Home Game (4 page)

MY MAIN AMBITION
when my wife went into labor was to be sober. When our first child was born, I'd been rushing to finish a book. I'd suspected, rightly, that it would be impossible to reconcile book production with new fatherhood. To finish the manuscript before the baby arrived I'd taken to drinking several cups of coffee after dinner and working right through the night. I'd quit around four in the morning, then knock myself out with cheap wine. When Tabitha's water broke I'd just thrown back a third glass of unsentimental Chardonnay. I'd wound up driving her to the hospital at five miles per hour and then, somewhat dramatically, passing out on her delivery room bed. I'd woken up just in time to witness the birth of my first child (Quinn Tallulah Lewis) but had made, I fear, a poor impression. For the past two years and eleven months I have been on the wrong end of a story called “How My Husband Was Loaded When My Baby Was Born.” I promised myself I'd do better this time. It was my last chance.

I remember that it was a Monday evening, just before cocktail hour, when Tabitha said she felt funny. An hour later we were in triage; an hour after that we were walking up and down the hospital halls to accelerate her labor to the point where it generated the respect of the women who doled out delivery rooms. I knew this hospital, from hazy experience. I recalled dimly the secret kitchen stocked with grape juice and the crushed ice and the strawberry Popsicles. I remembered vaguely how to finagle a private recovery room. I was the college graduate who had partied his way through school and was now returning on alumni day, hoping his classmates had forgotten what he'd been like. The one thing I knew for sure was that when they asked you if you wanted to get back in your car and endure labor in the intimacy of your own home, or take the hospital room now, you took the hospital room now. Having done this, I settled into the chair beside Tabitha's bed and watched nurses string nine separate tubes and wires from her body to various machines: narcotics drip, penicillin drip, thermometers, blood pressure gauges, gas masks to deliver pure oxygen, heart monitors for baby and mother, and God knows what else.

And then…nothing. For the next ten hours we sat around with expectant looks, like extras in a World War II movie battle scene waiting for the Japanese finally to come charging through the jungle. From the point of view of the woman, “labor” is well named; from the point of view of the man, it really should be called “waiting.” Your wife goes into labor; you go into waiting.

A woman in labor needs to believe, however much evidence she has to the contrary, that the man in waiting beside her bed is directing every ounce of his concern toward her. This is of course impossible; and so the trick for the man in waiting is to disguise his private interests. He learns to camouflage trips to the john as grape-juice-fetching missions. When he is hungry he waits until his wife dozes off, then nips furtively down to the hospital vending machine for his supper of Ring Dings and Nacho Cheese Doritos. At some point in his private ordeal one of the hospital staff will turn to him and ask sweetly, “And how is Dad doing?” He must understand that no one actually cares how Dad is doing. His fatigue, his worries, his tedium, his disappointment at the contents of hospital vending machines—these are better unmentioned. Above all, he must know that if his mask of perfect selflessness slips for even a moment he will be nabbed.

“Would a little food taste good to you right now?”

“I don't think so.” (Muffled, through oxygen mask.)

“Because they have these Ring Dings in the vending machine. The kind with the vanilla icing.”

The fixed accusing stare. “You're incredible.” Pause. A weary tone. “If you want something to eat, just go get something to eat.”

At great and tedious length, fourteen hours after labor began, the baby made its dash for the exit. Then it stopped. The doctor on call poked and prodded a bit, then took off her gloves and stared.

Then another doctor appeared, Tabitha's doctor, conveniently just back from vacation. Tabitha's doctor is maybe the least likely obstetrician in Berkeley, California. He doesn't believe, for example, in the sanctity of his patients' whims. He has no time for superstition; he is unapologetic about his belief in the power of modern science; he believes that the best way to endure childbirth is not out in the woods surrounded by hooting midwives but in a hospital bed, numb from the waist down. He is, in short, my kind of guy. Maybe my favorite thing about him is the way he dismisses ignorant fears with such contempt that they simply vanish. When he is around, Tabitha feels, rightly, that she is in more capable hands than her own. This, for her, counts as an unusual experience.

Tabitha's doctor collected information from the doctor on call, in the way doctors do. They spoke for maybe two minutes, in English as intelligible as their handwriting. At some point I remembered that it was my job to know what was going on.

“What's up?” I asked.

“The baby wants to come out face first,” said the doctor on call.

“And that's not good?”

“It won't fit,” said Tabitha's doctor. He let that unpleasant thought hang in the air.

“We can't get a grip on it to turn it around,” said the doctor on call.

Without ever uttering the phrase “C-section,” the two doctors conveyed the idea of it well enough. As Tabitha's doctor leaned in to see what he could do, I leaned over Tabitha and, drawing upon my years of selling bonds for Salomon Brothers, tried to persuade her of all the advantages to having her stomach cut open. She pretended to nod and agree, but tears welled in her eyes. The doctors, to their credit, noticed her distress; and, to their even greater credit, they responded to it. Before I knew how it happened, Tabitha's doctor brandished a large pair of suction cups, one over each hand.

“I'm going to try to pull this baby out,” he said, in a different tone. He was no longer a doctor. He was a deep sea fisherman. One of those guys who sat on the back of big motorboats hauling in schools of giant tuna with one hand while drinking beer with the other.

Tabitha's head popped off the pillow. “If it puts the baby at any risk I'd rather have the C-section,” she said.

“Tabitha, no shit.” The doctor shook his head and pretended to say to me what he wanted to say to himself. “I love the way her mind works. Just what I want to do, put the baby at risk.”

Ten minutes later, by some miracle I still do not understand, he was hauling a baby girl into the world. I knew from experience that the little involuntary sob of joy I made as my eyes met Tabitha's was a fleeting sensation. I also knew that other, less understandable emotions would soon follow.

THE LAST PLACE
to recover from what they do to you in a hospital is a hospital. When Tabitha staggered down the hall from her delivery room to her recovery room, she left a place where people had cared for her so well that it brought tears to my eyes, and entered a place where she was a nuisance. You might think that people who work in hospital maternity wards have some special feeling for new mothers. You'd be wrong. Some of them enter the spirit of the occasion, and a few do it with obvious pleasure. But an astonishing number seem to resent any woman who has had the nerve to reproduce. To ensure that she thinks twice before she does it again, they bang bedpans against her door every twenty minutes, holler down the halls all hours of the night, ignore all her gentle requests, and, in general, exude the warmth and charm of an old Soviet border guard. “Oh, great, another fucking baby,” I half expected a few of them to say as they breathed their heavy sighs over my wife's pale, spent body. For all I know, this is sound hospital strategy. Certainly, the atmosphere in the recovery ward discourages anyone from staying longer than necessary. The patient remains on the premises just long enough for the hospital to collect the data it needs to prove to the courts that it didn't kill her.

Anyway, the last time around there was no question about what I would do after our child was born: I'd curl up in a little ball in the chair beside my wife's hospital bed, protect her from the hospital staff, and pop down to the nursery every half hour or so to make sure that Quinn hadn't been sold on the black market. This time is different. This time I'm free to go; indeed, it is my duty to go. By default, I'm now in charge of family harmony. Which is to say, I'm supposed to fetch Quinn from home, bring her to the hospital, and prove to her that her life, as promised, is now better than ever.

The past few months Tabitha ginned up what we both imagined to be a ruthlessly effective propaganda campaign to brainwash our two-and-a-half-year-old into thinking that the arrival of Dixie, and the subsequent collapse in her share of parental attention, was actually in her interest. Out went Dr. Seuss and in came
I'm a Big Sister!
and
Hush, Don't Wake the Baby
. Each night, Quinn laid her head on her mother's swelling belly and engaged her imaginary sibling in loving conversation. A few weeks back, I even drove her over to the hospital, walked her through a play-by-play of the birth, and, to encourage her to think of this as a win-win situation, bought her a chocolate doughnut from the hospital vending machine.

When I got home from the hospital, I found Quinn as delighted as ever with life. “Daddy!” she cried as she freed herself from the babysitter and threw herself into my arms. Then it dawned on her something was missing. “Where's Mama?” she asked.

“Mama had the baby!” I said. “A baby girl! You're a big sister!”

“But where is Mama?” She was no longer a happy, loving child. She was a personal injury lawyer taking a deposition.

“In the hospital! With Dixie!”

“I want my family back,” she said.

“But now you have even
more
family. We have Dixie, too.”

“I hate Dixie,” she said. Then she howled and bared her teeth.

It was an unpromising start. In this situation an unprepared father, a father who hadn't done his homework, might say something foolish. He might say, for instance, “That's not a nice thing to say,” or “Of course you don't hate Dixie. You love Dixie. She's your sister.” But I'd read the parenting texts, or at any rate the passages Tabitha highlighted and dropped in my inbox. I'd listened intently to the many reports Tabitha brought back from the parenting classes she attended every week. I'd taken note of the instructional parenting cartoon Tabitha glued to our refrigerator. I understood that my job was no longer to force the party line upon Quinn. My job was to
validate
her feelings.

“You hate Dixie because you're afraid she's taken Mama away,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes,” I repeated. And then…I was stumped. I couldn't think of what to say next. All I could think was:
Of course you hate Dixie. She
has
taken Mama away. I'd hate her, too, if I were you
. Truth is, a tiny part of me was proud that she saw the situation for what it was, a violation of her property rights. It boded well for her future in the free market.

The parenting books don't tell you where to go when your first move doesn't lead to psychological checkmate. The only thing I had going for me was the toddler's indifference to logic.

“So you want to go see Dixie?” I said.

“To the hospital?”

“To the hospital.”

She thought about this. “Can I have a chocolate doughnut?” she asked.

The hospital visit went well enough. The doughnut purchased the hour needed to initiate the first of the peace talks. But that night, when I put Quinn to bed, something was not quite right. First, she insisted that I lay her head at the foot of her bed and her feet at the head. Then she demanded three books and two stories instead of her usual two and one. Finally, as I switched off her light, she said, “In fact, you forgot to give me a kiss.” I gave her a kiss. “A kiss doesn't make all the angry go away,” she said. And then: “Good night, Daddy,” in a voice I'd never before heard. A chillingly adult-sounding voice.

An hour later there came from her room a sudden noise. She was still awake, fiddling furiously with something on her floor. It was a book of family photos, given to her by her grandmother, which had given her a year of pleasure. She'd yanked it to pieces and scattered them across the room.

IN WADING THROUGH
the parenthood literature, I have read exactly one piece of writing that comes close to capturing the potential misery of it. It was an article in
The New Yorker
by John Seabrook, in which the author hunted down a man named Ferber, whose research gave birth to a cold-blooded method of training babies to sleep. As I recall, Seabrook and his wife had been made miserable by their newborn's tendency to holler through the night. Addled by lack of sleep, they set out to “Ferberize” their child. This meant shutting the door and clinging to each other as their baby in the next room shrieked with greater and greater urgency. Ferber extremists believe that parents should leave their infant to learn how to fall asleep on its own, even if the poor creature becomes so upset it vomits. One book even suggests that parents spread a plastic sheet under the baby's crib to catch the mess. Before Seabrook went this far, he set out to find Ferber. When he found him, he also found that Ferber had recanted. He was no longer quite so sure about his early research. Millions of babies were being tortured without a theory.

Even if we had a theory, we couldn't abide by it. It's unnatural to leave a baby to cry alone in its crib; it makes you feel about as humane as a serial killer. And so our lives have now resumed a pattern they last had three years ago, when Quinn was born. Only this time it's worse because Quinn is still here. Dixie—who is now referred to by the other three members of her family simply as “the baby”—wakes up every hour between seven p.m. and seven a.m. and bleats just loudly enough to alert Quinn to the possibilities. Quinn wakes up at eleven at night, then again at one, three, and five-thirty in the morning, and each time screams a horror-movie scream that sends a chill down the spine of the man across the street.

There is no way my wife and I could function if we each had to deal with both children, and so we've split the family in two. I sleep downstairs with Quinn, Tabitha sleeps upstairs with Dixie. On good nights, we meet for dinner. Essentially, we are both single parents. I reckon that Tabitha averages maybe three hours of sleep each night, broken up into forty-five-minute chunks. I get more like five broken hours, and while I should be pleased about that, I am, in truth, pissed off. That's what happens when you don't sleep properly for long stretches: You get pissed off. At any rate, that's what happens to me. My wife grows melancholy.

I decided to keep this diary for a couple of reasons. The first was that I wanted a written record for Dixie, who, as a second child, runs a risk of being a blur; and I knew that there was no way I would take the trouble to record her arrival if I didn't have an editor breathing down my neck for the material. The other was that I noticed a tendency to gloss over the unpleasant aspects of parenthood, in part because it's unseemly to complain about one's children but also because there is a natural inclination to forget that there was anything to complain about. But there is. In the first few weeks after a child is born—or at least after a child of mine is born—it is as if someone must pay for whatever it endured when it exited the womb and entered the world.

Here's what my typical day now looks like, for example, beginning at what used to be bedtime. I awaken at eleven at night, and then again at one, three, and five-thirty in the morning, to persuade Quinn that there isn't a spider in her bed. At seven a.m. she rises for good, somehow fully rested, and hollers at the top of her lungs for her mother. As battered as Rocky going into the twelfth round against Apollo Creed, I wrestle her to the ground, dress her in clothes she does not want to wear, and drag her out of the house, still screaming, to my office, where I feed her a breakfast she does not want to eat. She demands chocolate; I offer a fruit plate; after tantrums on both sides of the bargaining table, we compromise on an Eggo waffle. Around nine I get her to school and enjoy a brief feeling of self-satisfaction: I am coping manfully with a great big mess. I'm preventing my wife from further suffering. I am the good soldier who has leapt on the hand grenade, so that others may live.

This cheering thought lasts until I get home and find my wife in tears. Often I try to hide, but usually she spots me, and when she does, she will usually say something poignant. “I feel like I am going through this alone,” for instance. Or, “I don't know how much more of this I can take.” Whatever she says neatly undercuts my belief that I am carrying far more than my share of our burden; indeed, it makes it clear that I am not a hero at all but a slacker, a deadbeat Dad. Demoralized, I tromp back down to my office and try for a few hours without success to put bread on the table, before retrieving Quinn from school.

By about the sixth day of this routine, I am as random as a misfiring piston and as raw as an exposed nerve. Driving Quinn home the other day, for instance, I was cut off by a woman in a station wagon. “What the fuck are you doing, lady?” I shouted at the windshield hysterically.

“Daddy, why did you say fuckyoudoing?” a voice inquired from the back seat.

“Oh.” Pause. “That's not what I said.”

“Was she a fucky lady?”

“
Funky
. Funky lady.”

“You said fucky.”

Once home, there is paid help—for which I feel
guilty
, if you can believe that—and I try to use it to get back to work. In truth, I usually wind up curled up in a little ball of fatigue until dinner, which is my job to throw together. After dinner, I put Quinn to bed while Tabitha nurses the baby for the twenty-thousandth time. Then the cycle begins all over again.

I know that all of this will soon pass and our family will once more achieve some wonderful new equilibrium. With one more person on hand to love and to be loved, we'll soon be drowning in finer feelings. But for now we're drowning mainly in self-pity.

You would think that someone would have come up with a humane, economical method for absorbing a new child into a family. Certainly there's billions in it for whoever does. As it stands, there are three approaches to the problem, all of them inadequate. You can pretend to believe the books and do whatever you must do to your children to ensure a good night's sleep for yourself. You can throw money at it and hire squadrons of night nurses to tend to your children while you move into the local Ritz-Carlton. Or you can do what we are doing and muddle through as best as you can, grabbing at any old piece of advice that comes your way, less because it will actually help matters than because it offers hope. You tell yourself that eventually this baby will learn to sleep, just as eventually it will learn to walk and to use the toilet. After all, you don't see a lot of adults who wake up hollering at the ceiling every forty-five minutes, just as you don't see a lot of adults who crawl around on all fours, or who crap their pants twice a day. So it stands to reason that the problem will solve itself. Here's hoping.