Hell Is Other Parents

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “Oh, I get it!” I said. “And they put me on the fetal monitor, and they see my contractions are coming three minutes apart, and then they call you and give me the drugs.” Stealth baby removal! I loved it.

  And that, more or less, is how the deed went down. I showed up in Labor and Delivery late Saturday afternoon, leaving Dr. D plenty of time to finish her errands, the nurses put me on the monitor, the peaks hit every two minutes, I was declared in active labor, Dr. D was called in, the Pitocin was injected, my cervix began to dilate, and everything was going peachy keen until Dr. Bigshot, sitting at his computer, at home, had to go and stick his malpractice-fearing nose into everything.

  Forget tort reform, I said to Dr. D (which clearly was called for but never would happen). Why was it that people without uteruses were still making decisions for people with them? Imagine a parallel universe, I said, where women were in charge of all things womb-related. Where ob-gyns with three decades of safe deliveries under their belts could make decisions based on individual circumstances. Where postpartum women would be allotted more than two days in the hospital to recover. Where…

  “Shit-fuck-motherfucker-asshole!” said the teenager next door.

  …where the word abstinence would no longer substitute for proper instruction in the use of prophylactics. “Are you going to get in trouble because of this?” I asked.

  “Stop worrying about me and womankind,” said Dr. D, “and keep your mind on the baby.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s coming soon,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “And this ordeal will finally be over.”

  A couple of hours and two quick pushes later, Leo Copaken Kogan stumbled out into this world as we all do, tiny refugees from a distant land, bloody, screaming, and hungry. I remember crying upon first seeing his face, the purse of his lips as he latched on, and then everything goes blank.

  For the first time in six weeks, I’d fallen asleep.

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep, chimed the Nextel walkie-talkie. “Yo bitch. Bring me a motherfucking Big Mac. I can’t eat this hospital shit. And some fries. I need some motherfucking fries.”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “Fuck that shit, I’m at work. Your mother still in jail?”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “No.”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “So tell her to get off her fucking ass and bring it to you, bitch. I’m busy. Did you call WIC yet? You better fucking call WIC or you ain’t getting no free formula.”

  A baby, not mine, began to wail.

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “Damn. The baby’s crying. I’ll call you back.”

  These are the sounds to which I awoke, disoriented after an hour or so of sleep, in the hospital room I now shared with the dark-haired sixteen-year-old I’ll call Maria-Elena. Wanting to be neighborly, to prove both to myself and to Maria-Elena that differences in age, race, and mobile roaming devices would not stand in the way of a friendly discourse between postpartum mothers, I pulled myself out of bed and walked around the curtain separating her side of the room from mine. “Hi,” I said. “I’m your roommate.” Okay, so maybe I just wanted to tell her that I existed. And that her walkie-talkie was really bleeping loud.

  “Yo,” said the girl in a monotone, without meeting my eye. She had one hand on her son’s isolette, which she was trying to shake into submission, while the other worked the buttons of the TV remote.

  “What’s his name?” I said, glancing in the direction of the isolette.

  “Fernando1,” said my roommate, never turning her head from the screen. She settled on a soap opera and began to watch.

  “He’s beautiful,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  Maria-Elena shrugged.

  “Gotta love those squirt bottles they give you to go to the bathroom, huh?” I was trying—way too desperately—to connect, hoping that this would somehow translate into the kind of empathy that would make our room more conducive to sleep. “Okay, well, if you need anything…” Neither of us had had any visitors yet that morning. Fernando’s daddy was, well, I wasn’t sure where he was. Paul I’d sent down to Brooklyn with our son Jacob and his best friend, Luke. My parents were on call escorting my daughter Sasha to school.

  Maria-Elena, who clearly wanted to put a punctuation mark on our conversation, turned up the soap opera until it was blasting. I tried to imagine what was going through her head. Go away, came to mind. As did Die, Yuppie Scum.

  And why not? Though we occupied nearly identical containers, we were experiencing completely different realities. I was a married mother of three; she was a single high school student only five years older than my eldest. I was at the end of my fertility cycle; she was just getting started. And as broke as my family was, I was never going to need to call WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) benefits to feed my baby, and we both knew it. “Well, see you,” I said, and I slunk back into my half of the room, checked that Leo was still breathing, covered my head with a pillow, and tried to sleep.

  Five minutes later, the Nextel duet began afresh.

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “Yo, bitch.”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “Yo, bitch. What up? Your parents still freaking?”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “Nah. They was crazy mad when they found out, but they okay now. I mean, what they going to do, right? He’s here now.”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “What about Fernando?”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “Shit, he was like fucking crazy mad, too. And I mean crazy mad. At first he told me to get rid of it. Like he didn’t want to take care of it.”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “Shit.”

  Bl-l-l-l–l-leep! “Mm-hmm. But I think he’s down with it now. He better fucking be down with it. I named the baby after him. You coming to the hospital?”

  Over the next few hours, each one of Maria-Elena’s friends, around twenty or so in all, bleeped in on their Nextels, all of them wanting to know more or less the same information, most of them saying that they would drop by to see the baby at some point later that evening. Meanwhile, Fernando Sr. arrived with three bagfuls of McDonald’s burgers and fries, followed by his and Maria-Elena’s posse, all of whom wanted to see the baby and eat the fries and greet one another with vulgar epithets while watching the game on my roommate’s TV. The party had begun, and Maria-Elena was the queen of the ball.

  But of course we all knew—even Maria-Elena, I suspect—that her sudden spotlight of validation would not shine for very long. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even flicker past the last gasp of summer three months hence, when everyone would go back to school and back to their own realities, forgetting all about their dark-haired friend and her beautiful child named for a father who was himself still a child. And who could blame them, really? Her friends were still in one universe, while Maria-Elena had slipped through a black hole into another dimension altogether.

  I stared at one-day-old Leo, sleeping peacefully in his isolette; I pictured one-day-old Fernando, sleeping peacefully in his. I mentally fast-forwarded through their parallel lives, watching each of them through infancy, first steps, school, adulthood, and decline, as if witnessing it all in time-lapsed photography. And then—blame postpartum hormones and a realist’s clairvoyance—I started to cry.

  Of course the teenagers scream, I thought, even when they get the epidural. How else to deal with hurtling headfirst into the universe of motherhood too soon? What was one night of lost sleep for me if it meant a small moment of celebration for Maria-Elena and her baby? I vowed to keep my mouth shut and let her have her fun.

  My compassion dissolved around nine-thirty that night, as the party grew rowdier, the TV blared, and the stink of rotting fries could no longer be ignored. I pulled myself out of bed and peeked my head around the curtain once again. Ten or so kids were scattered along the windowsill and at the edge of Maria-Elena’s bed, hanging out and watching the Mets noisily slaughter the Yankees. This one sat on that one’s lap in the lone chair. A few were drinking sodas that didn’t smell like sodas. If not for the venue and the sight
of the young girl trying to get her wailing baby to take his bottle in the midst of the chaos, it was just your average, workaday teen gathering. And I was about to be the killjoy.

  “Please,” I said. I didn’t explain that I’d been in labor for six weeks or that I was at the end of my rope or that the Perco-cet wasn’t doing much to dull the pain between my legs. I simply reminded the group that visiting hours had been over at eight and that I’d already let that fact slide for an hour and a half without complaining. “I don’t mean to be a party pooper,” I said, “but I was up all night giving birth. I’m forty years old. I need to sleep.”

  Maria-Elena glared at me with no lack of venom. “Yo, bitch,” she nearly spat. “I’m just trying to feed my baby.”

  Her friends laughed. They kept partying.

  “Please,” I begged.

  This time nobody responded.

  Okay, I thought. If that’s the way you’re going to be about it—um, bitch—then I formally declare war.

  Hospital policy requires that babies never be left in the room by themselves, so I went back to my side of the room, grabbed Leo’s isolette, and pushed it into the white glare of the corridor, waking him. With my now-screaming baby in tow, I approached the nurses’ station. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I need your help. My roommate still has friends over, and they’re being really loud.” I know. No one likes a tattletale. But what were my options?

  The nurse on duty, who looked and sounded like an older, more weathered version of Maria-Elena, rolled her eyes. “You should have asked for a private room then.”

  This was, it’s safe to say, not the response I was hoping for. But neither was “Yo, bitch, I’m just trying to feed my baby.” Had I stepped into a parallel universe of my own, one where people like me were not invited? “Um,” I said, “I couldn’t afford a private room?” I didn’t mean for my voice to go up at the end like a teenager’s, but that’s the thing about parallel universes: once you’re there, they infect you. You start growing goatees, wearing vests. And no one, not even your grandfather, can explain why.

  The nurse rolled her eyes again. Clearly, she was making socioeconomic assumptions based upon my appearance: I was white and middle-aged, therefore I must be hoarding buckets of cash. I was consequently making the same kind of assumptions about her: she was Latino and working the night shift—for all I knew she’d been a teenage mother herself—therefore she was taking her fellow chola’s side.

  “Please,” I said. “I’m so tired.”

  “We’re a bit busy right now,” said the nurse. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

  I pushed the isolette back into my noisy, malodorous room, offered my breast to wailing Leo, and hugged him to me in tear-ful frustration. About an hour or so later, just before 11:00 P.M., the nurse walked into my room, and with a “Come on, kids, it’s time to go home,” she finally shut down the party.

  No sooner had the visitors left, however, than Maria-Elena turned up the volume on her TV.

  “Maria-Elena?” I moaned plaintively from my side of the room. “Please. Can you turn it down just a notch? It’s really loud.” I wasn’t asking her to turn it off: each bed was equipped with a privacy speaker, which looked and acted somewhat like the top end of a phone receiver. She could have easily watched TV, without disturbing me, all night long.

  Maria-Elena turned up the volume even louder.

  I resolved to be Christ-like, to feel compassion and empathy for all the creatures of God while simultaneously turning the other cheek. After all, I had been a teenager once. I knew how empowering it had felt to defy authority. Then I thought, Fuck it, I’m a Jew, and I’m exhausted, and went postal. “Jesus!” I yelled. (If I couldn’t actually channel the man, then I could at least invoke his name.) “I’ve been in labor for six weeks! I have to sleep! And so do you! Our babies are going to be up again in a few hours to eat. Trust me on this one, I know. PLEASE!!!!!!”

  Maria-Elena, ever the teenager, turned up the TV a notch louder.

  In the late 1980s, a few months out of college, I moved to Paris to become a war photographer. A couple of months after that, I was living in a cave in the Hindu Kush mountains just outside Kabul, covering the Afghan war. My first few nights of these accommodations were difficult: the cave was frigid, food was scarce, and I had a hard time falling asleep cheek to jowl on the cold dirt floor. But a few weeks later, I simply got used to the glacial temperatures and the soldiers’ body odor and the intermittent rumbling of mortar fire. I now tried to put myself back into that Zen mind-set, to find my way gently to sleep without privacy, calm, or quiet.

  After about an hour or so, here’s what I decided: war doesn’t hold a candle to a hospital room filled with one headstrong teen, two newborns, three bagfuls of rotting McDonald’s fries, a torn perineum, and a Montel Williams rerun played at 150 dBs.

  So I pressed the CALL button on the side of my bed several times, to no avail, then trudged back to the nurses’ station, pushing baby Leo once again in his isolette. “Hi,” I said to the nurse. At least this time I didn’t expect any sympathy. “It’s me again.”

  “Hi. Can I help you?” she said in a tone implying anything but.

  “I’m sorry to keep bothering you, but it’s my roommate again,” I said. “She’s playing her TV really loud. And it’s nearly midnight.”

  “Nothing I can do about that,” said the nurse with a smile. She reminded me that I was sharing a room. That no one else sharing rooms seemed to be complaining. That next time I had a baby I should perhaps think about getting a private room, regardless of my ability to pay for it. “The hospital accepts MasterCard,” she said. Then she turned back to filling in the data on her computer.

  I could have said a lot of crazy things in response, but at that point I was too tired to keep fighting. I was getting nowhere with this woman, nowhere by complaining to Maria-Elena, and nowhere by not at least trying to sleep through the noise, so I made a U-turn with my isolette and headed back to my room, where I finally passed out around 3:00 A.M.: fifteen minutes after Maria-Elena turned off her TV, a half hour before Leo woke up for a feeding, and about an hour or so before Fernando Jr. woke up for the same, causing Maria-Elena, who was unable to soothe him, to break down sobbing.

  Despite having wanted to strangle her, I now felt protective of the young girl sharing my room. I wanted to run over to her side of the curtain to tell her it wouldn’t always be this hard. One night you’ll actually get six hours of sleep. One day, bitch, you’ll wake up and realize you are capable of shit—love, strength, whatever you want to call it—way beyond your wildest expectations. That’s what being a mother is, no matter your age, race, or mobile roaming device.

  “Yo,” Maria-Elena said, peeking her head around the curtain. Her cheeks were tear-stained. She was leaning heavily on Fernando’s isolette, barely able to stand up. The baby was still crying, gasping big gulps of frantic air. “Would you mind watching him while I use the bathroom? I’m starting to bleed real bad.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Here, let me show you a trick.” I covered my hands with Purell, stood over baby Fernando’s isolette, and stuck the tip of my pinkie into the roof of his mouth. He started sucking on my finger. Hard. Silence filled the room.

  “That’s a good trick,” said Maria-Elena.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is. Now go to the bathroom. I got him. And don’t forget to use that squirt bottle. It’s helpful, I promise.”

  “Thanks,” said Maria-Elena.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  The next morning, after Maria-Elena met with a social worker, who carefully explained everything the new mother needed to know about applying for WIC benefits and low-cost inoculations, family and friends arrived in a steady stream, on both sides of the curtain. If Maria-Elena’s parents had been “crazy mad” about her getting pregnant at sixteen, they didn’t show it. They were, I was pleased to note, extremely loving and kind, both with her and with the baby, as well as with me, Leo, my parents
, my other kids, and my various visitors. Yes, her mother was missing several front teeth, and her father seemed beaten down in some profound, elemental way, but on the whole Maria-Elena’s family seemed like the kind of family that could weather just about anything—or at least circumstances far worse than the kind of night I’d spent with their daughter—without whining or complaint.

  At one point, when the crowd grew thick, the curtain separating our side of the room from theirs was pulled back. Maria-Elena had been given the spot by the window, and her mother thought she should share her sunlight. All twenty or so of us mingled together, marveling over tiny miracles.

  I had to rethink my entire image of Fernando Jr.’s future. It, like our room with the curtains pulled back, was suddenly looking a little brighter.

  “Oh my god,” my mother said while staring at Leo’s now–sun-dappled face. “He looks exactly like my father.” I had to admit he did. In fact, from certain angles, especially when my now-two-year-old is sitting on the couch in the evening, clutching his ukulele and watching Across the Universe with the same single-minded intensity and concentration as his late Great-Grandpa David watched Star Trek, I catch glimpses of my grandfather in his easy chair, reaching down to pat my head. And at these moments, I pause to think about Fernando Jr. sitting on his side of the universe, focusing on whatever it is that brings him joy, while his mother fixes dinner in the kitchen.

  Hell Is Other Parents

  I read No Exit, Sartre’s famous existentialist play, in my early twenties, and I remember thinking at the time that it was interesting on a conceptual level but not on a literal one. Hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape?

  Then I became a parent.

  And I realized that anyone who defines hell as being stuck for eternity with an adulterous deserter, a lesbian sadist, and a narcissistic baby-murderer has never spent an hour at a Mommy and Me class. Or killed a Saturday afternoon in the children’s shoe store in my neighborhood, with its sign-up sheet thirty kids deep and shoe projectiles flying across the aisles. Or been forced into any seemingly innocuous but secretly agenda-laden interaction with the parent of your child’s peer.