by Dana Canedy
It was important to us to find out before your father left for Iraq if we were having a boy or a girl. Now, to our joy, we learned that we were expecting a son.
We continued to look at the screen, stunned by our good fortune, captivated.
Then the technician said, “Uh oh.”
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
She and Charles laughed.
“Not at all, but boys will be boys.”
“What does that mean?”
“He found his privates,” Charles said.
“No way!” I said, sitting up to get a better look at the screen. “Are you sure?”
They were laughing at me now.
“Oh honey, he’s just discovering his body,” the technician said.
“Well, don’t take a picture ofthat,” I said.
We packed all we could into that precious week, spending hours looking at cribs. I decided on a black wooden model with sleek lines and a mattress with memory foam for added support
“Memory foam?” Charles said, furrowing his brow. “What does a baby need with a memory foam mattress?”
I was crestfallen.
“Charles, we have to support his little head and back,” I said. It was as if he had asked why we needed diapers.
“I might have to get another job to pay for it, but if this is the one you want, we’ll get it,” he said.
I turned my attention to a CD player that could be attached to the side of the crib. “We’ll need it to play lullabies,” I said before he could register an objection.
I made a mental note to come back another time for the wet-wipes warmer.
It was too soon to be buying car seats and changing tables, but we did anyway, because I wanted your father to participate in as much of my pregnancy as possible—to carry with him the memory of shopping for his “miracle child.” That week it was as though Charles was trying to memorize everything about me. He watched me walk, stomach poking out; followed me into the kitchen when I cooked; and gazed at my image in the bathroom mirror as I applied my makeup.
As I lay in his arms one night, I felt a gentle thumping and grabbed his hand. “Feel this,” I said, placing his hand on my belly. He could not detect the movement.
“Soon,” I said. “You’ll be able to feel it soon.”
I wanted so desperately for him to feel the little kicks before he left.
After that visit, he became even more protective, which made me grateful but at times tested my patience. We were both on edge as the day of his departure for Iraq drew closer.
“What are you doing, Ma?” he asked on the phone one evening.
“Making a cup of tea,” I said.
“Well, don’t reach over your head in the cabinet to get the cup,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“My mom said that if you reach over your head when you’re pregnant the umbilical cord can get wrapped around the baby’s neck and strangle it.”
“Charles, that’s just an old wives’ tale,” I said.
“Well, my mom’s a nurse and she said it’s true,” he insisted.
“I’m telling you, it’s not true and, besides, your mother didn’t work in labor and delivery.”
“Don’t talk about my mother,” he snapped.
“What? I’m not talking about your mother. I’m just saying that I’m not going to kill this baby by making tea. What will hurt the baby, though, is stress, and you’re stressing me out. I’m done with this conversation.”
“Well I’m not talking to you, either,” he shot back.
We hung up in a huff.
When I answered the phone the next morning, the first thing I heard was Charles laughing, and I joined him.
“What was that?” Charles asked.
“Prenatal anxiety, I guess.”
“This baby must be thinking, ‘God, you gave me crazy parents,’“ he said.
Although we had spent hours choosing baby paraphernalia, we had put off deciding when to get married.
“We could go on a weekend cruise before you leave and get married there,” I said.
I knew from his silence that he was not emotionally prepared to board a party ship while getting ready for a war, not even to marry me. I wondered, too, whether I wanted to rush the wedding because I feared he might die before I became his wife.
I finally asked, “Do you think we should wait until you come home to get married? It feels like we’re trying to cram a lifetime into a few months.”
Ever chivalrous, he said he wanted whatever I wanted. I knew he did not want me to think that he had had a change of heart. So I made the call; we would wait. With only six weeks until his deployment, we had no time and energy to plan a wedding anyway. We gambled on having a lifetime to make our family official.
Even with that faith, though, it was time to put Charles’s affairs in order.
On a cold gray afternoon in early November, fitting weather for the bleak business before us, we sat at the dining room table going through a stack of documents. He had made out a stack of checks so that I could withdraw money from his account each month. He had also obtained a power of attorney that permitted me to sign on his behalf for military dependent benefits. He told me precisely when his combat pay would be deposited and how much he expected to save while he was away toward a down payment on a bigger apartment in New York and his daughter Christina’s college education.
“I won’t need to spend much money over there, so it’ll really add up,” he said proudly.
Then he handed me another document. “Put this someplace safe,” he said, “in case you need it.” I looked down and saw my name. It was a copy of the form designating his life insurance beneficiaries.
I wanted the conversation to be over, but there was more to discuss.
“Charles,” I said, my voice cracking, “If, God forbid, you should die over there, where do you want to be buried?”
He seemed at a loss. I asked if he would prefer his hometown or Arlington National Cemetery.
“Arlington would be good. It would be easier for everybody to come visit me.”
I felt a catch in my throat and stood up and walked to the bay window in the living room. Then I turned back to him. “Sweetheart, would you want me to plan your funeral?” I managed to ask.
“Absolutely not,” Charles said. “If something happens to me, you just take care of my son.”
I felt the tears welling up.
“Would you worry about my ability to raise him alone?”
“No,” he said. “Dana, I trust you more than anyone in my life. You’re going to be a great mother.”
“Can I ask you something else?” He looked at me as if I were asking for permission to breathe.
“Woman, when have I ever been able to stop you from interviewing me?”
“I’m not interviewing you. I’m just curious about something.”
“What do you want to know?”
“When people go away to war, what do they do about sex?”
Charles had gotten used to my bizarre questions, but this one was strange even for me. He looked puzzled for a second but then realized I was serious and tried to give me a thoughtful answer.
“Well, when you first get over there, you’re so scared that sex is the furthest thing from your mind. You’re just thinking about surviving and getting used to the conditions and the sounds. After a while, some soldiers do have affairs. I’m not going to lie.”
“With who? “I asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I was just thinking that if you need sex in Iraq, I mean to help get you through whatever you’re going to be facing, I want you to know that you have my permission.”
He looked at me as though I must be having some sort of pre-postpartum delusion.
“Have you lost your mind?”
“No, I’m completely serious. I can’t even imagine what being in a war is like. So I don’t know how you cope in that environment. If you get over there and you f
ind you need somebody to hold, to get through it, I don’t want you to feel guilty. There’s nothing you could do in combat that I would hold against you. Just make sure you protect yourself at all times.”
Charles was flabbergasted.
I was making lunch a short time later and he came in the kitchen. He slid his arms around me and palmed my belly. “You are carrying my child,” he said. “I would never disrespect you by doing anything like that, you crazy woman.”
With all this talk of war and death gratuities and final wishes, the time seemed right to give Charles a gift I had been saving for him—something that had caught my eye at a stationery store.
It was a journal.
Not a blank book—a “guided” journal for fathers, with a question at the top of each page. The first one I spotted asked the writer to describe his childhood. Perhaps this would encourage Charles to jot down a few thoughts for the son he had not yet met
He sat silently on our bed, thumbing through the pages. Nearly an hour later, I found him sitting in that same spot, already writing. He wrote well into the night and for much of the next morning. He took it into the bathroom with him, wrote while he ate, and brought it to bed.
As Charles’s deployment drew frighteningly near, I began to accept the fact of his leaving. When I was five months pregnant, he made a final trip to New York for Thanksgiving and I took a week off from work. I was determined to remain upbeat, but inevitably something would upset me—like the way he kept twisting his arm and wincing. He said it was sore from the many vaccinations he had been required to get. He had received all but the one against anthrax, which wasn’t recommended for anyone who might come in contact with a pregnant woman.
“Don’t you need it?” I asked, alarmed.
“I’m not going to take anything that might hurt you or the baby.”
For the rest of the evening I worried about whether he would survive an anthrax attack. I was afraid to find out what else he had been vaccinated against, and Charles was determined to change the subject. He succeeded in distracting me when he said that there was a special item he wanted to buy the next day.
The following afternoon your father and I stood just inside the entrance of a baby superstore, feeling as lost as if we were at NASA headquarters. There were vast floors of baby gear that I wondered how my mother ever did without: a teddy bear that made simulated womb sounds, a talking potty, vibrating bouncy seats.
Our first stop was for Charles’s special item: an outfit for a newborn. He wanted me to have one that he had chosen in case I went into labor and delivered early and he missed your birth. If all went according to plan, however, Charles would be with me. He would take his allotted two-week leave early, and the doctor would induce my labor a week before my due date to help us coordinate our schedules.
I beamed as Charles searched the clothing racks and touched fabrics, trying to choose the softest one. Eventually he settled on a blue fleece sweat suit with a hood and an emblem of a football on the jacket. It looked too big for a newborn, but when he held it up and smiled, I knew it was an image I would hold on to for the rest of my life.
“It just killed you to let me pick it by myself, didn’t it?” Charles said, laughing.
I assured him that I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. “I can’t wait for us to show it to our son one day and tell him that his daddy bought it for him to wear home from the hospital,” I said. “Maybe he’ll put it on his own son someday.”
I had never seen a man happier than your father was at that moment But then I thought of what was coming. I said that I could not stand the thought of him spending Christmas alone and in danger. He said I had already given him the most precious gift of all.
My belly felt heavy and my back ached, but I was determined to cook what I knew would be our last holiday meal together until he returned from the war.
I was walking past Charles in our bedroom that Thanksgiving Day when I thought about what our lives would be like the same time the next year.
“Just think, we will have even more to be thankful for next Thanksgiving,” I said. “You’ll be home for good and our baby boy will be here with us.”
Charles did not say a word—he just handed me a large framed drawing. It was one of his angel pictures. He had drawn a series of them the previous year and had donated them to a benefit for cancer survivors. This one depicted a man’s chiseled body with an enormous, stunning pair of angel wings attached to his back. The man was bowed in prayer and was clearly presenting himself to God.
“I don’t want this,” I said, shoving the picture back at Charles. “Take this back. This is a picture of you. Don’t give me a picture of you as an angel. You’re coming home/’
Charles thought I would take comfort from the image, but I was shaking so badly I had to sit down. I had been trying to pretend, for just one day, that we were an average couple celebrating an ordinary Thanksgiving, but the angel snapped me out of the dream.
He said nothing and put the picture in a closet I later learned that just before he left for Iraq he gave his mother and several close friends the same drawing.
Later, he sat by a window writing in the journal and occasionally lifted his pen, contemplative, before he continued. He had replaced many of the questions at the top of each page with ones he had written himself. One said: “What was your most painful experience during Desert Storm?” He wrote:
I am glad not to have read entries like that one before Charles left. It would have made it that much harder for me to say good-bye to him.
I told him that he didn’t need to exhaust himself, that he could take the journal with him.
“No,” he said, “I have to finish this before I leave.”
One morning I walked into the bathroom and saw him sitting on the toilet with the lid down, writing while the shower was going. “Sweetie, you really don’t have to do this,” I said. He stopped and considered.
“Maybe I’ll take it with me,” he said, set the journal down, and got in the shower. I knew then that he was mentally prepared to leave for Iraq.
The evening before he returned to Fort Hood, I took him to a steak house and told him to order the biggest steak on the menu. We held hands and talked about how nice the crib would look in our room. Charles made me promise to be careful walking on the snow and ice that winter and pleaded with me not to take on too many projects at work. He assured me that he would come home when I gave birth. I rubbed his arm and said I would be fine until he returned. I reminded him that my pregnancy was going well and that I was surrounded by friends and caring colleagues.
It was a chilly evening, but we took our time walking, oblivious to the other people hurrying past. It would be our last evening together for a very long while, and both of us wanted the night to unfold as slowly as possible. We had decided to see a movie as our last date before we became new parents, and sat through a bad romantic comedy about a bachelor trying to win the affections of his high school crush. The ridiculous dialogue would ordinarily have annoyed me, but it was good to hear Charles laugh. I rested my head on his shoulder and we kissed between scenes.
All too soon the darkness gave way to dawn. We untangled ourselves and knew it was time to face the difficult morning ahead. I wrote a letter to Charles while he was in the shower and tucked it into his bag. He discovered the envelope while packing the last of his things and I asked him not to open it until he was on the plane to Iraq.
The doorman rang to tell us that the car I had ordered to take Charles to the airport had arrived. Then I broke down.
Charles kissed my swollen stomach as I stood shaking and sobbing by the front door. He placed the palms of his hands on my belly and sighed in his own anguish. I pressed his head into me. Both of us held on as long as we could. Then he stood up, wiped away my tears, and said softly that he loved me. I could see in his face that a whisper was all he could speak. And then he left.
I did not want him to hear me sobbing again, so I waited until I was sure
he was on the elevator, then cried until my head ached and my eyes stung. I went back to bed and cried myself to sleep.
Charles called from Texas several hours later as he was driving from the airport to the base. I could tell that his focus had already begun to change. He talked about shipping his art to me and where he would store his truck. He would need to disconnect his cell phone and go to the pharmacy to stock up on eye drops. And there was the issue of where he would sleep in the days ahead. He had moved out of his apartment and put his furniture in storage the day before he flew to New York, but he still had a week until deployment. I told him to check into the nicest hotel he could find, order room service, and watch pay-per-view movies. He told me he had a cot in his office and would sleep there.
“Charles, you are not sleeping in your office on your last days in this country. You deserve to treat yourself well. Check into a hotel. I’ll pay for it.”
“I don’t need to stay in a hotel,” he said.
“But where are you going to take a shower?” I asked.
“At the barracks,” he said.
“Charles, please. Why?”
He hesitated.
“I don’t want to spend money on a hotel. We need to save it for the baby.”
Every night that week he called from his office, and each time I pleaded with him to go to a hotel. One of his soldiers, Kenny Morris, and his wife, Donna, had offered him a spare room in their house, but Donna said she suspected he wanted to give her family privacy during their last days together.
By the end of that week, I had come to realize that forgoing the comfort of abed was not just about saving money. It was part of his mental transformation from the man I knew into the warrior I did not. The instant he walked out my door, he was no longer just my man and the father of my child. He was a soldier headed for war.
