Womb with a View

So we just passed one of the most important hurdles of the pregnancy a couple days ago, the first ultrasound… and we’ve learned that COUCH is flying solo in the womb.  In other words, COUCH does not apparently have any little extra potential brother(s) and/or sister(s) cramping its living space.  This revelation is important for several reasons:

1)      It could have been emotionally detrimental to the older kids (my stepchildren) to suddenly drop a litter of squalling newborns on them, rather than just one.  Not that there hasn’t already been a dumpster fire of changes to throw on them already, but I’d kinda like them to not despise a whole passel of furniture-themed children for the fact that during their first few formative years the rest of us were eating cardboard and shoe leather just to be able to afford diapers and formula.

2)      With two or more children, buying a new car or minivan would suddenly jump from a suggested eventual course of action to an outright absolute right now necessity.  With just COUCH, my Suzuki Reno could handle most runs that didn’t require the entire family to go along if it needed to… and there is even the possibility that we could ride squished in Reno for short distances.  (Comfortably?  Oh, hell no.  But I come from a family that was large enough that we were required to squeeze in once in a while for everyone to go somewhere.  You learn to make do.)   Not having to pay for a new car is important because:

3)      There’s that lack of money thing again.  I do realize the wisdom in what others have told me, that you will never really be financially “ready” for a child.  But by the same token, when you start looking at the cost of living day to day, even the addition of one more mouth to feed and body to clothe makes you get a nervous tic just doing the math.  

No joke—the kids are currently gone to Florida to visit their dad for a month, and my Trophy Wife™ and I went grocery shopping last week: we bought enough for us to get by for a couple weeks, and still managed to spend less than fifty dollars.  When I pulled out my wallet to pay, I unexpectedly found that it was drenched, despite it being a warm sunny day outside.  It wasn’t until later that I realized it was wet because it had been weeping tears of joy.

So this nervousness about the possibility of twins had been embedded in me within the first few days after the initial pregnancy test.  My Trophy Wife™ mentioned offhandedly that she was feeling pains that she hadn’t felt until much further along in her earlier pregnancies, and she wondered if maybe it was twins.  She even coined the name SOFA for a possible second COUCH… as in, “Sofa King Not Expecting This.” 

At first it was cute, and I treated it like the little joke it no doubt was, but slowly as time passed and facts began to hammer away at us, the idea that we could have two (or more!) babies began to take root and become a full blown paranoid delusion.  

First it was the mention that she’d read that twins often happen at the pre-embryonic level when a woman suddenly quits her birth control and over-ovulates (oh, and by the way, she did suddenly quit her birth control).  

Then the fact that women over thirty are more at risk for twins (my Trophy Wife™ is officially twenty-nine with a very slight remainder).   

Then the fact that twins run in both of our families (which I was totally and completely unaware of, not that this in itself is at all surprising… I often have to ask my mom who people are at family reunions.  My brother was mildly insulted one year that I had to ask his name).  

Then the plain and simple fact that Murphy’s Law just seemed to point at us a lot and laugh, not unlike the ever-so-slightly-mad serial killer on whatever cadaver-coroner-clone TV show is popular these days.  

I started to get so paranoid about how our lives would be impacted by twins that when the ultrasound tech said there was only one embryo, I jumped up and high-fived her like she’d just tomahawk-dunked the ball to win the game… and posterized LeBron in the process.  

Okay, no, I wasn’t that excited.  I will admit that there was a small part of me that was a little saddened by the idea that we wouldn’t be having both a boy and a girl, especially since there is a pretty good likelihood that COUCH will be our only child together.  But then again, that small part of me enjoys doing up flower arrangements, watching overly sentimental movies, petting cute little fuzzy animals and engaging in idle thought rather than looking at our skyrocketing bills and empty bank account. 

So, yes, the ultrasound.   I never realized that there even was such a thing as multiple ultrasounds until I got in there.  The tech mentioned that there would be a normal ultrasound, and then they would do a vaginal ultrasound.  (Apparently this is standard operating procedure now.  There’s every possibility it has always been standard operating procedure, and everyone simply thought I was too immature to hear the word vaginal before, so they didn’t repeat it.  Of course, they never realized I would someday hear it while watching commercials during the Price is Right on daytime TV and would forever after be scarred by mother-daughter talks.)

I blinked very slowly and was going to raise my hand and ask her to repeat that, but thankfully thought better of it.  (Seriously, if you’re male and you ask a professional woman to repeat something like that term, you are immediately earmarked as a clod, a joker or a troublemaker, if not all three.  This holds true even if the professional woman mumbles and you have a pair of hearing aids and honestly didn’t understand a word she said.)   After the initial ultrasound—which is the one I grew up knowing about, where they gel up the mother-to-be’s stomach and run the scanner over it, kinda like buttering an overripe watermelon with a travel iron—my Trophy Wife™ was asked to adjourn to the bathroom and I was left in very awkward silence in the main exam room as the tech prepared for the… other… sort. 

I swear during that time she looked at me and slowly shook her head disapprovingly from side to side, as if to say that all of this was my fault.  I had no idea what she meant at the moment.

When my Trophy Wife™ returned, the tech explained the procedure, and in no-nonsense manner, made absolutely sure that she did not blow a single iota of smoke up my Trophy Wife’s™ dress.  Yes, she said, the probe and its gel was by necessity cold; yes, the procedure was invasive and would be uncomfortable, if not outright painful; yes, it would require the whole “feet in the stirrup” position that every woman utterly loves; yes, the probe was obviously a torture device created by a male, probably one who took great perverse pleasure in making it look as much like a magic wand as humanly possible.  I must have had a case of sympathy lightheadedness for her medical procedure/borderline-violation, because I more or less blacked out after that.

Fortunately, I awoke in time to see COUCH playing hide and seek in the confines of his current housing.  Currently, COUCH is about the size of a healthy lima bean (and he or she has a tail right now, Jess was quick to point out to me), so the ultrasound tech had to point out that yes, the small vaguely-circular blob was our child-to-be and not in fact a finger-smudge on the screen.  She printed out a picture for us to embarrass COUCH with later in life, right next to the one of him/her in the bathtub and the one where I’m frantically carrying him/her away from the carpet while he/she takes offense to me changing diapers and pees on me. 

Even so, there’s something sort of awe-inspiring about seeing that little vaguely-circular circular blob and knowing you had a part in its existence… like you can’t help but look at it and have your heart melt, thinking, I created that.  We created that.   It’s pretty fucking amazing.

You know what’s even more amazing?  That something as small as that can get a loudmouth smartass like me to shut up once in a while and just enjoy the moment.  

Pregnant Pauses

So...

We're kinda having a baby.

Okay, technically, "we" is mostly My Trophy Wife™, who gets to undergo the actual wonders of pregnancy and spend her spare time psychologically/verbally/physically abusing me for being among the gender that the great Creator didn't equip with a requisite Incredible Expanding Uterus™.  Yes, yes; point taken, mea culpa.  But still--

We're having a baby.  A fucking baby.

Yeah, I know, huh?  Deep breaths, inhale-exhale; not too fast or you hyperventilate.

I'm going to be a father.

 I swear to God I'm not freaking out.  It’s just a little overwhelming, that’s all.  I mean, I – and yes, that is to say, me, Mark, the guy who hides in his room when there are children around; the same person who willingly pays shipping costs to buy items online so he doesn't have to deal with stupid adults and squalling infants at the local stores-- am going to be a father.  A fucking father.  Okay, maybe I am freaking out a little bit.  (Surely not! What sort of world do we live in that you could expect overreaction from someone who rants over Indiana drivers, wedding planner prices and environmentalists?)

Somewhere, my own father-- God rest his soul-- is kicked back on his heavenly kitchen chair, saluting me with a cup of coffee (triple cream, no sugar) and smirking while he says, “Yeah, karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, boy?”

And I should also point out that this wasn't exactly a huge surprise or anything... My trophy Wife™ and I didn't just forget to “baggie the pecan log” or “wrap the smoked kipper” or whatever other horrible, horrible phrases you can come up with for that sort of thing.  We sat down and spoke very candidly to one another about the idea of children; neither one of us wanted more children when we first got married, but after you’ve been married a little while, there is sometimes that moment of sentimentality that stealthily creeps up and stabs you in the back of the head and makes you go, “What Common Sense?”  We took some extra time to consider and discuss if we really wanted to blow our remaining youth and always-dwindling money on a bawling bundle of shitty diapers, formula puke and financial ruin.  We even put together lists which pretty much boiled down to: 

HER PROS:

- Our home is a great environment for a new child

- The children would have a younger brother or sister, and in most circumstances this would be a good thing.

- Having a child teaches husband patience in childrearing, which may actually filter to other aspects of life.

- Mark’s mom would be ecstatic to have her youngest child give her a grandchild. 

- I can eat mountain ranges of chocolate and blame it on pregnancy.

HER CONS:

- Pregnancy = Eating weird food mixtures.

- Pregnancy = Weird hormonal/emotional whiplash

- Pregnancy = Pain and discomfort

- I sort of like sleep.

MY PROS:

- We can train the child from an early age to make sure that it is not going to grow up and be that child in Wal-Mart.  The one that you have to yell three names at to get to listen to you, and only then, because it fears for its ass cheeks’ continued lack of pain.  (Oh, yes, I tell you right now, I will be a spanker, if the child deserves it.   I’ve seen parents use the Positive Reinforcement style of parenting, which should be subtitled “Let the Child Walk All Over You While You Respond to His Misdeeds With A ‘No-No,’ and Then Wonder Where You Went Wrong When He’s Twelve and Won’t Do a God Damn Thing You Tell Him To.”  I subscribe to the old school Denis Leary School of Childrearing, which says ‘spankings = hot stove’.  A child touches the hot stove and burns themselves, you know what?  They don’t fucking do it again.  If a child commits an act and gets spanked, you know what?  They don’t fucking do it again.  And if they do do it again, they’re probably just gonna be a fucking societal degenerate and probable masochist.)

- I might be able to have a child with more than just a passing interest in sports.  And that’s not just because I want to be “that dad” who hangs around at the softball/baseball/soccer games and talks about how great his not-particularly good child is and blames the ref/ump/coach for his child’s lack of being able to run to first base without tripping over his untied shoes or going the wrong way.  I say this because sports really do teach children valuable lessons—things such as the fact that you’ll never be able to be good at something without practice, the fact that sportsmanship (being a gracious winner and not be a sore loser) and teamwork are two of the most important things you can ever take away from your youth, and that point shaving and offshore betting only work when you get past the high school level.

- Any child that combines the chromosomes of my Trophy Wife™ and I will very likely be one of the following: a ridiculous artistic prodigy, a brilliant author, a quiet and thoughtful near-genius, or the Antichrist.  It’s worth making one just to see which roll of the dice comes up.

- My wife will be too busy with a new child to realize the cat has quietly been sucked into an airplane turbine.  And she’s already mentioned once or twice offhandedly that if I saddle her with a child, we won’t get another.

MY CONS:

- I will consistently get screamed at by a yowling lungful of rage which then gives way to squalling torturous cries of pain or torture for no apparent reason I will ever be able to ascertain.  This will occur long before the baby is ever born.

- We have no money.

- We already can’t talk the kids into actually keeping our house clean (or for that matter listening to anything we might say) worth a damn… and when the baby is born, instead of being role-models for cleanliness in the house, the children will instead use the new child as further reason to not bother cleaning up-- as in, “What does it matter if I eat cherries jubilee and chocolate sauce messily in the living room… the carpet already has old baby poop stains in it.”

- We have no money.

- Instead of us laughing at those people in Wal-Mart with the horribly distempered child who screams as though his arms are being lopped off with a weed whacker because his mom won’t buy him the squirting frog toy that he saw and absolutely has to have, we will instead be those people.

- We have no money.

- Any chance we may have had of having a smidgen of privacy someday will go completely down the tubes.  Right now, at least, we have our bedroom, which is sort of a respite from the rigors of daily life (or it is, at least until Daily Life comes knocking on the door screaming that other aspects of Daily Life keeps pushing her and nuh-uh, I was just giving her a hug, and I haven’t had my computer turn yet and he’s been on there for hours, and isn’t she supposed to be on restriction for throwing the Wii Remote at me, and he ate the last yogurt and I wanted it!).  And let’s just say, if we have a child, any possible privacy would more or less be blown right out of the water, because for the first year or so, we will probably have little choice but to keep the child in our room.  I already can’t watch any cool movies downstairs because there’s a chance one of the kids might see a flashed breast or hear an f-bomb said by someone other than their mother or me, so this will mean that from now on, the closest I get to watching HBO will be the Pixar marathon on the Disney Channel.

- We have no money.

- We would totally lose the office, which was going to double as a library, game-design area, artist loft, craftwork space and aquarium refuge.  My plan was eventually to start painting in there.  With a child, My Trophy Wife™ and I will have to lock the paints in a safe for fear of everything, up to and including the cat, the fish tank and any appliances or electronics that cost over $500. 

- Oh, yeah, did I mention we have no money?

* * *

 Despite all that, we still managed to come up with a 'yes'.  As in, yes, we would not kill one another if we found we were to have a new child.  Looking back, it's entirely possible we were drunk.

That brings us around to a few weeks ago, when my wife stuck something white, plastic and a bit thermometer-y into my still-half-asleep face and said-- one could almost say accusatorially-- “Look.”

So I looked.  Across one little white bar there was the barest, thinnest little blue line possible.  It was smaller and less noticeable than the blue lines on a well-worn piece of loose-leaf school paper that had been weathered for a week and then used as toilet tissue.  It was infinitesimal.  I’ve seen mirages with more substance.  “And that is?”

“It’s a pregnancy test,” she reminded me.  “And there’s a little blue line on it.”

“Is that what that is?” I asked, squinting.  “So it’s negative?”

She gave me one of those looks.  You know those looks, especially if you’re married.  It’s that same look that she’ll give when she’s discussing her feelings during the fourth quarter of a back-and-forth playoff game and you ask if you can wait to answer until the next timeout.  It’s that look that says, ‘I realize that you cook and clean and are financially stable and at least marginally good looking after you spruce up for an hour or so, but remind me again why I married you?’

“No, the line means positive.”  She said, not quite in the tone you would use with a small, dull-witted child.

So I did what any red-blooded American male would do.  First I panicked.  Then I wondered if I was the father and I panicked some more.  And then logic finally took hold, and I realized that last I checked, we were married, so I wasn’t really in any trouble over this, and no one would come beating down our door and demanding I make a proper woman of her.  In fact, very likely, the Catholic Church would applaud the whole being married and having a child thing, if we were in fact Catholic. 

Of course, that moment of respite didn’t stop little niggling issues I had with the whole thing. “Wait.  Why the hell would the company that makes these do it so it’s a little minus sign if it’s positive?  Shouldn’t it be a little plus?”

“Because they’re from Wal-Mart and two lines cost more,” she responded.  “But  trust me, yes, it’s positive.”

“Look, I can barely see the blue line.”  I said.  “Maybe it’s… I dunno… marginally positive.  Like, I dunno, it’s not sure if you’re pregnant or just really ill.  A fertilized egg and a virus might look suspiciously similar to it.”

She exhaled one of those heavy exhales I hear more and more often from her as time goes on.  At the rate I hear them, by the time we’re fifty she’ll need a respirator.  “Fine then.  It is a little faint.  I’ll take another one in a few days.”

A few days later, she came downstairs as I was preparing to go to work and showed me another one.  The line was much more noticeable and much more blue this time around.  “See?”

I shook my head.  “Look, these tests are only 98% effective.  That might be a fluke.  And it’s still not a plus sign.  What’s up with that?”

“I’ll go to Planned Parenthood to be sure,” she sighed.

At work that day, I received a text message with a picture attached.  The picture was of a Test Result that listed my Trophy Wife™’s name, stating she was seen and that her pregnancy test result was Positive (they even put in the little plus sign so that I would know they meant positive) , along with an estimated date of delivery.

I called her immediately upon receiving it.  “Are you sure they didn’t mean some other Jessica Hughey?”

She hung up on me.

* * *

I kid, mostly.  Despite the fact that this is my first child and therefore there will be a lot of freaking out on my end, I have actually embraced the idea of having a little one with my Trophy Wife™.  I even lovingly came up with the pseudonym COUCH for our little bundle-of-joy-to-be because we’re more than likely not going to know its gender until the delivery room.   (COUCH stands for Cluster Of Unidentified Cells Hughey).  My Trophy Wife™ at first rolled her eyes at me when I mentioned it, but soon enough she began to get a kick out of the name and now wields it like Conan does his broadsword.

Just yesterday, for instance, after dropping the kids off, she mentioned offhandedly that maybe we ought to stop off and get a milkshake.  I joked that it was the pregnancy talking, and she slowly looked over at me, and with great calm in her voice, intoned, “COUCH demands a sacrifice of milk and ice cream.”

It was adorable, in a slightly sacreligious sort of way.  

I have a feeling the next few months are going to be filled with these little moments.  It’s gonna be an interesting next few months.