My daughter is getting to that stage where she’s starting to ask the Big Questions. Actually, she hit the stage some months ago, around the time I became pregnant again. I’m a fan of Dr. Spock’s advice on these matters, which is to offer no more information than a child is requesting.
At first, the questions about how babies are made were answered with things like, “From a mom and dad’s love.” Oddly enough, she seemed satisfied with that type of Helen Steiner Rice drivel. I might as well have told her that babies are three parts magic, two parts wonder, and just a pinch of heaven.
When the questions got more specific, my answers got more concrete. “Babies are made from an egg that lives in the mom’s body,” I’d explain, “and a teeny little seed that the daddy gives to her.” (She probably imagined my husband handing over a little Burpee’s seed packet to me.)
This explanation only lasted so long. She eventually became concerned about how a baby in my tummy could already have an egg in its tummy, which would in turn also have an egg in its tummy, and on and on down the line. This notion of some sort of infinite set of Russian nesting dolls was torturing her sense of logic, so I finally got down to brass tacks.
Well, hello there, great-great granddaughter!
“You know whenever we see grasshoppers on top of each other, or frogs or ducks or any animal, and I tell you they’re making a baby?” I explained. “Well, that’s how it is with pretty much all living creatures, people included.”
I waited for her to process this new information. That took exactly three seconds, judging by the way her expression changed from curious to horrified. I had no idea that I, personally, could disgust her so much.
“Nooooo,” she said with a question mark in her eyes. “You and Daddy don’t get on top of each other, do you?”
Technically, no. No, we don’t. I mean, two people can’t be on top of each other at the same time, right? I’ve been getting by on such technicalities in my explanations for a long time now. And I could have dodged the truth just this one more time. Instead, it finally occurred to me that I don’t have to answer every single question she asks exactly when she asks it. So, this time? This time I said, “Who wants to play My Little Pony!?” And to my surprise, it worked.
Even the happiest and best-paired of husbands and wives sometimes have drastic disconnects. My husband and I are generally two peas in a pod. We’re a nice mix of similarity and complement, and this generally keeps our boat floating, even in the worst of circumstances — like when he was deployed to the Middle East while our daughter was a toddler. Sometimes, though, like with any other marriage, we can have the most ridiculous disconnects. Case in point:
Our daughter is set to be the Child of the Week this week at her preschool. This dubious honor roughly translates into Make More Work for Mom Week. While our daughter gets to revel in such rapturous treats as being at the front of the line all week, having control over the classroom light switch during recess, and sitting up front with the teachers during circle time, for me, it means making a “special snack” for the whole class, orchestrating a surprise drop-in from a “special visitor” for her before the week’s end, and helping her create a “special poster” to share with the class that tells them more about her life. Aside from their obvious abuse of the word “special,” the preschool really can’t be held responsible for the grief this event is causing my family. How were they to know that it would coincide with our 11-week-old getting a ruptured eardrum?
After many days of crying, difficult bedtimes, fussy daytimes, and bobbing on and off the breast, my son managed to get through to the mother intuition that I didn’t even think I possessed. (Who can blame me? Our firstborn was an equal-opportunity crybaby, with a scream as shrill for I Don’t Like the View from this Carseat as it was for I Just Rolled Off the Bed and Onto My Face on the Wood Floor.) At any rate, I just got to thinking yesterday that the baby might be coming down with something. My husband confirmed my hunch with his otoscope, glimpsing blood and what appeared to be a rupture in my son’s right eardrum. Probably from our airplane descent last week.
As I was trying to deal with the fussy baby yesterday, I was also trying to help our four-year-old create her “special poster” for school. Being the Child of the Week is an event that comes only once a year for each student, so it’s a big deal. But I had no intention of trying to best any of the other mom’s gratuitious attempts to make their children look like professional archivers with an uncanny mastery of calligraphy. Seriously, I had the notion to just plop our daughter down with some paper, glue, pictures, and crayons, and let her have at it. But I knew it was important to her that I help, and the kid can’t exactly choose pictures off our computer to print, so she and I sat down together for an hour yesterday and carefully went through our digital photos. She meticulously picked which ones she wanted to include — a photo of her first day holding her brother, one of her cat that died this past summer, one of her climbing a tree with her Grandma, etc. Every picture had a “special” story to tell. When all was said and done, she had about 35 pictures selected. I hit print, and then learned that our printer was out of red ink.
At this point, the baby was crying for the umpteenth time, and because I’d been up much of the prior night nursing and comforting him, my energy was wearing out. But my husband had done all the holding that could help, so I had to take back the baby while my husband ran out to Walgreen’s to buy an ink cartridge. He took our memory stick with him, loading onto it the pictures we needed, just in case the store didn’t have the cartridge.
While he was out, my daughter went to a cookie-decorating party next door. She returned from the party high — absolutely HIGH — on sugar cookies with icing and M&Ms and candy corn. She was the epitome of a whirling dervish. I tried to settle her into working on her poster as her dad began whipping together dinner for us all. The baby was crying again, and I tried to nurse him in a sling as I pulled together the art supplies. “Just have to make it to the end of the day,” I told my heavy eyelids and tired arms, as I opened the Walgreen’s bag and discovered that my husband had printed only about 10 photos.
“Where are the rest of the pictures?” I asked.
“It seemed like too many,” he said, “So, I just printed some of them.”
I think fire shot out of my eyes. It was not that big of a deal, but it was, for some reason, the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“You mean we spent ALL that time this afternoon going through those photos for no reason!?” I snarled. “I could kill you!”
Yes, I am that ridiculous right now.
I stomped upstairs and downstairs and through hallways, collecting up the goods for the poster and then remembering that he’d also stopped to buy an ink cartridge somewhere else after all. I went to the bag where I thought the ink cartridge would be, and found instead a shiny new bottle of AstroGlide. Um, yeah. Snowball’s chance in hell.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said. “You’re out of your mind.”
My husband looked up and saw me holding the bottle, that precious little bottle of hope, and said with a smirk, “What?”
“Do you know what I’m thinking when I see this?” I asked.
“I think so,” he said. “You want to tell me I can go f— myself with it?”
I laughed. That wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking how much that bottle shouted about the disconnect men and women often experience when a new baby arrives. No, I think it says a lot about the disconnect between men and women, period. Her very sanity is hanging by a thread, and he’s stopping off to buy lube? Did he really think that whole business about breastfeeding drying up cervical mucous was all that stood between us and a night of great sex?
When all was said and done, we had a good laugh about it. My daughter’s poster got finished and had her beaming with pride. My son eventually went to sleep. And my husband and I ended up with a little extra oil to burn. I intend to put it right in the kitchen next to our olive and canola oils, where it has a better chance of being put to some use.
“It’ll be fun,” she said. “All different ages,” she said. “You won’t be the oldest.”
So I unclicked the MAYBE box and changed my RSVP to YES. I’d never been to one of these home parties. Sure, I’d attended ones where you buy jewelry, cooking gadgets, even couture clothing. But never one with dildos and lubricants.
It was nice of her to ask me and the other moms from work. Oh, sure, she and I are more than just co-workers. We’ve been for drinks together. We joke about who stunk up the first-floor bathroom. We exchange off-color stories. (Mine are from 20 years ago. Hers are from last year.) But it’s one thing to get along well with a much younger co-worker and quite another to peruse vibrators in her living room.
Still, it wasn’t a pity invite. And I do appreciate the occasional night away from helping with homework, doing kids’ bedtimes, and retiring on the couch with my lovely husband. So, I drove the fifteen minutes away from my cornfield suburbs, through the autumn night and off to her downtown apartment, which was decked with strings of pretty white lights. Ah, the city life. Oh, to be twenty-something again. And she was right: There were women of many ages, all sipping on beer or wine, nibbling on chips and wraps, and seated in a ring around some professional party hostess that was older than I am.
Now, I’m not going to lie to you. There were some big vibrators there. A few looked like miniature submarines. Others had tips fashioned to resemble, I think, tiny woodland creatures. But it wasn’t all vibrators.There were pretty lingerie pieces, too, and pretty sparkling lotions you could rub on your décolletage. Or your vagina. (The paid hostess assured us that this is a great trick to play on a partner just before heading out for a dinner date, just a quick little seduction to leave him with proverbial egg on his face—or glitter, as it were. Heh, heh, heh. Look who doesn’t know he’s got a sparkling moustache!)
At one point, I let said hostess smear scented lube on the back of my hand. I rubbed it in and sniffed at it like the other ladies in the room. “Mmmn!” I agreed. “That does smell good!” I did this on the tail end of her most embarrassing sales pitch of the night:
“Let’s face it, we’ve all had dolphin sex, right?” She was miming a bedroom scenario in which there was a last-second mix-up in entryways. Lurching slightly forward with a dreamy expression, then suddenly snapping her eyes open wide, she flapped her arms and screeched like Flipper. If I’d been given a safe word when I got to the party, I would have shouted it right about then.
Don’t get me wrong. I did have fun, partly because it was interesting to listen to how the younger women talked about sex. Whereas they were intrigued with a magic spray that instantly spirits away wet spots on the sheets,I was fascinated by a sweet little, gel-filled, heart-shaped massager that warms and firms up when you bend a metal disc inside of it:
Dear 20-somethings: This gel-filled heart will make you yawn ALL NIGHT LONG.
So, I bought one. It promptly went to live in a drawer.
Fast forward a few weeks, when my son came down with explosive diarrhea and violent vomiting. This wasn’t just any stomach bug. It was third-world. He spiked a wildly high fever. He had to sit on the toilet with a bucket at his tiny ankles so that he could unleash the curse of the damned from both ends of his body at one time. “I’m so cold,” he said, shivering in his bed in his fourth pair of underwear for the evening. “My skin hurts.” I couldn’t find the heating pad. We don’t own an electric blanket. And then I remembered THE HEART. Boom! Magic! He slept with it against his belly. He cuddled it to his face. We boiled, cooled, and activated the thing over and over.
The next evening, it was my turn to battle the bug. It never fails that I get these stomach viruses more violently than any one else in the family. Every time, I think I might die. I lose four or five pounds. I can barely walk. At one point, I was on all fours, crawling across our cold tile from the bathroom, dizzy and thinking of cholera. “Stay away from me,” I moaned at my husband, who was shouting out offers of help from the next room. “I don’t want you to get this thing.”
As I tried to catnap on the kitchen floor, I started thinking about the heart. I really wanted that thing. But it was all the way up on the counter. I bargained with God. My skin was so freaking cold. My belly was cramping in agony. Dragging myself up to standing, I grabbed the heart, pressed the metal disk in it, and watched it warm up. Then I rubbed it’s silky-soft warmth all over my aching, green-tinged skin. Oh, yeah, baby. I could do this all night long. Mmmmmnn.
Right around midnight, my condition started to improve. I was about to go to sleep when I heard low, miserable groaning upstairs. “Mommmmm, my belly huuuurts.” Now it was my daughter’s turn to dance with the devil. She spent most of the next six hours with the toilet and a bucket. At this point, I was still holding out hope that my husband would be spared, so I soldiered on, playing the part of nurse, rinsing buckets, wiping away tears, cleaning up towels, and heating and reheating that heart.
By morning, my husband was hit. He’s got a powerful immune system, rarely gets sick, so I figured it would be a mild case. Even when he had H1N1 several years ago, he seemed to be enjoying his time off. Not today. He was literally moaning in pain. I couldn’t believe it when I saw my poor, strong man boiling that pink heart. Ahhhh, he said when I rubbed it on his skin. Mmmmmmn.
You want to talk about intimacy? The Norovirus can make anyone sound like a 500-pound man straining to lift a 1,00o-pound barbell. And no amount of Poopourri is going to cover things up. Try this: Try having gut-wrenching dry heaves and explosive diarrhea within earshot of that special someone. It doesn’t get more intimate than that.
So, yeah. Against my first instinct, I went to one of those parties. I let a stranger rub something called Coochy cream on my forearm while I pretended it wasn’t weird. I handled all manner of so-called adult toys. I even bought one. And I can tell you, it was worth every single penny. Talk about blurred lines.
Was that good for you? Get more true stories of beauty, shame, and horror, in my book, After Birth: Unconventional Writing from the Mommylands (Possibilities Publishing, 2013), available in both Kindle ($4.99) and paperback ($8.95) formats. During the month of March, 80 percent of profits go to the Restoring Hope Transplant House, a home away from home for transplant patients and their families.
The Second Magpie 