on the bed next to her, and red aloud the notes I had jotted down, almost a haiku:

curly hair
scrunched face
big balls – tiny penis

Birth

2005-05-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

The daily threat that Wyatt could arrive any day lost its weight somewhere in the second week. A target date was set to induce labor, and was still a few weeks away. Diane lay in a hospital bed, watching a stack of movies I had carefully selected for their positive messages and lack of emotionally damaging content. Finding Nemo, for instance, made the list only after I was assured that at the end of the movie they did, in fact, find Nemo. And well, with everything at the hospital seeming very much in stasis, I left for an important basketball game for my co-ed team, a team that had gone 0-9 in its first season together.

I found out that our plans had moved up, and they were starting to induce labor that night. I got a call on my cell phone late in the game. At half-time. OK , so it was just before the game, but the process would last a day or two before the actual labor began. We were doing everything we could to improve a bit off of our first season’s perfect record. So I finished the game and headed back to the hospital.

Diane’s IV had been filled with Magnesium, which would drip slowly into her system throughout the night. Magnesium seemed like a strange substance to be injected into a pregnant woman, like some X-Men plot. The next morning they would change the IV to Pitocin, a chemical that tries to trick the body into starting labor early. The baby could be born as early as the next morning, and would definitely be delivered within two days.

This time, the threats of Wyatt’s early arrival were very real. Diane had a difficult night. As the Magnesium increased in her body, she had hot and cold spells with sharp headaches. I rubbed her head and spent most of the night cooling her off and then getting her more blankets. By the morning the rotation of nurses had become an army of white sneakers, a cast of five or six parked permanently in our room. The regular crew had scattered around the hospital and we were surrounded by a crack team of mostly Eastern European nurses, led by a small Ukranian woman with intense eyes and a giant helmet of hair. She was in constant motion, arms waving, pacing around the room. Every part of her moved except her hair.

Diane’s headaches developed into light-headed pain mixed with crazy talk. She was given an oxygen mask to breath into, and the team of nurses was mostly replaced by a group of doctors. The Ukranian nurse held a quiet bitterness in her thin lips, peering out beneath the hair helmet. She was the local cop kicked off the case by the FBI, and seemed intent on breaking the case on her own.

The room was taken over by a tiny, Jewish woman with short curly hair: Dr Goldstein. She was sort of a Dr. Ruth character, with her short stature and her curious approach to medicine. The doctors began to monitor Diane’s vitals closely, especially her blood pressure. This would determine how quickly they needed to move to delivery. They also continued to check in with Diane, constantly asking her to rate her pain, on a scale from 1 to 10. Dr. Goldstein appeared knowledgeable and thorough, and I felt comforted by her command of the situation. Although she kept talking to the other doctors about things she might be able to fit into Diane’s uterus.

The Magnesium drip had been replaced by Pitocin, which induces the body into early labor. But Diane’s uterus was not easily tricked, and her labor wasn’t progressing. If her uterus didn’t begin to dilate at a faster pace, then we would have to resort to a Cesarian birth. In other words, if Diane’s body wasn’t creating a space large enough for the baby’s head to fit through, they needed to cut a hole in her stomach. A C-section is basically a handyman’s response to bumps in the road.

Dr. Goldstein kept talking about the feasibility of getting a Foley into Diane’s uterus. Apparently a Foley is a balloon that is put in the uterus, is inflated once inside, and opens up the uterus a bit. It sort of made sense, trying to help the uterus open faster to increase the chances of a successful vaginal birth rather than resorting to a C-section. Then again, it sort of sounded like some crazy Dr. Ruth lady was going MacGyver on my girl’s uterus. Hey, maybe we should shove a balloon up there and try to inflate it. I’m thinking, maybe we should stick to tactics that are a little more traditional.

Dr. Goldstein turned to Diane, "How would you rate your pain right now?"

Diane breathed into the mask and rolled her eyes about the room. "It fuckin hurts," Diane snapped back.

Dr. Goldstein continued, unfazed. "Alright, and on a scale of 1 to 10?"

"An 8," I intervened. "Fuckin hurts is an 8."

Dr. Goldstein turned to me, then back to Diane, "I recommend we give the Foley a try."

"Is there any reason not to?" I asked. Any reason not to stick a balloon up my girlfriend and try to inflate it? I know that something has kept me from trying this kid of stunt in the past. Maybe an antiquated sense of decency, or some state law.

The doctor paused, as if not wanting to admit any drawbacks that would spoil her experiment. "Some communities do frown on the use of the Foley."

Yeah, like the medical community? "Oh, I see," I replied.

After another check, the uterus was barely responding to the Pitocin, so the balloon ride inside Diane was cancelled. Her rising blood pressure, together with high degrees of protein in her always popular urine samples, meant that we were going forward with the C-section. Once the decision was finalized, the all-star team of doctors scurried out of the room, and one of the overnight nurses came in for a last blood test. She was an older woman with long, grey stringy hair that covered her face and most of the top of her head. She had a warm smile, a soft voice, and the shakes. She complained of Diane’s low veins as she aimed a shakey needle above her arm and stabbed at her repeatedly. They looked like two strung out addicts in search of the last decent vein. Then a 300 pound nurse came in to shave Diane’s pubic hair, kind of ruining any kinky fantasy that might have grown out of it. She shaved only the top half, giving Diane a sort of Stephen Wright hairdo, bald on top with an afro beneath it.

I taped a plastic baby on Diane’s medical bracelet, gave her a kiss, and kissed Wyatt through her belly. "We’re gonna come in there and bust you out," I whispered. I told Diane I loved her and she was wheeled off.

Bumps in the road

2005-05-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

Diane spent most of two weeks lying on the floor. She gathered herself for occasional trips to the hospital, rising slowly from the animal nest to greet the outside world. One evening just before our next session with the aged lactation expert, she became violently ill. Bouts of vomiting paused only for diarrhea. As Diane forcefully expelled everything inside her, I wondered if her body was evicting Wyatt.

We headed to the hospital. I looked at the class schedule on the dashboard. We were skipping "Bumps in the Road," but we seemed to be mastering the topic on our own. Diane had jotted a note next to the "Early Stages of Labor" section: Stay at home as long as possible. She would be in the hospital until Wyatt was born, almost two weeks later.

Diane’s symptoms worsened into the night and she grew weak and dehydrated. With some rest and an IV her body began to recover, and by the morning she felt herself again. The doctors and nurses ran through different theories about her illness, claiming it was probably a random bug or food poisoning, but that it could also be related to the onset of preeclampsia. Basically, they didn’t know. She should be fine, but her blood pressures were rising and they wanted her to remain in the hospital so they could monitor her closely, and get easy access to her valuable pee.
Diane spent the next 10 days with a constant blur of different nurses, and was forced to move rooms unexpectedly, like the star witness in a mafia trial. Many of the nurses were friendly and professional. But some of the overnight crew were a little discomforting, as if the hospital had just roamed the streets looking for anyone with white sneakers and a desire to stick people with needles. I slept in the corner of the room on a pull out chair, with one eye open under a baseball cap, a slightly less manly version of Clint Eastwood. My gunslinging enemy was a lightly-bearded lady with white sneakers, trying to draw blood from my neck. I worried I would wake up with an IV and a new diagnosis. It says in your chart you have an abnormal spleen. Oh you don’t, well, we can take care of that. Diane was on a constant schedule of poking and prodding, tenderizing her for a later date. Late into the first night we finally both fell into a deep sleep and were woken suddenly by a screaming nurse.

"Good morning," she shouted. And continued to yell, "Hello. Good morning. Did you get some sleep?" I rolled over and noticed an elderly woman leaning over Diane’s face screaming at her. It seemed that someone in white sneakers must have written hard of hearing or deaf on her file. "Well, you’re having a baby. Gotta watch parenting videos. I’ll get ya started." I saw that the old woman had a big clunky item in her ear, and figured she must have a hearing aid, albeit a not very effective one. She took Diane’s exhaustion for non-comprehension and raised the volume a bit. "I’ll be right back," she blew in Diane’s face, and left the room.

The door swung open again and I got a better image of the nurse. She had a gold jacket on over her white clothes, and a face caked with thick tan base and red cheeks, like a clown nurse. "I’m the video lady," she declared, and then headed to the VCR to play a 70s parenting tape. I noticed two large gold nuggets hanging from her ears. She brushed by my chair, and made a big surprised face like clowns do. "Oh, you’re up?"

"Uh yeah," I replied. Maybe you missed it. There was an old clown in here just a moment ago, screaming, and she had the strangest pair of giant gold hearing aids.

She turned the TV up just a bit louder than her outfit, then looked at Diane slumped in her bed, trying to prop her eyes open. She yelled over the video, "Is that loud enough for you dear?"

The nurses had individual quirks and personalities, but they definitely covered the stereotypes. There were young, cute candy stripers, large women that smelled like cigar smoke with voices to match, and a big, silly, gay male nurse with a wife and three kids. It’s reassuring when nurses are meticulous, but they were overly strict about hospital policies like my overnight stays and appropriate times to eat pudding. And the laid back nurses were more fun to hang out with, but worrisome when considering that this two week slumber party was actually a hospital stay. Like the relaxed nurse that gave me a wheelchair to take Diane around the hospital, telling me to ignore the tag that was on it. The tag was a sticker along the arm band that read "Replace Arm Band." And there was also a giant, neon pink tag on the seat: "WARNING: DO NOT USE THIS PIECE OF EQUIPMENT!" It seemed to roll alright and we took it for a spin.

Generally I prefer a laid back slacker to an uptight professional, even when it concerns matters of health. Luckily we got a pretty relaxed team of nurses when Diane was stuck in the hospital on Superbowl Sunday. With the Patriots in the game, we had to make a little effort even in our current environment. We filled our small room with friends, beers and cheese sticks. It was a memorable day, a gathering of close pals drinking and eating fried cheese, with Diane lounging in her buttless gown. The show was incredible -- full of music, fireworks, and an infamous moment that turned Janet Jackson from pop diva into breast pop diva. The Patriots game was OK too.

24 hours of pee

2005-05-11T00:26:00.000-07:00

Through the first 7 months, Wyatt had been quite a pleasant little resident. Besides some occasional queasiness, and the heartburn of a 70 year old hot dog vendor, Diane's pregnancy had been fairly smooth. Then she recorded one high blood pressure at the doctor's office, which set off a series of tests that would last the rest of the pregnancy. The doctor recommended that she minimize her activity level and stress. And then she was put on a rigorous schedule of hospital visits and home tests, a constant monitoring of her blood pressure and urine. She was possibly in the early stages of preeclampsia, which untreated can become a serious hazard to the mother and the baby. The levels of protein in her urine, along with her blood pressure monitoring, revealed if and how quickly the condition was advancing. We were told that this may not affect the pregnancy at all, or at any time could develop rapidly and the hospital would be forced to induce labor.

Basically, the message was this: Well, you might have a baby as early as today, two-months early. You should be fine, though at any point you could develop preeclampsia which could lead to seizure and death. But this is very rare, so the best thing you can do is to keep your activity and stress level down. Just relax and don't worry about it too much. Telling this to a highly emotional pregnant woman is like telling a little kid that chocolate might make his head explode.

Diane handled it well, and lowered her activity level, aside from the increased monitoring of her blood pressure and urine. Over the next two weeks a rise in her blood pressure and traces of protein in her urine sent us back to the doctor for further examination. He explained the need for a more sensitive urine analysis, and then announced that they were going to need 24 hours of pee. 24 Hours of Pee. The first time that Dr. Bob Villa mentioned it, he seemed to pause and then raise his voice, as if the other tests were just filler, and Diane's day of pee was the main event we had all come to see. Welcome urinaters, to 24 Hours of Pee! It seemed an event that traveled the county fair circuit, pairing up with tractor pulls and pig races. This Saturday at the monster truck show Grave Digger crashes through mobile homes, $1 PBRs on tap, and 24 HOURS OF PEE!!!

The initial 24 hours of pee required staying overnight at the hospital. Once they were convinced we grasped the basic concept, collecting pee for an entire day, we were allowed to do it at home. We were given a plastic bucket that resembled a sombrero, called the pee hat. We poured the pee hat into a red expanding gas tank that was kept on ice. I felt suspicious going to the hospital on my own to deliver a gas tank full of pee. Then I grew suspicious of the doctors, and their need for so much pee. They talked about Diane's urine, or output, with such interest and intensity. They seemed like one of those underground vampire societies posing at hospitals to get their hands on fresh human blood. This was some sophisticated clan of un-dead healthcare professionals living off of my pregnant girlfriend's pee.

I remembered a recent conversation with my dad, who with no real context suddenly had a lot of questions about the Dali Lama. After a short pause in our phone conversation, he broached the subject. "So, you know the Dali Lama."

"Yeah, what about him?" I sensed one of my dad's strange stories coming on, some kid he went to high school with that claimed the Dali Lama was gay or Italian or something.

"Well, do you know that they keep everything that comes off of him? Like his fingernails and hair."

"I have heard that."

"Everything." He paused. "Everything that comes out of him. They keep all of his excrement."

"Yeah."

"His poops and pees," my dad clarified.

"I know. I know what excrement is, dad." Maybe he knew a story about someone claiming to have the Dali Lama's poops, and wanting to auction them off -- that seemed about right. "What's on your mind, dad?"

"Nothing, I just found this out the other day. It just seems a little strange, that's all. I mean, what are they gonna do with it? And where do they keep it? Over time, it would really add up. They would need a room . . . a whole building really."

"I really hadn't considered it, dad."

Now Diane's pee had become a subject of mystery, a kept and sought after commodity poured from pee hats into gas tanks, which were constantly being delivered and tested. I was impressed that she was keeping company on some level with the world's greatest leaders, safeguarding her output for the bizarre hospital pee-stealing life forms. And I became their delivery boy. I got used to hanging out in the lobby of the obgyn. Some things in life you just never planned to get used to; they start as a bad joke and work their way into a regular part of your schedule. I looked and felt a little suspect, sitting in the corner by myself in the obgyn lobby. Three days from my last shave, I waited to drop off fresh pee samples, listening to old ladies' gyne info.

After a few weeks, the doctor recommended that Diane go on complete bed rest, to help delay the development of preeclampsia, which would require a early delivery. We filled the living room with a king-sized mattress. Diane lounged about the house with the cat and the dog, an animal lover's opium den. Not working or being able to get things done around the house bothered her. I began to scheme for my own doctor's note of forced bed rest. Diane, her cat, and our pitbull Spartacus spent a lot of time piled on top of each other like harbor seals, watching TV and calling out for snacks. If I could have traded the pets for some kind of Roman orgie, I think I was basically looking at my perfect early retirement plan. Bored and convening with the pets, she began to watch a lot of programs on Animal Planet, specifically animal births. Diane's deep interest in these shows concerned me. I worried our newborn son would be pushed to his feet and forced to walk, or licked clean by his mother.

Nipple stimulation

2005-05-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

After spending hours in the delivery room with Diane’s sister, we felt that our next class would offer few surprises. Though you are never really prepared for a lactation expert in her 70s that has a passion for acting out the birth process. But at least she brings a consistent sort of strange behavior, a grandmother throwing sex in your face in descriptive, awkward performances class after class. The hard part of these later classes is that the group itself begins to change as people feel more comfortable, a little too comfortable. Raising your hand becomes a guise for bizarre personal stories or announcing non-pregnancy related grievances with family members. It’s a slippery slope from group class to group therapy.

Diane and I used to work together in the field of social work, working with homeless teenagers. We were required to attend a group supervision where professionals in the field would discuss their work with clients. It’s a slippery slope from a group of therapists to group therapy. The groups are confidential, so I’m going to have to ask you not to repeat this. But the most entertaining member of our group was a guy I’ll call Ed, who had an enormous and very square head. All of us would begin the meeting with a brief few words of how our week was going. Ed the Head would slip into stories about his family, lasting usually 10 to 20 minutes, mostly about his wife’s pregnancy. He would mumble discomforting details about his life, always punctuated by his favorite expression: "And so forth." In the middle of a description of a birthday party he would casually mumble something about his "wife’s mucus plug . . . and so forth" or "the kitchen table on which his son was conceived . . . and so forth." It was quite entertaining to watch a room full of social workers darting their eyes at each other, silently asking if they had misheard, or if Ed had just mentioned his wife’s mucus plug, or that he and his wife had sex on the kitchen table. The response was usually an awkward pause, followed by a request to move on with the meeting.

At our pregnancy class, several Eds were slowly rearing their square heads. The old lactation expert was no rookie, and she did a good job of steering people back into the class by redirecting the focus. As soon as she announced the topic, The Early Stages of Labor, hands went up.

A formerly shy group member stood up to address the rest of us. "Well, with my first baby, it’s kind of a long strange story, but . . . I was under self-hypnosis and I didn’t even realize I was in labor."

The old woman stood next to her, arched her back and began to wave her fingers toward her own breasts.

The other woman realized she had been upstaged and quickly took her seat.

The teacher went on to demonstrate taking a shower. "And when you are in the shower, what can help you go into labor. The hot water, trickling down. Come on, you know it. Nipple stimulation."

A skinny guy in a track suit raised a tentative hand. "Excuse me. Did you just say nip . . . nipple stimulation."

"That’s right."

"Well, me and my wife do practice nipple stimulation and so forth."

I reached over and jotted a note to Diane: NIPPLE STIMULATION AND SO FORTH. MUCUS PLUG AND SO FORTH. Diane giggled.

The skinny track suit continued. "So yeah, I do stimulate her nipples and so forth."

Diane’s giggle turned into an uncontrollable laugh.

A woman in the back spoke up, "Well my husband is German, so he’s very stubborn . . . and when he goes to the hospital and hears all the whining and crying he says no . . ."

Diane cupped a hand to her mouth but was chuckling loudly. The skinny guy had a hand raised, eager to talk more about his nipple stimulation. And the German woman was muttering a completely unrelated story about a cranky husband, who I’m guessing took no time for nipple stimulation. Damn Germans.

The old woman looked around, then marched to the side of the room and returned with a prop. She held up a pelvic bone above her head until the German woman stopped talking. Diane, finding this visual equally humorous, was forced to excuse herself for a moment. The pelvic bone waited high in the air, until the room was silent, and then the skinny man dropped his hand down by his side. The teacher began to act out the labor process in agonizing detail, using the pelvic bone and a doll. She squatted, pushed, and lay on her back with her feet up and the doll’s head between her legs. Then she acted out the baby’s part by placing her own head behind the pelvic bone, like a picture of a fisherman with the jaws of a shark.

This would have been strange and artsy enough with total silence. But she talked throughout her act about the "old days of giving birth." She was breathing rather heavy from all of the physical aspects of the performance, like a bad live pop group. Through her loud breaths she was murmuring the strange ways of the old days. I jotted down a few choice phrases: "Used to be an automatic shave and an enema . . . we would have a mask and gloves, fresh out of nursing school because you think you better be so clean . . . in reality, the vagina is not really that sterile."

The class became quite strange, but nobody else raised a hand, or tried to take over with their own stories. She had outweirded them, and thus taken control back over the class. I thought back to Ed. Maybe our group’s leader should have tried a similar approach, responded to a story about his wife’s mucus plug with something like, "Interesting . . . thanks for checking in. Let’s move on. I had a good weekend, and, well, I lick horse balls and so forth."

A picture for my wallet

2005-04-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

D’arcy and Chandra discovered the sex of their baby as he was squeezed out into Chandra’s hands. But they left the hospital without giving him a name, leaving behind hospital forms with this name: Baby Nicola. They wanted to experience the character of their baby before naming him. All we knew about our baby was that he seemed to crave chocolate and made his mom burp a lot. But it/he/she/fetus was already named Wyatt.

We had several ultrasounds done throughout the pregnancy, but one stands out more clearly. Diane lay on the table as a nurse squirted cold jelly from a ketchup bottle all over her stomach. The nurse traveled across her belly, pausing as body parts came into focus – the head, the fluttering heart, a leg. Or at least we were told that we were looking at these things. As our baby grew, it became more difficult to distinguish human parts in the mosaic of shapes on the screen.

She began to quiz Diane. "Do you know what you’re having?"

"Yeah, an ultrasound." Diane buzzed in first.

"Good answer," I cheerleaded.

The nurse didn’t look too impressed. "No, I’m talking about the gender of your baby."

"Oh, we don’t know," Diane replied.

"Well, I do." She said. "Would you like to know."

We had talked about waiting to find out the sex of little Wyatt, but these days it seems like a hassle to keep the doctors and nurses from telling you, as they look at it in your file each time you come in. I didn’t want to be roaming the hospital hallways paranoid, covering my ears and shouting, like a six year old brat or a guy that taped the Superbowl. And besides, I didn’t like this nurse bragging about how she already knew. "Sure, we’d like to know," I chimed in.

We watched on the screen as the shapes shifted, trying to guess body parts like finding images in the clouds.

The nurse gave us a tour. "Here’s an arm, the leg . . . and here ya go, there’s a penis and a scrotum. Yup, he’s basically a boy," the nurse confirmed.

"Basically?" I echoed. Meaning perhaps he was a hermaphrodite, or some other kind of person that could be classified as basically a boy.

"Well, we do get a small percentage of false positives. A penis that turns out to be a leg or something."

How about a leg that turned out to be a penis. That would make a dad pretty proud.

The nurse continued. "Or sometimes we think it’s a girl, and there was a little penis hiding in there somewhere."

In other words, if my son’s penis was real small, so small that it appeared to be a vagina.

We had no such problems. The nurse traced the shapes on the screen with her fingers. "Penis. And over here – scrotum."

It seems like they’d have a more sophisticated way to identify the gender of a fetus. The hospital obtains a picture of a growing human from inside a woman’s womb using ultrasound technology. And then, well, they look for a penis.

The nurse scrolled around Diane’s belly, showing us a few more body parts, watching the heart beat, and trying to get a good view of Wyatt’s head. She pulled out a cloth and wiped a small portion of the jelly away. She curled her lip as if surprised by all the slime she had dumped there, then covered it with Diane’s shirt as if she didn’t notice a mound of clear jelly soaking through. She printed out several of the frames and put them in Wyatt’s file. "Oh, did you want a picture?"

"Sure," we both replied, having enjoyed the previous ultrasound pictures we got of Wyatt. She pressed a button on her keyboard and a black and white image printed out.

We must have looked confused as we studied the shapes, looking for Wyatt’s head or the outline of his spine.

"Penis," she stated, as if the word itself was a meaningful comment. She pointed to the picture, "And here’s the scrotum."

Hippies versus Yuppies

2005-04-26T00:26:00.000-07:00

Hippies versus yuppies, grass roots against green-backs, birkenstocks against big business – a classic battle of politics, personality and parenting styles. I’ll take the hippies in three rounds. What they lack in corporate sponsorship they make up for in homemade hemp clothing.

You look around to find models of parenting that might fit your lifestyle. I need to look no further than my immediate family to find a range that should contain most folks. My brother and his wife have a son that is about 8 months older than Wyatt; we’ll call them the yuppies. My brother-in-law and his wife are having a baby about 4 months before we are – the hippies. They live less than half a mile apart from each other, a short drive from our house, and will have babies that are 4 months apart.

Now in order to be fair and not box people into stereotypes, and maybe save myself a little grief at family reunions or a casual lawsuit, my brother is not a complete yuppie and my brother-in-law is not a complete hippie. My brother Ray has changed careers from investment banking to venture capitalism, turned in his BMW convertible for a family-sized SUV, and is the only member of our family with a financial portfolio. But he grows his own tomatoes and delivers them to the neighbors. My brother-in-law Chandra always carries his water bottle, wears tie-dyed scrunchies in his hair, and makes his own pottery. But he used to work at a firing range and shot holes through his pots.

These are the two extreme examples of family life that Diane and I look to while we create our own. I believe that both sets of parents will be good to Wyatt’s little cousins, but I have my concerns. Ray’s baby at four months old already has so many giant, colorful beeping toys that they might have to hire clowns when it comes time to teach him math. And the unborn love child of Chandra, we have already been told, does not want any toys that are made of plastic – he will chew on wooden teething rings and wear wool diapers. Hey Wyatt, which cousin do you want to play with? The rich kid with A.D.D.? Or the hippie kid with splinters and a rash?

I’m sure that hippies and yuppies experience a lot of the same tender moments with their children. But the difference lies in how they choose to share their lives with their family and friends. In a yuppie household, a lot of the parenting goes on upstairs, behind closed doors. Changing the diapers, breastfeeding, everything is hidden. In a hippie household, the family invites you to pull up a chair or lend a hand. When my brother’s son was born, we got a call from the hospital once they had a chance to settle in a bit. When it came time for Diane’s sister to have her baby, we were invited guests, with front row seats in the splash section of the delivery room.

Diane’s sister D’arcy and her husband Chandra went to their birthing center when she went into labor. Chandra sat and comforted his wife during the early stages of her labor. The birthing center was a peaceful house where they could share some private moments before the birth of their first child. Along with Diane and me, and D’arcy’s friend, and Chandra’s mom. We stayed there through the night and into the next day. We ate several bags of nuts and countless tubs of hummus. D’arcy’s water broke and her labor was not advancing quickly enough. She would have to leave the birthing center they had picked out carefully for the birth. D’arcy and Chandra drove to the local hospital. Along with Diane, Chandra’s mom, D’arcy’s friend, me, and a couple of midwives from the birthing center that had now joined the parade. When we arrived the hospital threw a doctor and a nurse in the mix and packed us all into a tiny delivery room.

D’arcy and Chandra had welcomed us into their most private of moments. Chandra shared with us the anxiety and joy of becoming a parent. And D’arcy shared with us, well . . . pretty much everything. It’s hard to get more intimate with a person, babywise, unless you’re making one. But the most amazing part of the experience was their constant hospitality. Chandra kept making sure we were comfortable and had good seats, and D’arcy would pause between fits of deep breathing to offer popyseed bagels with homemade hummus. Yuppies are supposed to have cornered the market on hospitality. Fuck Martha Stuart, these hippies were the ultimate hosts. Watch two hippies use a tub of hummus and some cloth napkins to turn a humdrum old childbirth into a fully catered birth party.

As the labor progressed, we encircled D’arcy’s bed, offering support. Keep breathing. You’re doing great. Good job. Can I offer you a beverage?

Heavy breathing. D’arcy’s red face moaned as she gripped the bed frame with one hand, and dug her nails deeper into Chandra’s arm with the other.

Very well. Perhaps you would like some walnuts.

Chandra urged us to become more involved. We closed in on D’arcy as she pushed, short intense efforts to bring a new life into the world. In between the contractions I would hold a cup with a straw up to her lips, or dab her forehead with a wet towel. We rubbed her shoulders and got her ready for the next round. Stick and move D’arcy, and watch out for that jab. Having never witnessed a birth, I was surprised by the calm of the moments in between, quiet escapes between violent waves of physical effort. Sometimes she clenched her body until it seemed her flush red face might push itself through her tensed body, turning her completely inside out. And then she would fall into a 20 second nap, awaiting the next wave.

During the last stage, she spent most of her time crouching on the bed and holding a metal bar in front of her chest. I felt as if we were a crowd of spotters, helping the world’s strongest woman attempt a record breaking clean and jerk. And she didn’t care if it took hours, days, torn muscles and a vein popping in her forehead, she was going to make that weight. When the contractions arrived we would help her rise to her power crouch, where she would turn red and howl, then calmly take in a little juice and thank people for wetting her forehead. Again, the manners of these hippies, thankyous doled out when she was too tired to open her eyes, just moments after rageful grunting.

Finally, the crowd got what they came for, a gorgeous 9 pound baby boy. Chandra caught the baby and laid him on his mother’s chest for warmth. Diane looked on with wet cheeks as she rubbed her swollen belly. "Hey Wyatt," she whispered, "that’s your little cousin."

Bob Villa

2005-04-20T00:48:00.000-07:00

All of the tests had come back positive, Diane was pregnant – now it was time to look inside and make sure there was really a baby in there. We went in for our first sonogram. "This is gonna be cold," the nurse said, as she squirted an excessive amount of jelly all over Diane’s stomach. She then proceeded to massage the well-greased area with what appeared to be a plug from a printer. The monitor began to show a fuzzy image, and the camera rapidly zoomed in and out, too close and too far. You begin to guess at little spots on the screen. Is that a head? An arm? A spleen? It’s either a knee or a nostril. If that’s what I think it is he’s going to be very popular with the ladies. And finally the motion slows and the camera rests on a picture of a little curled-up gremlin, a dancing skeletal monster living in my girlfriend’s stomach. It almost seems to smile with rows of bony teeth, a scrawny beast from too many horror movies, poised to rip through her stomach and bite onto my neck . . . but in a cute way. The tiny fellah lays pretty still, except the rhythmic eruptions of it’s heart, pounding anxiously like flower petals dancing in a breeze.

The first real contact we had with a Dr came about a week later. We waited in the small room, wondering what tests or procedures she may be in for. He came in and tugged on his white coat, then stroked at his neatly trimmed beard. "So, you’re pregnant, yes?" He waited for her response and then nodded, as if the first part of the exam was over. "Alright, I’m just going to take a look here."

"Do I need to undress?" Diane asked.

"Nope, you’ll be fine like that." He cupped his hands on her stomach, then felt around a bit. "Yup, there’s a baby in there. Then he lifted his hands and with a large thumb began to pound on that spot in her stomach, and up toward her chest. "Hear that?" He thumped on her belly like he was playing in a bluegrass band. "That’s the baby." He thumped up and down her belly, then up toward her chest. "Hear that hollow sound? No baby up there. Hop off the table and we’ll go to my office."

He led us to an office, where we hardly sat down before being dismissed. "Looks like you’re all set," he smiled and sent us off. After pounding on my girlfriend like he was looking for studs in a wall, apparently he brought us to his office to show us his supposed medical credentials. We were all set, he told us. I wasn’t quite sure how the baby was doing, but I knew the best spots to hang a picture on her stomach.

We left and joked around about the visit as we drove back home. When we pulled into the driveway, Diane shut off the car and turned to me with a serious look on her face. "Hey, you need to stop calling my gynecologist the Bob Villa guy."

Getting educated

2005-04-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

The first person I saw was an old, Chinese man smirking at me as he picked up a green pamphlet from the table. The front page read Sex and Pregnancy, with a pencil drawing of a woman holding her belly and a guy whose face gave off something between confusion and blue balls. The old guy gave me the same expression as he tapped the pamphlet and then my shoulder. "Yeah, hey," he muttered to me, and then caught up with a young woman holding her belly. This was our first pregnancy class at Kaiser hospital, and was slated as the first trimester class. We walked in about three days from the end of our first trimester. It seemed a bit late for us to learn the lessons of the first three months of pregnancy. I figured we would be the most advanced in our class, or at least this would give us the opportunity to see all the things we had fucked up in the first trimester.

We took our seats in a circle of folks, most of them couples with a few stragglers that came on their own. I looked around for any single guys that were using the class as a social group, but most of the singles appeared to be pregnant women. A violent, gagging cough broke the silence and I turned to see if my old friend had scattered anything on the wall. He winked and smacked the green pamphlet on his thigh. I glanced around the circle, counting the men by the green pamphlets on their knees.

A skeleton in high stretch pants entered the room and announced herself as a birthing educator and a lactation specialist. She emphasized the word lactation, as she pulled the stretch pants just above her breasts and snapped them hard against her sternum. Thin, ragged arms and a small head barely peeked above her waistline. Really she was mostly stretch pants. She talked for a while about the baby’s development, passing around little plastic babies that represented its size as the weeks passed. Diane was a bit distracted, roaming the room looking for snacks. The old woman wrestled with her stretch pants and surrendered them just under her armpits. "At eleven weeks, my friends, half of the baby is head. And at twelve weeks, the baby will begin to urinate in the embryotic fluid." I thought of all the babies I have seen with giant heads, enormous pumpkins dangling around a helpless body. At 3 months old, my child would be half head, sitting in a puddle of his own urine -- that’s quite a thing to overcome.

Diane returned with some popcorn and a drink. "Look at this neon lemonade, it looks like my pee because of all the vitamins I’ve been taking." She stared down into the cup and pulled it close to her face, as if to smell it, maybe check to make sure it wasn’t vitamin-rich pee being passed off as lemonade. "Wanna sip?"

"No, thank you." I looked up to find the stretch pants dangerously close, and backed up in my seat. She began to move about the circle, snapping her waistband toward anyone that was dozing off. She fielded questions on topics like the growing fetus, and what pregnant women should be eating. Nobody asked about the stretch pants, but I was tempted.

The old guy raised his green pamphlet. "What about coffee?"

"Well, I would suggest you stay away from coffee." She turned her back, then spun around and pointed her finger. "That is, unless you want your baby born addicted to drugs."

A beefy guy in a tank top with sleeves of tattoos started cracking up.

"Oh, well, I’m glad you think this is so amusing . . . Paul." She pointed to his name tag. "Yes, Paul, caffeine is a drug. And it’s not just the health concerns that you need to be worried about with drugs and alcohol. Kids of mothers who smoke, for instance, manifest negative and deviant behaviors."

Deviant behaviors. I pictured a middle-aged guy at a sex club wearing a blindfold and leather panties – "Spank me harder . . . my mother was a smoker." I wondered if that’s the kind of thing she was talking about.

Paul wondered too. "What do mean, uh, negative behaviors?" (I am using a question mark here but Paul actually punctuated the question by tugging on his crotch.)

"Well, Paul," she pointed to his name tag again, "negative behaviors . . . like, well, you know those kids that go out . . . and shoot people."

I had to admit that this was definitely pretty negative behavior. Even Paul had to concede that shooting people is a fairly anti-social behavior, even for kids.

The class moved on to talk about sex and pregnancy, or as our teacher called it, "a little word that starts with s and ends in ex. Hmmm. Huh. Yeah. Oh yeah, we’re gonna talk about it."

"Hmmm. Oh yeah," the old Chinese guy echoed as he waved his green pamphlet and looked to other dads for eye contact.

I stared into Diane’s vitamin pee lemonade. The phrase I found the strangest, which was often repeated in the class and in the literature, was that sex during pregnancy was OK "up to and including labor." This spun my mind into wild fantasies of couples having sex in the hospital with the encouragement of teams of doctors and nurses. Maybe a midwife shouting positive, supportive comments. Sounded pretty nice, actually.

Before too long the class was winding down, and with a closing relaxation exercise I focused on my breathing and then returned to my supportive midwife, complimenting me on my sexual techniques. Before we left, the old woman began to reminisce about the old days. "Things are a lot different now. Back in my day, wine was considered a uterine relaxer, and they sometimes put alcohol into IVs." Then, of course, she slipped in a bit of lactation advice, a teaser from a later lesson. "You know, they used to say you needed to scrub your nipples to prepare them for breast feeding." She lowered her waistband almost to where an old woman’s waist might actually be, and began to scrub her nipples vigorously. At that moment she either dismissed the class or collectively the group decided it was time to go.

2005-04-12T00:54:00.000-07:00

Charles Bronson

2005-04-11T23:55:00.000-07:00

Having problems with authority and a strong sense of justice has served me pretty well over the years. Except for in school when I was young. Or anytime I get pulled over by the cops. And it’s kind of a bad combo when your girlfriend is pregnant. I expected the sharp changes in her mood, and saw crankiness as an aspect of the pregnancy, not taking it personal. I was quick to back down from strange conflicts that seemed to emerge out of nothing and retaliate with kindness. The authority that a pregnant woman wields is powerful. I struggled with an instinct to resist and debate the fairness of a situation. I predicted her responses in my head: Do you think it’s fair that you planted a life form inside of me, a parasite which is growing in my stomach? Mostly I just kept my mouth shut and tried to be sweet. But it wasn’t the sudden, quirky moods that bothered me; it was the ordinary, familiar and ongoing arguments that were most difficult for me to handle. Diane’s bizarre requests or complaints I could attribute to the pregnancy. I kept separating my lovely Diane from the beast that was the pregnancy and it helped me to keep perspective. But when old, past arguments would creep into the mix, I had a nagging sense that she was using the pregnancy to gain ground on a classic battle, an historic disagreement. Was this the pregnancy, or was I getting screwed? You screwed me, that’s how we got in this situation -- again, voices in my head. Was she consciously taking advantage of the pregnancy mystique to gain an unfair advantage? I needed some kind of unbiased authority to intervene, a board of bipartisan observers, a sort of United Nations that would establish international rules of pregnancy, and protect small, weak countries like myself. But mostly I just kept my mouth shut and tried to be sweet.

Diane now had the upper hand, wielding her swollen belly around the house and making strange demands. Exhaustion and mood swings had combined to form a bizarre and harsh dictatorship, and I was the only citizen around to face the wrath. But soon things began to change for me. Eventually I learned to use the power of the pregnancy. It was the ultimate excuse, beyond criticism. I could flake on a night out, call in sick to work, never answer the phone. I really wanted to go see your little sister’s flute recital, but you know how it is . . . with the pregnancy.

As the weeks passed, Diane’s main symptom was exhaustion. We spent a lot of time together, she tried to rest up as much as possible, and we were enjoying each other’s company in the first trimester of the pregnancy. My younger sister Julie had moved out from Miami and was living on our couch. Everything was going so smoothly, that we decided to move into a bigger place with my sister. We found a cute, sunny two bedroom, with a fireplace and a small view of the bay. The new place was only a mile away. Friends had offered to help us move, but I had taken a week off of work, and figured on an easy handful of trips in my car.

One mile away. Why bother packing? People spend days packing and unpacking cardboard boxes. I could just as easily throw clothes and dishes into my car. I have a small Honda Civic. But it’s a Hatchback. That big swinging back door with the roomy trunk space. It’s practically a small truck. Moving a mile away is what Hatchbacks were made for. It’s the kind of fun road trip you see on Honda commercials. People in Japan have done away with cardboard boxes completely, using Hatchbacks as storage bins as they move to new apartments.

Having casually refused the help of friends, I was left alone with the Hatchback. Without packing anything, it was difficult for other people to help, and hard for outsiders to know the fine line between junk and junk that was coming to the new house. The only boxes and bags were left over from our last move, filled with essential items that had gone undisturbed over the last couple of moves. I grabbed handfuls of clothes and piles of collected mess, making dozens of quick trips to the new place. Julie was working, and needed about ten minutes to pack her suitcase. Diane ensured me that she was physically able to help out, though mentally she seemed elsewhere. Pregnancy seems to bring with it a sort of absent-mindedness. Diane began to take on a stoner’s attention span and memory. As the days passed, and my trips continued, the clutter in the old apartment seemed to be expanding. I kept coming home to find Diane rearranging tiny piles of strange objects. She would sit in the middle of a hurricane-swept room, carefully going through a ziploc bag of costume jewelry or a glass jar of smooth rocks. Well, there’s no need to take all of these rocks, so I better pick through them. And then she would glance at the wall for a few minutes, and start over. I’m not saying that pregnancy makes you dumb, I’m just saying that it turned my intelligent girlfriend into an autistic pothead. She referred to her condition as pudding brain. On one of the many occasions during which she lost her keys, she found them, and then lost them again seconds later. About 15 minutes later she discovered that she had dropped them back into a paper bag as she was finding them there, and had then stumbled off with little recollection.

I Hatchbacked our lives into the new apartment, and even brought the cat and dog along. We could relax again, though Diane had many piles of small objects that she still wanted to address. I went about the business of settling in. I began to chat regularly with the post office, trying to get our mail forwarded. This was our second move within the same zip code, and we had been told repeatedly that transferring mail within the same zip code was an intricate and tricky affair, and not often successful. Perhaps it is just our zip code, a unique problem for our local post office.

The new place seemed perfect, but small problems quickly arose. The water heater broke almost immediately, and the landlord was slow to get it fixed. Diane was cold for about a week. She thought up imaginary ways to hurt our new landlord while she rearranged her small piles. Someone finally came to fix it, a loud, boxy fellow named Frank Bragg. I thought we had a bad phone connection until he showed up, and I realized that screaming was just part of his charm. He liked to repeat his name in a way that moved beyond talking about yourself in the third person. It was as if his name was an expression that meant several things depending on the context. He blurted out his own name like a Tourettic tick: Frank Bragg!

As I opened the door he began yelling. "Frank Bragg!" He shook my hand. "Water heater, eh? Frank Bragg!"

"Frank Bragg," I repeated back, wondering if this was a greeting among his people.

He wandered around the cellar, tapping on the old water heater and repeating his name at strange moments.

I put a load of laundry in, then decided to give him a little space. "I’ll be back in a minute, alright?"

He tapped two fingers on his shoulder. "Frank Bragg. No problem."

"Frank Bragg," I nodded, and headed upstairs.

I decided to place another call to our local post office. "Hello, how are you?"

Silence.

"I need to talk to someone about a mail forwarding."

"Mail what?"

"Forwarding my mail."

"Well, you just need to fill out the yellow form, which is kept by the post office, and the mail will be forwarded."

Twice in the last few days we had received yellow forms in the mail; on the top in big block letters it reads: DO NOT DELIVER TO RESIDENCE – FOR POST OFFICE USE ONLY. One of them had our address on it, the other one was forwarding information for a house on a completely different street. Not only were the forms not being utilized to forward mail, but these forms that were strictly marked do not deliver were being delivered, and to completely random addresses. I decided not to go into the whole story. "I filled one out already."

"You could try filling out another one."

"I actually filled two out, and submitted the information on-line. One of the forms showed up in our mailbox."

"No, they don’t go to your mailbox. It says right on the top: DO NOT DELIVER TO RESIDENCE."

"Interesting . . . Is there any way I can give you the information and you could check to see if it’s in the system yet?"

"You need to talk with the person in charge of mail forwarding."

"OK, who would that be?"

"Who would what be?"

"Who’s in charge of mail forwarding?"

"Me, Karen. Have you tried resubmitting your request."

"Yes. Can I give you my address information?"

She took down my full past and present addresses then made a soft gasp. "Oh honey, you moved but your zip code is the same."

"That’s right."

"That could be the problem right there."

"Why does that interfere with mail getting forwarded?"

"It’s just . . . well, it gets kinda tricky."

"Is there any way that I can start getting the mail that is delivered to my old address with my name on it."

"The only way for me to do a forward in the same zip code is to put a yellow sticky note on the pile of mail that the mail carrier delivers to your old address, to let him know of the change."

"And that usually works?"

"Well, I just had a mail carrier come in to the office today complaining about a yellow sticky on his pile of mail. He wasn’t too happy about it."

"Is there any way we can make sure we’re getting mail from the other address?"

"You might want to go by your old address once in a while and check in the mail box, see if there are letters with your names on them."

"Can’t we get our mailman to do something?"

"Hmmm . . . Do you have any yellow sticky notes?"

A loud scream echoed in the basement, like the sound of Frank Bragg getting stabbed repeatedly. I rushed downstairs to find Frank Bragg up to his ankles is soapy suds. "You might want to get someone to look at these water pipes."

Foam was shooting through a drain in the floor and running along the garage, under the door, and out into the street. I asked the obvious question. "Could you do anything about it?"

Frank Bragg took some bubbles off his boots and blew them into the air. "You could set up a nice slip and slide."

I came back to the phone to find someone still lingering on the other end. "Hello?"

"Post office, can I help you?"

"I was trying to forward my mail within the same zip code."

"Oh, not another one." She hung up.

Frank Bragg gave an estimate the landlord didn’t approve of, and it would be a few more days before we had hot water. Tired and cold, Diane’s laid back pregnancy was being pushed to its limits. The next couple of nights we were introduced to our neighbors, the up and coming rap stars with a home-made recording studio in the basement. Bass pounded the bedroom wall. Diane’s quiet diligence with her tiny piles of things changed into something more aggressive. And her super power ability to sniff out stench developed into a super sense of hearing. When the neighbor’s studio was shut down, Diane would wake in the middle of the night complaining of loud beeping noises or scraping sounds. She couldn’t sleep when a branch down the street scraped a street sign. Or there was the night when she swore a car alarm was beeping all night; the next day we discovered a barely audible beep coming from my sister’s alarm clock, which my sister had slept next to all night.

Cold and exhausted, unable to get a hot shower and a good night’s sleep, Diane began to vow vengeance on those who were keeping her awake. Like most Charles Bronson movies, where he is disrespected by some thugs and becomes the city vigilante, Diane was ready to start a private war. Armed with her super powers of smell and hearing, she monitored the neighborhood. And I was to be her hired gun. Every morning she woke up with a shit list for me. The kids yelling outside, the car across the street with it’s squeaky wiper blades, a cat three blocks away. She didn’t want any details, she just wanted the job done. My laid back girlfriend was becoming a neighborhood watchdog, a vigilante out to protect her new family. I guess she was just turning into a mom. A Charles Bronson kind of mom.

The naming of Wyatt

2005-04-03T22:59:00.000-07:00

Very early in the pregnancy I began to struggle with the pronouns associated with our unborn, underdeveloped baby. We had no knowledge of what our baby would look like – the hair, eye color, shape of the nose. Would it have long and slender fingers and toes, fat cheeks, a prominent forehead, or a strong Kirk Douglas dimple? We didn’t know who it would resemble. If it would have it’s mom’s long eyelashes, or it’s dad’s big calves, it’s mom’s soft skin, or it’s dad’s genitals. Yeah, we didn’t know the sex of the baby yet. I grew tired of talking about the baby or our little one, and felt a little bad referring to it all the time. I searched for a temporary word or nickname for the growing sperm-egg glob that rested in Diane’s belly. Fruit of our loins seemed a little too sexual, fetus a bit medical. I remembered one of the names that Diane had suggested to her sister for their baby, one of many names that had been passed around the room and discarded. Now it casually fell on my tongue as I looked at my girlfriend’s swelling, white stomach: Wyatt.

People worried about us having a girl, and still naming her Wyatt. I looked up the name and found that it means guy, and also is French for water. The French water guy. Perfect. This is our daughter, Wyatt, the French water guy. So the name stuck.

Sympathetic symptoms

2005-03-30T23:22:00.000-08:00

We arrived in LA and Diane took a flight to San Francisco. I had a weekend stopover in Las Vegas, a bachelor party for a friend, and then drove back home. When I returned Diane’s body had begun to react to the pregnancy. As if recognizing the comforts of home, her body began to collapse in fits of exhaustion marked by frequent trips to the bathroom. A foul smell took over the house, and hid under the bed sheets, pregnancy announcing itself like the poor diet of a fat man. And she began constantly pinching and poking at her chest, then wondering why her breasts were sore.

Fresh off of a dive trip in Mexico and a weekend in the desert with low morality, I crawled home in the heat along crowded stretches of thin highway with no air conditioning and little water. I returned home to help Diane cope with her new symptoms of pregnancy, but found myself dehydrated and exhausted, napping along side of her. A day of water and Gatorade chased away my numb finger tips and hazy vision, but left me on her constant pee schedule. We lay together passed out on the living room floor for the next couple of days, gathering the strength for the next trip to the bathroom and laying in a cloud of our own stench – hers from the life that grew inside, and mine a walking warning against cheap buffets.

So far our symptoms are exhaustion, constant pee breaks, and extreme gas. I have been lucky to find that my boobs are not real sore, though perhaps I’m just a little behind schedule. Days later, with a little more rest and a few salads for me, the stagnant smell of expecting parents has mellowed out, the stink of orange poops lessening in our house (our air freshener is citrus). Within a week, the slow gas leak began to gurgle higher into Diane’s chest and the rank expulsions turned to frequent burping – loud and long trumpet sounds, her head turning like a roaring lion as gas skipped out of her mouth. Guys would yell and applaud as she belched out words, expressions -- biker girl party tricks.

The other symptom that Diane has developed is a keen sense of smell, almost a super power, a secret government weapon. But instead of sniffing out cocaine at airports or burning office buildings, she concentrates on household smells. Diane curls her upper lip and looks at me with disgust. "Have you smelled the dog? The dog’s breath. It stinks. It’s really bad. We should wash the dog. Spray something in her mouth. Come here. Did you brush your teeth?"

Moments after returning from the sink and feeling minty clean, I reply, "Yes, dear, about 7 seconds ago."

"Wow, your breath really stinks. I mean it’s real bad, you might want to try again. And give the dog a little toothpaste while you’re at it."

The most rewarding part of being insulted by your pregnant girlfriend for having rank breath, just after you brush your teeth, is that the smell master, who accuses everyone else of rancid odors and questionable hygiene, is simultaneously emitting smells that would have previously landed her in a hospital waiting room, desperate for some kind of explanation. Two months in and Diane has had a few symptoms of pregnancy. And she is, in every sense of the word, a smell master.

Punto malo

2005-03-27T00:49:00.000-08:00

An hour later we were picking up my parents at LAX, and would be returning in seven hours to fly to the Sea of Cortes. We needed to find out if pregnant women were supposed to go scuba diving, or as my parents say in the Boston vernacular -- scuber diving. I have seen my share of large, or heavyset -- well let’s just say fat -- scuber divers, but never a pregnant woman stretching a wetsuit over a round belly. We would have to fess up to our fornication, reveal to the world that we were in fact having sex, and that we were at least moderately good at it.

My parents arrived, and we dragged body bags filled with scuber equipment to the LAX parking lot. I gathered my parents behind the car. We huddled in a circle and Diane became the reluctant quarterback, a thrown -in third stringer unsure of what to say to her players. I prodded her, "Diane has something she wants to tell you."

My mom grew wide eyed. She jokingly whispered, "You’re pregnant."

Diane smirked. "Yes."

My dad gave me a big hug, my mom darted to massage the two week pregnant belly, and mascara began to drip from the corner of Diane’s soft wet eyes.

Later that evening we assembled our friends and family for the trip to Mexico. It was a strange group that included Gajohnson from New Jersey, a newly discovered fetus, and a student from the high school where both of my parents teach. My mom had run a few diving trips with the high school, and this time had invited a student to join our family vacation. Technically it was a dive trip with six chaperones for only one student, the kind of ratio usually reserved for pop divas and serial killers.

After a little internet searching and a couple of phone calls, Diane left her scuber gear in LA and resorted to a week of laying around on the boat and snorkeling. Most of the research concerning diving and pregnancy was inconclusive, admitting that there was no evidence that proved that diving was necessarily dangerous for the fetus. Websites and hotlines referred to a lot of speculation that diving while pregnant could be detrimental, and it seemed that theories about this had been difficult to test. The only downside to animal rights activism is a real shortage of monkeys willing to be tested for scientific purposes; in this case, researchers had an extremely difficult time finding pregnant monkeys that were willing to try scuber diving.

A few days into the trip we began to realize that scuba diving in Mexico wasn’t the real threat that we needed to be concerned about. Rather, the danger arrived from much farther north: Canada. Our scheduled dive master had a last minute conflict, and somehow we were given a Canadian dive master for our week long excursion into the Mexican waters. From the first days, he seemed like the type of stranger that might just go on a killing spree. We whispered jokes to each other about his homicidal tendencies, then worried to ourselves that they were true. There was a locked freezer on the top deck, which brought speculation that the real dive master had been previously disposed of. The Canadian dive master had an awkward friendliness, an uncomfortable way of ending every sentence with the Canadian punctuation "Eh," followed by a lingering stare. Our theories were backed up by his general lack of knowledge of the dive sites. And the creepy coincidences began to build: his book about severe diving accidents; his miracle concoctions made from tequila and hot sauce that he wanted to pour into my sister’s ears; the loss of one of the two boat propellers far from shore, which forced us to drop off the boat’s captain on a remote island so he could hitch a ride to the mainland to get it fixed; late night stories about whole families disappearing in Mexico, and diving tragedies. Not to mention the numerous weapons which he kept "finding" underwater: tools, knives, and spears. We felt trapped in some alternate version of clue: Was it the freaky Canadian in the remote Mexican waters with a rusty knife?

We felt more comfortable when we arrived safely back on shore, and got to meet his girlfriend. "This is my girlfriend Cookies." He wished us luck in our travels to Mazatlan, where we would spend the last few days of our vacation on land. "Be careful in Mazatlan. Whole families disappear there all the time, especially American families. Eh?" He stared after us waiting for a response, but we were already chaperoning our one student into the car and driving quickly away.

My parents love to travel to small towns and experience the local culture. They hate big tourist areas, but wanted to be near a big city so that my brother might join us with his wife and few month old baby. They never joined us, and we ended up staying in a remote cabin called Tom’s Tree House on the outskirts of Mazatlan.

Mazatlan is a popular destination for game show prizes. Our little, out-of-the-way, non-tourist vacation rental ended up on the campus of the largest tourist facility in Mazatlan – The El Cid Megaresort. The Megaresort combines the beautiful beaches and warm water of the natural coastline together with a multi-pool area complete with swim-up bars, fake waterfalls, and a sort of club med for kids. The pool areas included an activity schedule that combined playful kids games with a lack of adult supervision, the recreation leaders being mostly kids themselves.

My parents have a natural aversion to the idea of Spring Break and what that has become for high school and college students. The Megaresort is dedicated to the idea that Spring Break can be reproduced at any time, like so many fake rock waterfalls. Our first day there, my parents hurried through the maze of Tiki bars and pool activities to the beach, and took their student parasailing. Meanwhile, the rest of us spent the afternoon playing volleyball in the pool with my pregnant girlfriend, and drinking with 15 year olds. Though we are all in our late twenties and early thirties, we worried about getting in trouble with my parents if we got caught. We were the bad chaperones, sneaking off and boozing in Mexico with the high school kids. To my parents, drinking at the bar is fine, mostly in the early evening. But partying, drinking games, and spring break atmosphere, especially before happy hour, is another thing entirely.

We found ourselves involved in a large game of water volleyball, organized by a couple of teenagers with orange hats and orange whistles, the camp counselors that ran the pool area. It’s basically like summer camp at the YMCA, except when someone misses the ball or loses a point. Then the little orange counselors blow their whistles, the crowd yells "Punto malo!" and the orange hats run over to the person with a bottle of tequila. Strawberry tequila actually. For the kids. "Punto malo!" "Punto malo!" The "bad points" kept adding up on our side, and young kids with plastic bottles would slosh through the pool to squirt strawberry tequila down our throats. After Diane made a bad shot, the orange hat rushed over with his bottle. I explained to the crowd that my girlfriend was pregnant, and was subsequently responsible for drinking down all of her punto malos.

In a few days we left the Megaresort and chaperoned our student back to LA. We were ready to spread the word of Diane’s pregnancy to the rest of our friends and family, though half of Mazatlan already knew.

Pee test

2005-03-15T23:03:00.000-08:00

When a woman you have lived with for years suddenly begins to produce an unreasonable amount of noxious odors, you would like to think there is some kind of logical explanation. I have long had a reputation for this kind of behavior – but soon Diane began to match and surpass my nighttime releases, with a kind of odorous severity that makes you check the sheets and search the bottoms of sneakers. I began to feel a stronger connection building between us, like roommates that develop the same menstrual cycle. A day or two late for her period, she shrugged off the suggestion of pregnancy, claiming the life that was bubbling inside her was merely cheese and grease from too much diner food.

We drove from San Francisco to LA, to meet up with family and friends for a trip to Mexico – a week aboard a boat for scuba diving in the Sea of Cortes and then a few days in Mazatlan. Diane and I were hanging out with my two sisters, my sister’s husband, and a couple of friends. Diane’s stomach continued to gurgle, and I pushed for a home pregnancy test. We snuck out of the house pretending to need sun screen, despite offers from several people who had brought their own. We had about one hour until my parents would arrive at LAX, and just twelve hours until we would be floating on a boat in the middle of the Sea of Cortes.

We hustled off to a closed Walgreens, then found a supermarket and searched for the pregnancy tests. They were tucked away in a locked glass case behind the checkout counters. Home pregnancy tests were heavily guarded, locked away with condoms and the newest Gillette razor technology. How these items were chosen for increased security I can barely fathom: Make sure kids can’t easily access condoms or pregnancy tests, or those new razor blades with the aloe strips. Hey, we realize how easy it is for kids to get alcohol and drugs, and we know that lots of them will be out having sex – we just don’t want them wearing condoms. And if someone does get pregnant, it’s better if nobody knows. We’ll just pretend that lots of teenage girls are getting fat, and we’ll make it harder for their boyfriends to get a clean shave.

Like a horny 15 year old in an 80s movie asking for condoms, I approached an employee and boldly asked for a home pregnancy test. She announced my purchase across the store as Diane ducked back into another isle, suddenly very interested in the varieties of pasta sauce. I consciously beamed a smile as I waited in line and placed my one item on the conveyor belt, thinking of all the folks that might buy these while chewing their fingernails or shouting obscenities. I purchased the pee test and headed outside. Diane followed a moment later, a conspicuous accomplice trying to hide her involvement.

Diane ripped the package open, read the directions and then buried the test in her pocket, discarding the bulky evidence of the flashy packaging. We drove back to my sister’s house and Diane went in the bathroom. A few minutes later she returned and we whispered in the kitchen. "What’s up?" I asked.

"Nothing," she replied. "I can’t pee." She headed back across the living room with iced tea and two bottles of water.

"She’s dehydrated," I offered to the living room crowd. A few minutes later she popped her head out of the door and called me in. We stared down at a little white circle like an art student, finding deep meaning in the tiny pink and blue lines.

2005-03-13T02:01:00.000-08:00

Trying to have kids

2005-03-13T01:50:00.000-08:00

My girlfriend is pregnant, knocked up, late, expecting. I could call my dad on the phone with a nervous cracking voice: Dad, I got a girl in trouble.

Congratulations. Were you trying to have kids?

I love the extent to which people involve the family when they are officially trying to have kids. Did you hear? We’re trying to have kids.

That’s great. How long have you been trying? Really. Maybe you’re not trying hard enough.

Well, we’ve been trying for quite a while. We’re trying real hard. Yeah . . . we tried last night on the sofa. If the spare bedroom is open we’ll go try right now.

Formerly prudish family members begin to offer sex tips and advice, politely worded recommendations for sexual positions. If you guys are really interested in trying, you might want to try this. Your grandfather seemed to enjoy it. And just look around at all the success we had.

I guess you could sum up the recreational activities of most younger folks and many single ones as a prolonged pattern of trying not to have kids. After a late night of dancing and drinking, I went home with this silver-haired freak, she took off her wig, and we stayed up until dawn trying not to have kids.

People draw a firm line between the time they stop trying not to have kids and the moment they begin to try to have kids. The timing is everything. As you are taking off your clothes for money or coveting your neighbors wife, these are good times to be trying not to have kids.

I’m not married, but I told my girlfriend months ago that I was perfectly OK with having a child out of wedlock – specifically I told her, "I have no problem raising a bastard." My girlfriend Diane and I have been living together for about 5 years. If we were gay, people would say that the government, the state, and the prejudices of others are the only things keeping us from a formal commitment. We are common law married, lifelong partners, roommates, bosom buddies.

I told Diane about a year ago that one day she should secretly stop taking the pill and trap me into fatherhood. I suggested she use the tactics laid out in Officer and A Gentleman to snag her a man. A few months later I noticed a diminished number of trips to Walgreens and gave her a big hug.

This was a passive, complete upheaval of the coveted planned vs. unplanned pregnancy dichotomy. People like to point out that they are making a baby by choice, on purpose, entering the bedroom at 5:30 pm to procreate, have unprotected sex, a mature choice not at all related to dry humping at a club. They are trying to have kids. Doing their best. As they are lighting candles and dusting off Barry White records, they are not fondling each other pointlessly. They are groping with a purpose, thrusting their way into an intentional family.

We had no need to organize an occasion for penetration. We just had a little old fashioned sex, without comments or advice from neighbors and relatives. We made a baby. We were a success. And we didn’t even try that hard.

2005-03-13T01:49:00.000-08:00

Wyatt: The Hippie vs. Yuppie Guide to Parenting

2005-03-11T01:07:00.000-08:00

I will be posting my new book here one story at a time, as it is written. Please let me know what you think, and send it along to your friends if you enjoy it. Thanks,

Pat Carey