The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

He specialized in historic buildings: vintage architecture, nontraditional layouts, the opposite of pop-up McCondos. Also he was patient, explaining everything fifteen times in layman’s terms, all of which I wrote down in specific detail although later, when I read back over those notes, I didn’t know what the hell they meant, which is very similar to reading over stuff I wrote back in college when I was drunk.*,* Also, he jumped up and down on hardwood floors to make sure there wasn’t excess moisture, which is apparently very bad. Also, one time, when he was driving us around from condo to condo, some guy cut him off in traffic and my Realtor pulled up next to him at a red light, rolled down his window, and said, “you must drive better.” He used the same tone of voice anyone else would’ve used to cuss somebody out. Also, he plays in two bands and is super cool to have a beer with. Also, he found our new home, which, at the time, I deeply loved.

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  New neighborhood, new condo: in Uptown across the street from the Aragon Ballroom. Our street was full of tour buses: Pixies and Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Bob Dylan and the Flaming Lips, guys in orange vests directing traffic as bands tried to parallel park, fans lined up down the street for the Aragon and the Riviera and the Green Mill underneath the Red Line stop at Lawrence. Due north: the West Argyle Street Historic District, or Little Saigon. Due east: five blocks of Lawrence Avenue ending in the Montrose Dog Beach, where we went religiously every Sunday so Mojo could run it out. Due south: an empty parking lot under an enormous billboard that changed ads every few months, mostly for upcoming films (Little Miss Sunshine, Casino Royale) and various cold medications (we immediately got sick). And high above it all, eight hundred square feet of a top-floor walk-up with a balcony and a turret and a refrigerator that had a little button and when you pressed it, ice came out, my ice, ice that I owned, ice bought and paid for with the American dream, i.e. Monopoly money and your firstborn child. It felt exactly like that Lorrie Moore story “You’re Ugly, Too”: Zoë buys a house. She keeps going into the basement because “it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree. The day she moved in, she had tacked to her tree a small paper sign that said Zoë’s Tree.”

  I didn’t own a basement.

  I didn’t own a tree.

  Somehow, that made it less scary.

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  A year after going off the pill, alone in a single-occupancy restroom at the Uncommon Ground on Clark Street. I peed on the stick. I waited the three minutes.

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  Four hours later, I was on a table at the gynecologist’s office. I’d made an appointment after three plus signs appeared in three tiny windows of three separate pregnancy tests. The soonest they could see me was after lunch, so I went to the table where Jeff and I met up to write, twitching from the effort of not telling him. My whole body shook. “No more coffee for you,” he said. “Okay,” I said, drinking water instead, glass after glass to keep my hands busy.

  Recently, I went back through my journals to find what I wrote that morning. At the top of the page is the date, followed by a single word: please.

  When I got to the doctor’s, she had me pee in a cup and tested it for HGC. The results: not pregnant.

  I’m nineteen years old, there on the table.

  Thirty-one, on the table.

  It doesn’t matter how old you are, how well you know your body.

  I showed her the three plastic sticks with the pink plus signs. “How about that?” she said, and did a blood test, which verified the pregnancy.

  Apparently I’d drank so much water that there wasn’t pee left in my pee.

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  I didn’t know I was supposed to be terrified about bringing a child into this world until I went to the eco baby store. I was there to buy paint. Our friend Kat was making the baby a mural, two weeks on ladders and a twisty forest climbing his walls. At the time, we were desperately broke, watching the value of our home plummet with the recession and trying, like many of us raising children, to figure out how we’d manage both a mortgage and child care.

  The saleswoman brought me the paint and asked if I had a crib mattress.

  “I—”

  She listed the ways mattresses would kill my baby and pointed at one that was safe. It cost over a thousand dollars. I went home and read about VOCs. About SIDS. About entrapment. About vaccinations and cord blood and cryogenically freezing your baby’s teeth to preserve stem cells in case your baby gets cancer. Did you know formula will give your baby cancer and that hat will give your baby cancer and what do you mean you don’t breast-feed, you’re killing your baby and how can your baby live without a Bumbo and a Boppy? I read about life insurance and health insurance and auto insurance, renter’s and casualty and disability and college savings and you have to pay for college or your child will be in debt forever and without college they won’t get a job ever and they’ll live with you forever and you can never retire and how will you retire and why are you eating that chicken it will kill you GMO HMO PPO and you’re already thirty? You should freeze your eggs. You should wear this band thing to help you get your abs back. You have to get your body back or no one will love you. Here: makeup for new moms, meal replacement for new moms, moisturizer for new moms that can freeze your cellulite and also—in teeny tiny print—maybe kill you. And in huge bold letters—but don’t think about that! Think about no cellulite! No woman wants cellulite! Cellulite cellulite cellulite!

  I decided to take a break from the Internet.

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  Christopher set up a meeting with a financial adviser to discuss college savings options. I was mystified by such forward thinking. I will eat a bagel sandwich. That was all the planning I could handle.

  So. Math! My kid will be of typical college age in 2025, which means, at the current rate of inflation, four years of undergrad will cost nine hundred billion dollars.

  For real though: we sat down with the financial adviser in his swanky financial adviser’s office, and by “sat down” I mean wedged my pregnant ass into a teeny little chair with arms—

  Dear People Who Have Offices and Therefore Probably Chairs: Get the ones without arms. Not everyone can fit in the ones with arms. Some of us are fat. Some of us are pregnant. Some of our bodies don’t work the way yours does. Truly, this is not hard! There are so many options! I believe in you!

  —and he explained with a totally straight face that in order to pay for college outright in 2025 we’d have to save, ballpark twelve hundred dollars a month for the next eighteen years. I burst out laughing. And my laugh—it’s obnoxious. What’s that line from The Catcher in the Rye? “If I ever sat behind myself in a movie or something, I’d probably lean over and tell myself to please shut up.”

  In that moment, laughter was the logical response, easier than facing an impossible reality, better than fearing an inevitable failure.

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  Christopher’s office threw us a baby shower. He was a web developer at a financial firm in an enormous glass skyscraper in the West Loop. It was very fancy. The pay was good and there was downtime, enough to start an art blog on the side, but still, it was eating him alive. The company dealt with huge amounts of money, so much so that the government built a mirror office in a rural yet otherwise undisclosed location to continue operations in case the Chicago office ever blew up, which I think is the dictionary definition of cynicism.

  There was a woman in the mirror office with Christopher’s same job.

  Her name was Christine.

  Listen: I was grateful for that job with its shiny, pre-ACA health insurance that let us have our baby but man, was that place eerie. The baby shower was held in the conference room, long and narrow with a long, narrow table, the head of which was flush against the wall. The wall—get this—was a floor-to-ceiling video screen showing another long, narrow table in a long and narrow room in Texas. On that table, onscreen, was a cake that said: Congratulations, Megan and Christopher! And on this table, in front of me, was another cake that said: Congratulations, Megan and Christop
her!

  The baby kicked the hell out of me the whole time.

  My boy knows what’s up.

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  At the infant care classes you take at the hospital, they give you a doll to cuddle and swaddle and practice changing diapers. I accidentally broke off its legs.

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  February 1, 2008, 10:00-ish p.m. Outside: snowstorm. Inside: chicken-fried steak from a bar around the corner called Fat Cat while watching Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. It was the bungee ballet scene, Angelina Jolie all ethereal in white gauzy pants dancing midair to Bach while shooting black-op assassins with machine guns, a soundtrack of bullets and techno and breaking glass. I remember getting up to pee, but when I peed, the pee didn’t seem like pee.

  I felt very dumb. One should know if one’s pee is pee.

  “My water maybe broke?” I said to Christopher.

  He was playing online Scrabble, winning by a lot. “It’s too soon,” he said, which was true, we weren’t due for weeks, but that morning I’d put both hands on my stomach and whispered, I’m ready. I imagined the baby and me communicating via a radio surveillance earpiece, the kind with the plastic telephone cord like Agent Smith wore in The Matrix.

  “You’re probably right,” I said to Christopher.

  Then I had a contraction.

  I remember thinking that I’d never be a good enough writer to find words for the pain. I’d read about it on the Internet: “Really intense menstrual cramps,” said one woman. “Overwhelming back pain,” said another, and all I can figure is both those women must’ve been drugged out of their minds ’cause those words don’t skim the surface. First of all, they’re lowercase, and, believe you me, labor contractions are in all caps at all times. Second, poor choice of adjective! Intense? Overwhelming? Try: what the goddamn fuck. Try: are you fucking kidding me? Try: taking a bullet in your lower back a bullet that is attached to metal wires and someone is holding the other end of those wires and they run around from your back to your front dragging the wire through your insides and then yanking it out your abdomen and it’s important to note since my dad is a big game hunter and he’s probably reading this hi dad! that the bullet in question is buckshot used for large game and/or military and is actually lots of little shots inside of one big shot so really there’s a hundred wires ripping you open instead of just one and that happens every five minutes.

  Poor Christopher. He’d read all the books, the ones that tell the new partner how to help the birthing mother through labor, and all of them talk about those first eight to twelve hours: holding her hand, walking her around the block, giving her water through a straw, timing contractions from hours apart to five minutes apart and then—and only then—calling the hospital, and here I was, five minutes apart from the get-go and, in the background, a soundtrack of submachine guns and death.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I puked in the sink.

  “Okay,” he said, calling the hospital.

  What happened next was forty minutes of Christopher digging out the car with a shovel, by which point I was covered in vomit and scared out of my mind. Then a slushy, snowstormy drive down Lake Shore, me turned sideways in the passenger seat with one foot on the windshield and my leg bent across the dash. I had several moments of profundity: No pleasure without pain. No joy without fear. Etc. The time between contractions was so mind-blowingly wonderfully breathtakingly glorious and I wouldn’t have been able to experience such glory without the paralyzing pain coming every three minutes.

  We arrived at the hospital, and I thanked the snowstorm for clearing traffic that night. I thanked the baby for waiting until after rush hour. I thanked Dr. John Bonica for inventing the epidural that would soon be mine. “I’m having a baby,” I told the intake nurse at triage. “Right this very second.”

  She probably heard that line twenty times a day. “Sit down, dear,” she said. “You have to fill out these forms and—”

  I puked. Everywhere. Over everything. Puke on the floor, puke on the desk, puke on the pretty, newly renovated hospital wallpaper. It got on the documents I was supposed to fill out and the woman who called me dear. We looked at each other. Then we looked at the floor. Then—and maybe this is just me—you know how when you’ve had too much to drink, the only thing that could possibly make it better is to take off all your clothes and lie naked on the floor? I stripped in the waiting room. One boot, one sock, my winter coat, pants pulled over the other boot as I pushed through the door—I’d found a door! And down a hall—look, a hall!—then sweater, shirt, and underwear. When I finally got to the toilet I was wearing one Ugg. Christopher told me he followed the line of clothes.

  They got me on a bed and a nurse came in. She was very nice, but, like the receptionist, thought the immediacy of this was all in my head. Then she took a peek, said, “Oh my goodness!” and disappeared. And within seconds I was on a gurney and down another hall. The delivery room was fancy, with all sorts of machines and a forty-two-inch flat-screen TV. Beetlejuice was playing. Beetlejuice, with Michael Keaton and pre-Heathers, pre-Mermaids, waaay pre–Reality Bites Winona Ryder. It was the dinner party scene where they all dance to “Day O” and Catherine O’Hara wears a single perfect, black leather elbow-length glove.

  Dr. F. came in. FYI: if you’re having a baby, this is your guy. Super cool, super calm. “Heeey,” he said, like he’d just smoked a bowl. “Let’s have this baby.”

  “Let’s have an epidural,” I said.

  “Let’s push,” he said.

  There was no way in hell I was doing it without drugs. No way, no how. It was just too much: the crying and the puking and all of it happening so fast, so immediate. “You already did all the hard stuff!” my friend Julie, my role-model mother, told me later. “Pushing is a relief in comparison to getting to nine centimeters!” But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking that I didn’t want to have this experience hurting anymore. I wanted to have it joyfully. I wanted to . . . float.

  “No, really,” I said. Probably “said” is incorrect. Gasp? Yell? Plead? “I need an epidural.”

  “Try pushing once,” F. said.

  “That’s fair,” I said.

  I didn’t know that once meant three sets of ten.

  Fuckin’ doctors. Fuckin’ personal trainers.

  “Okay,” I said after. During, I’d imagined that Ralph Steadman illustration where a guy’s brain explodes upward though his skull and the ceiling drips with brain goo. “Epidural, please.”

  Finally, it wasn’t about me anymore. It was about the baby. The baby. The baby. I hadn’t thought about him in the past few hours—only myself—and I remembered that this little person I’d been talking to for months was here.

  I didn’t feel the episiotomy. I pushed five times. I watched Christopher’s face. It was, for me, the most amazing way to bring a child into this world: calm, slow, knowing exactly what was happening because it was all over his face. He gripped my hand. He kept forgetting to lift my leg. When our son arrived, Christopher caught him and they yelled like wild men and I wasn’t scared.

  At least, not yet.

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  We are awake, the baby and me. The 2008 presidential primaries are on cable.

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  We are awake, the baby and me. The Lost Boys is on cable.

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  We are awake, the baby and me. Saving Private Ryan is on cable. I’d seen this movie a few times before and was always like: No. I was like: You do not risk the lives of many to save just one. I was like: Are we saving Matt Damon again? But this time, my kid in my arms, I was a sobbing mess. “you get that boy,” I yelled at Tom Hanks. “get him right now and take him home to his mother.”

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  We are awake, the baby and me, and on cable there’s an HBO documentary about the Beslan elementary school siege. They’d interviewed some of the kids who made it out, giving them cameras to take around the school: empty, blackened, untouched for four years. This is where they held us. This is w
here they shot my mother. This is where we drank pee ’cause there was no water, and it was so hot, and so many bodies crammed together, and everyone was scared. One of them talked about how sad her town was now. Everyone wears black, there’s no dancing, no laughing, and she wants to grow up and leave and find a place where it’s okay to be happy.

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  We got rid of the fucking cable.

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  We are awake, the baby and me, and I call my mom crying. I’m so tired, so scared, so in the fog of it, and after a brief conversation, I pack him in the car seat and drive the four hours overnight to Chelsea. You need a place where you can rest. You need to let yourself crack. You need someone to take care of you.

  For me, that means my mom.

  How long did I sleep? Minutes? Days? When I finally wake up, it’s the middle of another night and everyone else is asleep. I remember getting into the car, turning on the brights, and driving west from downtown to where the train tracks cut across the road. I follow them till they turned into a slingshot, park my car, and walk down to the shed, amazed and relieved that it was still there. I sit on the little steps and look up at the stars—when was the last time I saw them? My entire adult life, I’d lived in cities: Boston, Florence, Chicago, Prague. You can’t see the stars from the city, at least not like a blanket above you, or the inside of a telescope, or the answer to an impossible question. My time in Chelsea is the only time I’ve had them at the ready, just a tiptoe down the stairs and out the back door, careful that it won’t slam behind you and wake up your parents. I think of those midnight bike rides down Cavanaugh Lake Road, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old and all I wanted to do was scream. Now I was thirty-two, sitting in the darkness, trying to see my own hand in front of my face. Thirty-two and waiting for the train. Waiting to throw my voice at it, the exhaustion and the fear.