(Not That You Asked) (34 page)

THERE IS MORE
to sex than bioemissions, of course. It is an entire language of intimacy, a central pursuit of human happiness. But a bit of psychosexual whiplash was to be expected.

For most of human history, bearing children wasn’t a conscious decision. It was a biological consequence, and, a bit later, a matter of economic import. (It is still this way in most of the world.) Only in the superabundance of the current era has pregnancy become a discretionary matter. But as couples wait longer to get married, as breeding becomes a lifestyle decision rather than a cultural assumption, as women test the age boundaries of fertility, you wind up with more and more folks like us who figure,
What the hell, why not let biology decide?
Call it the half-planned pregnancy.

Erin and I were well aware of the alternative: months of scheduled intercourse, clinics, procedures, centrifuges, the anxious machinery of the modern babymaking business. If we’d failed to conceive for a few months, we would have been sucked right into that vortex. We knew we’d gotten lucky.

But somehow we didn’t feel so lucky.

Erin didn’t, anyway.

She was supposed to be finishing up grad school, working on her novel, teaching undergrads. But she was nauseous around the clock. She wanted her feet rubbed. Maybe even more than this, she wanted to talk about her pregnancy. It was something neither of us had realized: how entirely absorbed women get by their own pregnancies. How much they need to feel
supported
and
validated
and other verbs that men generally don’t get.

The problem was that I was the only person she could talk to—owing to my brilliant notion about not telling anyone our good news until we eloped in March—and I was three thousand miles away.

A typical phone conversation ran something like this:

I DON’T MEAN
to suggest that we didn’t have our bright spots.

The sonograms, for instance.

Yes, we had pictures of our fetus! The big head, the delicate sepia bones, the fishy appendages. Our favorite showed the child in profile, nestled in a kind of intrauterine hammock, hands clasped behind its head, feet up. Stone cold chilling in the amniotic crib.

We took to calling the kid Peanut. Peanut Almond. It had a certain ring to it. Erin got to see Peanut in action, too, a live video feed from her tummy. Peanut did a lot of bopping around. Then Peanut fell asleep and Erin had to cough to try to wake the kid up. We also began taking weekly belly photos, so as to track the distension of Erin’s abdomen. By week sixteen, the belly button ring was gone. (I imagined it popping across the room in her sleep.) A few weeks later, her belly button became, after years of pronounced inniedom, an outie. Also: the tits. Wowza. We knew the belly was going to grow; the tits were an added bonus. Two cup sizes in less than two months. After years of feeling flat-chested, Erin now had cleavage. Every now and again, I would catch her staring into the mirror, admiring the goods.

Somewhere in there Erin flew out and we eloped, which went swimmingly, if you don’t count breaking the news to her parents. The next morning, we threw a brunch to tell all our pals. Much gasping. Much cheering. My parents, who had flown out from California for the weekend, had to be peeled off the ceiling for the occasion. Erin immediately began having long, intense conversations about lactation with the various mothers and mothers-to-be in our circle.

So this was good.

Erin (and her astonishing breasts!) returned to California happily married, still queasy but empowered to reveal the divine source of her quease. My mother commenced a long-delayed campaign to purchase every single Baby Gap outfit on earth.

ALL PROCEEDED CALMLY
for the next three weeks. Then, in the middle of April, the ob-gyn called. Erin assumed the doctor was calling about the nausea, possibly with a cure more effective than ginger ale. Instead, she told Erin that the blood work had come back with abnormally high alpha-fetoprotein levels, which indicated a one in one hundred chance of trisomy.

Erin asked for a translation.

“Trisomy twenty-one corresponds to Down’s syndrome.”

I was not there for this conversation, of course. I can only imagine the dread that must have lurched through Erin, the sudden dimming of our sudden joy.

“Any time the test profiles indicate a probability greater than one in two hundred, we recommend an amniocentesis,” the doctor said. “The best thing would be for you to talk to a genetic counselor.” The doctor also informed Erin that any
action
she might want to take—to use her chilling, sanitized language—would have to occur by week twenty-four. We were at week eighteen.

ONCE AGAIN, WE
needed to decide a bunch of stuff in a hurry.

The first thing was whether Erin would have an amnio. The procedure involved plunging a big needle into her belly. Erin was understandably reluctant to have a big needle plunged into her belly. There was also a small but nagging risk of damage to the fetus. Erin felt betrayed. She had thought pregnancy would be this beautiful, glowing experience. Instead, she had retched through her first four months, mostly alone, and now, just into the magical second trimester, the sickness had (perhaps) migrated to her unborn child. It sucked.

And it sucked in that particular way modern medicine sucks, wherein the huge, amazing advances in technology carry with them a corresponding increase in data, contingency, anxiety. As recently as a few decades ago, there were no alpha-fetoprotein triple screens, no sonograms, no genetic counselors. Most of the women of the world, in fact, still experience pregnancy as a process devoid of medical intervention.

I’m not so foolish as to advocate this approach. I know too many moms who have suffered preeclampsia or given birth prematurely, whose lives and babies have been saved by modern medicine. At the same time, the prenatal process has become so micromanaged. From the earliest stages of pregnancy, parents can see their baby and listen to its heartbeat, and all that is terrific fun. But they also spend more and more time fretting over its development and safety.

The modern fascination with the unborn child—a fascination skillfully exploited by the antiabortion movement—proceeds from a peculiarly modern fantasy: that with sufficient precaution we can keep our children safe from all harm.

THE FACT REMAINED:
Amnio was the only way to know for sure if Peanut had a genetic problem. But did we even want to know? Wasn’t there something unnatural, unseemly even, about preap-proving the child’s genes? What did it say about the limits of our love? That we wanted a child, just so long as he or she wasn’t too much of a burden? Or worse, what if we got a bad result and disagreed about what to do? These were not discussions we wanted to be having while three thousand miles apart. We wanted to be able to touch each other, to shoulder this together.

At the same time—and I know this will sound pretty caddish, but it’s true—being on opposite coasts probably helped us deal with the situation. It forced us to talk our way past the histrionics and self-pity to the real issues: our fear, our sense of indignation, our guilt, and ultimately our desires as parents. We spent a good week chewing on these issues via phone and e-mail. We were perfectly sweet and thoroughly terrified. I kept reminding Erin that the chances were still one in a hundred, that we shouldn’t worry until there was cause. Then we would both spend another hour on the phone worrying.

There’s a tendency, when a possibility like this gets raised, for the couple to feel that they’ve brought on (and secretly deserve) the worst-case scenario. Erin and I had gotten pregnant too easily! We didn’t deserve such happiness! There had to be a catch! This brand of logic is total shite. But it’s also oddly comforting. It grants you a measure of control over fate, which otherwise feels sadistically random.

THERE IS NO
need to prolong the drama. Erin had the amnio. The procedure was painful, but it also revealed—after a few tense days—that Peanut was healthy. And that Peanut was…a Peanutta. This was our reward for the big scare. From the earliest days of the pregnancy, we had been rooting for a girl. Both of us had been terrorized by older brothers. So: Great relief. Great rejoicing. Which was important, because, as it turned out, my landlord was just about to give me the heave-ho, meaning we had to find a new place to live.

This is another consequence of having been such late bloomers: Everything happens all at once. In three months we: found a home, closed on a home, moved me across town, moved Erin across the country, visited fourteen states, and set perfectly ridiculous deadlines for our books. (I also quit my teaching job, but you already knew that.)

We live now amid a hundred boxes, stunned and sweaty with the onset of August. Erin is well into her final trimester. She has reached the
cumbersome
phase. Each morning, a bit mournfully, she weighs herself. She is fast approaching what we have come to think of as the “Jack Sprat Parallax,” the point at which she weighs more than I do. We are deep into the particulars of the final trimester: weekly sessions with the ob-gyn, prenatal yoga, birthing classes. We have had several awkward discussions about perineal massage, which, if you didn’t know, is intended to stretch the vaginal tissues so they won’t tear during the child’s expulsion.

Did I mention that these discussions were
awkward
?

Erin is also being bombarded with birth stories. The four-day labor, the magnesium-drip delirium labor, the emergency breech labor—she has heard them all. She is a good listener, polite to a fault. My sister-in-law recently related the story of her first birth, which involved a day-long home labor, no drugs, and hanging from a tree. Erin has no interest in such heroics. She has already announced her intention to call for Saint Epidural should the need arise.

Another friend showed us her birth video, which included a rather lengthy illustrated disquisition on the configuration and operation of the (bloody) placenta. And yet another friend has brought it to our attention that Erin will likely poop during the birthing process. I have promised to poop in solidarity.

DID I FORGET
to mention the baby shower?

I did.

Here’s why: because the baby shower strikes me as one of those events invented and largely nurtured by our fake friends on Madison Avenue. It is intended to supply the anxious parents with everything they need to make sure their baby doesn’t die of cold or hunger or diaper rash or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or boredom. But the general result of such gatherings is that the couple winds up with thirty-seven designer outfits from, yes, Baby Gap.

Now, look: I am just as susceptible as the next person to the sight of a little goo-face tricked out in designer togs. But I also happen to view food, shelter, and love as the only real requirements for the successful nurturance of an infant. The rest is just stuff. Some of this stuff is a matter of convenience: baby monitors, aerodynamic strollers, car seats. Most of it—the fancy-schmancy teething elements, the miniature Doc Martens—is retail masturbation. As a child of the gilded age, Peanut is going to get pelted with thousands of buy messages before she can even hold a penny. There’s no reason to accelerate that process.