by Jenny Mollen
Logically, I understood that there was someone just underneath the surface of my skin about to explode into the world like the most rewarding zit of all time, but I wasn’t feeling connected to him. He kind of seemed like a dick, up all night doing flip-flops around my stomach, probably breaking shit and tagging my uterus with question marks because we hadn’t yet decided on his name. His hands defiantly covered his face in every 3-D ultrasound we tried to snap of him. He wasn’t even out of my body and already he seemed to be saying, “Get away from me,” but also, “Give me your undivided attention forever.” Once we met I was sure he’d explain that it was all a misunderstanding and that he had no idea how young and beautiful I was and we’d fall madly in love—or would we? I still couldn’t conceive of ever caring about anyone more than my dogs (especially if he had to be washed more than once a month).
The truth was, having kids still worried me; but while I was worried for myself, I was more worried for my son. I knew that no matter what I did, I was bound to fuck something up. Every parent is the reason their child eventually spends thousands of dollars in therapy. That I understood. But I didn’t want to cause him pain. I didn’t want to make mistakes. I didn’t want to do anything that would result in my being sent to voicemail for the rest of my life.
Aside from doing my best, there was no real way to predict the outcome. He was going to be his own person with his own point of view, which I’d obviously try to shape heavily, but at the end of the day the ball was going to be in his court. If he wanted to hurt me, he could. I was going to love him too much to maintain any control. I hadn’t even met him yet and already this was the most fucked-up relationship I’d ever been in.
I was due on February 4. On February 14, I was still pregnant.
“This is just my new body. It’s just what I look like now,” I explained to Jason, defeated. I gave him a kiss on the lips and hoisted myself into bed, utterly disappointed.
The truth was that after eight hours of sequestering myself at home and watching House of Cards, I’d stopped believing in God and the order of all things. I was over being patient, waiting for nature to take its course. “Fuck nature,” I said straight to an imaginary camera in my best Frank Underwood voice. This pregnancy had gone on so long that now my Aquarian son was dangerously close, like three days shy, of becoming a Pisces. I hated Pisces men. All of my exes were Pisces, and they were all overly sensitive, elusive liars. It was such a Pisces move to blatantly ignore my wants and needs and just hibernate in my womb long enough to become a Pisces. I wasn’t going to let this happen, I was having an Aquarius even if it meant reaching inside and pulling that little water bearer out myself.
My hair was a teased rat’s nest of restlessness. My fingers looked like mini–French baguettes. I rolled myself up on a body pillow like an enslaved Sea World orca and tried to fall asleep.
As I flipped on my side, my water broke.
“Baby…I think my water just broke.”
“WHAT!? Shouldn’t we be drenched? I don’t see anything!” He looked up at the sky, expecting a giant bucket of You Can’t Do That on Television slime to drop from the ceiling and cover us.
“Maybe you just peed,” he offered as he searched the sheets for proof.
“Baby, I would know if I just peed, and I didn’t. You need to call the doctor.” I hurried to the bathroom and stripped off my clothes to make sure I couldn’t see a head or the face of one of my former Pisces ex-boyfriends peeking out.
Jason called our doctor, Howie Mandel (his real name), as I sat on the toilet, regretting having used all my pregnancy books as nightstand coasters. I guess I should have prepared myself better, but those books made me feel like I was studying for the SAT. When Howie said I should go back to bed and try to sleep, I was skeptical. I’d tried to go to sleep and instead I wet my pants. This time, who knew what might happen? (Of course I didn’t. See above, re: coasters.) So instead of sleep, I wandered around the house, moaning and groaning. I figured that if I went through the motions of giving birth vocally, my body would eventually catch up. Like in acting class, where they teach you that if you start breathing really fast, eventually you’ll burst into hysterics and become Meryl Streep.
Around 3:30 a.m., I gave up and Jason and I drove to the hospital. I wasn’t feeling any cramping, but pretended to be miserable, just in case I suddenly felt like screaming or beating Jason uncontrollably and needed an excuse. The streets were empty, save for a couple police cars. Part of me hoped one might try to pull us over, just so I could say, “Sorry, Officer, we don’t have time for your bullshit! WE’RE HAVING A FUCKING BABY!” then hit the gas and peel out—but no luck.
Once at the hospital, we were escorted into a private delivery suite where I was told to strip. I’d brought no less than seven sexy nightgowns with me. I wasn’t sure what kind of message I wanted to send to my newborn son as he emerged into the world. I could be bohemian silk kimono mom, black mesh Agent Provacateur mom, lacy, demure floor-length mom, or even all white cotton coed mom. Like a bride at a Kennedy wedding, I assumed I’d probably change twice. I wasn’t sure how labor worked, but everyone said it took forever. I told Jason to notify me when he felt we’d hit the halfway point so I could sneak off and slip into my second look.
Before I had a chance to make a nightgown selection, a nurse came in and fingered me. Then another, then another. Suddenly I wasn’t feeling very sexy. The final nurse hooked me up to a monitor, where Jason could visibly see that my contractions hadn’t actually started and that any sounds I might have been making were only because I thought I was Meryl Streep. I was barely two centimeters dilated when Howie Mandel and my doula, Ana Paula, arrived.
Ana Paula was the type of woman who takes a lot of deep breaths and talks about chakras. She was serene and centered. I’d never seen her car, but I already knew it was a Prius with a bumper sticker that urged fellow drivers to free Tibet. She’d been referred to me by a friend who was shocked that at seven months pregnant, the only thing I had planned out about my birth was the outfits. I finally got around to meeting Ana Paula when I hit thirty-six weeks.
“So, what is your birth plan?” she asked, sitting on my couch, staring inquisitively at the giant photograph on our wall of a small Asian girl holding a bloody butcher knife in one hand and a dead goldfish in the other.
“My plan? Um. Well, I guess at this point I’m having it.”
Ana Paula smiled empathetically and promised if I listened to her, I’d have “a magical experience I’d cherish forever.”
This was my first time seeing her since our chat, and already I was regretting inviting someone into the room that believed experiences could be magical without drugs.
Howie ordered me a Pitocin drip to help induce labor. He then offered me an epidural. I wasn’t opposed to painkillers, per se. But the latest craze in the mommy world was to do things naturally—as opposed to when my mother had kids and the trend was to push the button on your morphine drip as many times as you could before a person sprang from your giant hairy vagina. Also, I’d recently seen that Ricki Lake documentary that persuades all women to give birth in their bathtubs. Though I eventually decided against a home birth, I was still open to the idea of doing things naturally. Mostly just so I could gloat to my mother.
But that was when I was the kind of pregnant that looks cute in tight shirts and leggings—when I was safe and pain-free in the comfort of my own bed. Now, with what felt like a thousand teeth clenching down on my abdomen, following in my mother’s footsteps seemed like a pretty sensible option. I knew Jason and Howie didn’t give a shit whether I delivered naturally.
But there was Ana Paula. She favored the holistic approach. She’d delivered countless babies in bathtubs. And even though I knew it shouldn’t matter, I needed to know that Ana Paula loved me more than those other babies, that she respected me even without a silk kimono, and she considered me just as strong as the girl that referred her to me. So the drugs would have to wait.
I w
andered the halls of the Labor and Delivery ward for five hours, riding the vicissitudes of the most incomprehensible pain of my life. I couldn’t stand up straight, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t see. My hands were shaking and my back was drenched in sweat when finally my ego was beat into submission.
Physical pain had won out over my need for approval. I asked for the works.
An anesthesiologist, who looked roughly the same age as my boob job, walked in and administered an epidural. From that point forward, everything was a blur. I’m told that Howie, Jason, and Ana Paula sat with me for more than seven hours, waiting for my cervix to dilate. It never did. After endless pushing and pooping myself twice, the baby’s heart rate began to drop. A C-section was our only option.
I anxiously sobered up as the nurses wheeled me down the hall toward the brightly lit operating room.
“I think we’ve passed the halfway point,” Jason said, appearing next to me in scrubs and taking my hand.
I smiled at him. Or maybe I smiled at the wall. But it was meant for him.
Howie told us we’d be meeting our son in less than ten minutes. All the choices I’d made with my life—the bad haircuts, the questionable workout mix tapes, the Screamin’ Semen—came flooding back to me. I was hit with a flurry of unanswerable questions.
Would this little creature love me? Would he approve of me? Would his friends ever consider me hot? Would he ever find a picture of me from middle school with super-thin eyebrows? Or a Facebook post where I vowed to go vegan? Does my OB-GYN realize that one of my vagina lips is longer than the other? Is it weird to ask him to shave a little off while he’s down there?
The nurses rolled me from my hospital bed onto the operating table and placed a linen screen just under my chest. Standing next to me, Jason pulled out his camera and waited anxiously. Once the IV drip took hold, everything below my ribs went numb. I told Howie to let me know before he started cutting.
“We’ve already started,” he said matter-of-factly.
I tried to stay focused and not picture all the balloon animals he might be making out of my intestines and abnormally long pussy lip.
“Okay, you are going to feel a lot of pressure,” he instructed.
I waited for a minute, but before I could get super-cocky about not even flinching, I heard a baby cry.
My narcotized eyes looked up and saw Howie’s hands holding a bloodied version of Caesar, from Little Caesars Pizza. He had a large Roman nose, chubby cheeks, and a black toupee stuck to his head.
“Pizza pizza,” I could have sworn I heard him say as he was whisked off for a bath.
A few minutes later, a nurse walked him back over and placed him on my chest. He seemed a little pissed off. Like maybe the cesarean was interfering with whatever plans he’d made for the evening. I cradled him in my arms the way I’d seen people hold babies in movies, trying to console him.
My heart heaved with emotion as I looked into his dark blue eyes. I wanted to laugh, sob, and throw up all over myself, all at once. I’d burst through the ceiling of any love I’d felt before and was now traveling into the stratosphere reserved for heroin junkies and people who write romantic greeting cards. I didn’t recognize these feelings in myself. I was instantly and completely transformed. For once I wasn’t thinking about my career or if my hospital smock made me look fat. Yes, I’d make mistakes, and yes, one day my son might decide to send me to voicemail. But it was part of an emotional, painful, joyous journey I was finally happy to take.
I wasn’t ready for kids. I was just ready for him.
2
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE
NIGHT NURSE IN THE DAYTIME
I wanted a night nurse because everybody told me I wanted one. A night nurse is basically a woman who lives in your house and tends to your newborn child alongside you. She is on the clock twenty-four/seven, and the majority of her job happens once you are tucked in bed, sleeping soundly through the night, while your baby is screaming his head off because he’s no longer floating around in his own subdermal hot-tub time machine. My sister had assured me that the first weeks after bringing Sid home were going to suck. Every couple hours, an adorable little atomic bomb would go off and all hell would break loose. Sid would be angry, he would be hungry, and he would want to know where the fuck I was. The night nurse’s job was to attend to his cries, pick him up, change him, and bring him directly to my tit.
Some people might consider this a job for their mothers, especially people who hadn’t met mine. I knew my mom was technically more than qualified—she was an RN, after all. But because I had met my mother, I felt a little more comfortable serving my tits up to a complete stranger. After the emotional roller coaster of childbirth, I needed stability. Adding my mom to the mix seemed like booking myself an extended ride on Space Mountain. She was well-meaning and fun, but indifferent when it came to genuine angst and/or screaming in the dark.
I was introduced to my first night nurse by Hollice, a woman I’d taken to referring to as my high school rival. I didn’t know we were high school rivals at the time—it was only years after college, when she informed me that as kids, she fucking hated me. I was flattered. I guess I’d hated her, too, but I also loved her. We hung out in different circles but shared a common goal: to be the lead in every high school play. I suppose I had talked some shit about her, in the throes of adolescent angst. But I talked shit about everyone. I still do. It’s just something that comes naturally. Like doing the splits or knowing the exact whereabouts of my husband’s ex. I was jealous of Hollice because she’d done community theater since the age of six and was in a commercial for the local rec center.
Beyond that, I couldn’t stand how invested her mom was in her success. Hollice had one of those typical stage moms who lived vicariously through their daughters because their own dreams had never been realized. Hollice’s mom knew all the words to every musical number she performed. She waited backstage with notes and feedback, sometimes even a few constructive criticisms for me.
“Jenny, you seemed a little pitchy up there tonight. Is your father getting another divorce?” she asked, feigning concern.
“Probably.” I brushed past her, trying to avoid any deep conversation.
“Oh. Sorry to hear that…Don’t know if Hollice mentioned it, but she just signed with John Casablanca!” she called out proudly.
My mom had never even seen me in a play, but she once dated a guy named John Casablanca. I think he was a child molester. As much as I longed for a cheerleader like Hollice’s mom, I knew it couldn’t have been easy for Hollice. The anxiety radiated off her. When she entered a room you could feel the pressure, the burden of expectation to fulfill not just her own goals but also her mother’s. As a result, Hollice had a depth the other girls didn’t. I was drawn to her pain and yet repelled at the same time, because I knew we were fighting inverse battles. Her mother’s love was conditional and my mother’s was ephemeral. Our experience of our mothers, hers driving her on, mine leaving me grasping for attention, pitted us against each other more than any casting decision could. In a parallel universe we might have been friends, but in this universe, Grease has only one Sandy, and we were both too driven to end up beauty school dropouts.
Unlike me, Hollice did become a successful actress. At nineteen, she left college to start working full-time on a CBS sitcom. Meanwhile, I was auditioning for student films with head shots taken by a guy I met at Trader Joe’s who offered to waive his fee if he could shave my pussy. It wasn’t what Hollice was doing so much as what it represented that killed me. Her life was what my life could have become, what it should have been. No matter how hard I tried to be above it, her success served to highlight my failure. Once I’d settled into adulthood, my competitive feelings toward Hollice waned. Partially because I’d matured, but mostly because I’d found new people to compare myself to.
Hollice had two boys several years older than Sid, and she reached out to me while I was still pregnant.
“Why i
s she texting me?” I asked Jason, hoping he had the answer.
“To be nice?”
“Why would she want to be nice? She’s my nemesis. She’s supposed to be rooting for my demise in life.”
He laughed. “Jenny, that was years ago. I think she’s over you.”
“Like over me because I never made it? That’s so fucked-up to say!”
“I didn’t say it. You did.” Exhausted by my insecurities, Jason delicately explained to me that some people do grow up. Not me. But other people.
Hollice seemed sincere. I couldn’t help but respect her willingness to offer an olive branch and cautiously decided to give our fake friendship a real chance. And by real, I mean totally fake.
As Hollice and I spent more time together (read: became Internet friends who don’t actually hang out) I learned that she was a hands-on mom, the kind of über-competent parent who sculpts things out of fondant and uses a special nontoxic plant-based solution to clean off her fruits and veggies. She’d done her child-rearing homework and was quickly becoming an Instagram authority on the subject. As a childhood development expert, Hollice was a firm believer in the necessity of a night nurse.
“It takes a village,” she posted, under a picture of herself and another woman wearing aprons, covered in what looked like baby diarrhea.
According to Hollice, Debora saved her life when she had her second child. She traveled with her all over the globe; she trained the baby to sleep through the night; she even gave Hollice’s husband reflexology massages. I wasn’t half as busy as Hollice was. But I did love the idea of not having to rub Jason. Hollice had high expectations when it came to caregiving. She was the type of woman who, if she had the time, would have been doing it all herself. If somebody was good enough for Hollice, she was good enough for me.
I hired Debora for six weeks, sight unseen.
I carefully transported Sid home from the hospital on a Sunday. A nurse helped us out to the car and strapped his eight-pound body safely into his car seat. I was too anxious to focus on the myriad belts and levers and feared that once we were home, I might have to use scissors to cut him out. With each twist and turn in the road my anticipation grew. Jason slowly coasted into our driveway like we were burglars prepping for a robbery. Once we were parked and the emergency brake was on, we hopped out of the car and rushed around to the backseat. Sid was still breathing. Jason didn’t spend time trying to figure out the buckle situation and instead left Sid content in his carrying case. He unhooked the thirty-pound pod and walked urgently toward the front door as if he were holding a water balloon.
