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.