YOU’RE WHAT?

THE BEWILDERING JOYS OF THE HALF-PLANNED PREGNANCY

On an unseasonably warm Boston evening last January, I attended my weekly poker game, made what I often characterize as “a short-term charitable donation” to my opponents, and headed out to the car.

I had left my cell phone on the front seat and was surprised to find two messages from my fiancée, Erin, who was out in Southern California finishing up her MFA program. The first message said this: “Hey hon, it’s me. It’s nothing bad, but can you give me a call as soon as you get this message? Like, tonight. I’ll be up.” The second message said the same thing, at a slightly higher frequency.

Erin is a calm person. She is not prone to panicky phone calls, nor, somewhat regrettably, to drunk dialing. I figured maybe she had gotten a short story accepted in a magazine, or perhaps run into someone who hates me.

I looked forward to talking with her, as it would afford me the opportunity to complain about my brilliant play at the poker table, which had, for the 153rd straight week, been undermined by outrageous fortune. You know the deal.

I dialed.

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s me. What’s up?”

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

She started laughing a little.

“Pregnant,” she said.

         

I WILL NOW ATTEMPT to represent my shock. Let each blank line represent 160 volts applied to some tender region of my body, such as the armpit:

         

“Isn’t that crazy?” Erin said.

         

“Honey?”

         

TO CLARIFY THE SITUATION, I had just returned from a visit to Erin. On the morning she drove me to the airport, she had an upset stomach and “spotting,” which she took as a sign her period had arrived. I had not given any thought to pregnancy, mine or hers.

I was more preoccupied by the idea of being—after years of fairly disreputable male behavior—engaged. I should mention that, at the time of her phone call, we’d been engaged for a grand total of four days. I should also mention that we’d just spent the winter break together and that, yes, we’d had unprotected sex a few times.

Then again, Erin was over thirty. I was pushing forty and had smoked the equivalent of a large marijuana tree over the previous decade. Neither of us had ever been, to the best of our knowledge, involved in a conception scenario. We were both pretty sure we were going to have the opposite problem. That’s why Erin had been checking fertility websites all week. In fact, she had gone to the pharmacy intending to purchase an ovulation kit. She had picked up the pregnancy test on a lark.

I DON’T MEAN to imply that I was anything less than tickled to hear her news. I was tickled to a deep, delighted red. I was especially thrilled to have knocked up Erin before we got married, because it seemed like such a bohemian arrangement. I was a writer. It was my job to scandalize polite society. I loved the idea of being, even briefly, a baby daddy.

Erin was delighted, too. The ensuing conversation was characterized by much giggling. We were so pleased, in fact, that we sort of forgot our original plan, which had been to hold off on the pregnancy until we were married and living on the same coast, presumably in the same house. Erin had also wanted a couple of years to work on her writing.

Instead, we had undergone a radical paradigm shift. In the space of a single conversation, we morphed from your-typical-self-absorbed-young-couple-eating-at-swank-restaurants-drinking-too-much-wine-and-fucking-to-the-best-of-our-abilities to parents-in-waiting.

The main thing that had to happen is that we had to make a bunch of decisions, pronto. That was fine with me. I’d spent long enough mucking about in that postadolescent haze known as the Indecisive Thirties. I had spent enough hours pondering paper or plastic, which facial cleanser to purchase, whether to splurge on dessert.

Marriage was the first thing. We had to get married. We had to get married because we didn’t want our child to be a bastard (I am already a bastard) and because we needed family health insurance. Erin had insurance, but it would last only until she graduated. In true starving artist fashion, I did not have health insurance at all. There was also the matter of making sure we were in the same room during the ceremony, which, as I understood things, was standard operating procedure.

I now hatched a plan I felt was ingenious—this should have been the first red flag—we would elope! Yes, we would elope over Spring Break, during one of those beach parties where coeds pantomime performing oral sex on stage!

Or perhaps, more manageably, Erin would fly out to visit me in Somerville and we would get hitched at City Hall.

         

THERE WERE OTHER advantages to this plan, only one of which was that it would save me several thousand dollars, which I had no intention of handing over to the retail racketeering firm known collectively as the Wedding Industry.

Of even greater importance was keeping our relatives far, far away. One of the advantages of being, uh, the technical term is old, is that you have been witness to enough weddings to recognize that they are driven by familial guilt. You tell yourself at the outset that it will be a small ceremony, and before you know it you’re pricing circus tents and crab cakes by the gross.

I was able to convince Erin to go along with this plan. In fact, I was able to convince her that we should keep both the elopement and the baby a secret. My reasoning ran something like this:

• There was a significant risk the pregnancy would not come to term.

• We could break the good news to our friends and family together.

• I was totally freaked out.

I’m not sure I was completely forthright about the last factor.

         

THE FIRST SIGN that Erin’s pregnancy was not going to be easy had already occurred: She had puked.

In those early, heady days, we were almost pleased: This was morning sickness! It meant the hormones were kicking in, that she really and truly was knocked up. We joked! I took to calling her Pukey Pukestein. I suggested she start a band called Pukey Pukestein and the Puke Stains. Ha ha ha!

Over the next month, her morning sickness began a steady green creep across the hours. One evening Erin called me simply to moan into the phone. On another occasion, I would have greeted this turn of events as an erotic invitation. But this moaning was different: anguished, exhausted, not really all that sexy. “Awuahuhhawawuhhh,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

         

IT DIDN’T REALLY SINK in until I saw her a month later, in Santa Fe.

I’d heard all these stories about how horny women get during pregnancy, so I naturally assumed this first rendezvous would be an even randier version of our usual visits, which were enthusiastically carnal in nature. Erin arrived at our very romantic bed-and-breakfast just before midnight. She looked terrifically sexy, her belly already swelling a little.

We hugged. I nestled into her.

“Baby baby baby,” I said.

“Where’s the bathroom?” she said.

“Are you okay?”

Erin smiled queerly and slipped into the bathroom.

“What’s the matter?” I said, through the door. “You want me to come in?”

“No,” she murmured.

I stood, listening to my future wife throw up. A late-night quickie seemed pretty much out of the question.

Erin emerged twenty minutes later, flushed and apologetic.

“Why are you sorry?” I said. “Don’t be sorry.”

“That was disgusting. Could you hear me?”

“I couldn’t hear you.”

“Yes, you could!”

I tried to cheer her up with a naked rendition of Pukey Pukestein’s first and final hit single, “Save the Last Chunk for Me.” This did not work.

Erin had made reservations for us the next day at this Japanese bathhouse place, where, I assumed, we would fuck in a totally hot Buddhist-porno manner. We certainly tried. We tried to fuck in a totally hot Buddhist-porno manner. But Erin still felt sick and we couldn’t find a decent surface. So we settled for some light frottage and green tea instead. And it occurred to me later that evening, as I pressed my unrequited boner into Erin’s slumbering hip region, that her body was no longer exclusively available for my pleasure. It was now engaged in the vigorously disruptive process of gestation.

         

THIS WAS COOL. I could deal with this. It was part of the broader paradigm shift. I needed to recognize that and not be one of those sexually demanding baby daddies constantly banging on the cervix door with the tip of my insatiable johnson.

Because the nausea was really just the beginning, a warning shot over the biological bow. I knew this because of my advanced age. I had lots of married dude friends. I had heard the stories about the long, anguished sex sabbaticals that awaited me. But now here’s the weird thing, the thing I’m not even sure is a good thing: My own sex drive had been dampened by news of the pregnancy.

It’s not that Erin was any less attractive. Pregnancy suited her, accentuated her shape, brought a pale glow to her cheeks. No, it was the idea that her body had more essential business to conduct than the dirty things I had in mind. She was growing an entire person inside her. All those years of hoping and groping and sweet-talking, and what was I after, actually? An ecstatic twinge. A bioemission. It felt kind of paltry.

         

THERE IS MORE to sex than bioemissions, of course. It is an entire language of intimacy, a central pursuit of human happiness. But a bit of psychosexual whiplash was to be expected.

For most of human history, bearing children wasn’t a conscious decision. It was a biological consequence, and, a bit later, a matter of economic import. (It is still this way in most of the world.) Only in the superabundance of the current era has pregnancy become a discretionary matter. But as couples wait longer to get married, as breeding becomes a lifestyle decision rather than a cultural assumption, as women test the age boundaries of fertility, you wind up with more and more folks like us who figure, What the hell, why not let biology decide? Call it the half-planned pregnancy.

Erin and I were well aware of the alternative: months of scheduled intercourse, clinics, procedures, centrifuges, the anxious machinery of the modern babymaking business. If we’d failed to conceive for a few months, we would have been sucked right into that vortex. We knew we’d gotten lucky.

But somehow we didn’t feel so lucky.

Erin didn’t, anyway.

She was supposed to be finishing up grad school, working on her novel, teaching undergrads. But she was nauseous around the clock. She wanted her feet rubbed. Maybe even more than this, she wanted to talk about her pregnancy. It was something neither of us had realized: how entirely absorbed women get by their own pregnancies. How much they need to feel supported and validated and other verbs that men generally don’t get.

The problem was that I was the only person she could talk to—owing to my brilliant notion about not telling anyone our good news until we eloped in March—and I was three thousand miles away.

A typical phone conversation ran something like this:

STEVE:	How’re you doing, baby?
ERIN:	[Unintelligible]
STEVE:	Did you throw up today?
ERIN:	Uh-huh.
STEVE:	How do you feel now?
ERIN:	I want a McDonald’s cheeseburger.
STEVE:	You’re a vegetarian.
ERIN:	I don’t care.
STEVE:	Okay. If that’s what you want, you should get yourself one.
ERIN:	That’s disgusting.
STEVE:	Did you try the ginger ale?
ERIN:	I feel sick.
STEVE:	Remember what Dave said about the ginger ale?
ERIN:	Ginger ale makes me sick.

I DON’T MEAN to suggest that we didn’t have our bright spots.

The sonograms, for instance.

Yes, we had pictures of our fetus! The big head, the delicate sepia bones, the fishy appendages. Our favorite showed the child in profile, nestled in a kind of intrauterine hammock, hands clasped behind its head, feet up. Stone cold chilling in the amniotic crib.

We took to calling the kid Peanut. Peanut Almond. It had a certain ring to it. Erin got to see Peanut in action, too, a live video feed from her tummy. Peanut did a lot of bopping around. Then Peanut fell asleep and Erin had to cough to try to wake the kid up. We also began taking weekly belly photos, so as to track the distension of Erin’s abdomen. By week sixteen, the belly button ring was gone. (I imagined it popping across the room in her sleep.) A few weeks later, her belly button became, after years of pronounced inniedom, an outie. Also: the tits. Wowza. We knew the belly was going to grow; the tits were an added bonus. Two cup sizes in less than two months. After years of feeling flat-chested, Erin now had cleavage. Every now and again, I would catch her staring into the mirror, admiring the goods.

Somewhere in there Erin flew out and we eloped, which went swimmingly, if you don’t count breaking the news to her parents. The next morning, we threw a brunch to tell all our pals. Much gasping. Much cheering. My parents, who had flown out from California for the weekend, had to be peeled off the ceiling for the occasion. Erin immediately began having long, intense conversations about lactation with the various mothers and mothers-to-be in our circle.

So this was good.

Erin (and her astonishing breasts!) returned to California happily married, still queasy but empowered to reveal the divine source of her quease. My mother commenced a long-delayed campaign to purchase every single Baby Gap outfit on earth.

         

ALL PROCEEDED CALMLY for the next three weeks. Then, in the middle of April, the ob-gyn called. Erin assumed the doctor was calling about the nausea, possibly with a cure more effective than ginger ale. Instead, she told Erin that the blood work had come back with abnormally high alpha-fetoprotein levels, which indicated a one in one hundred chance of trisomy.

Erin asked for a translation.

“Trisomy twenty-one corresponds to Down’s syndrome.”

I was not there for this conversation, of course. I can only imagine the dread that must have lurched through Erin, the sudden dimming of our sudden joy.

“Any time the test profiles indicate a probability greater than one in two hundred, we recommend an amniocentesis,” the doctor said. “The best thing would be for you to talk to a genetic counselor.” The doctor also informed Erin that any action she might want to take—to use her chilling, sanitized language—would have to occur by week twenty-four. We were at week eighteen.

         

ONCE AGAIN, WE needed to decide a bunch of stuff in a hurry.

The first thing was whether Erin would have an amnio. The procedure involved plunging a big needle into her belly. Erin was understandably reluctant to have a big needle plunged into her belly. There was also a small but nagging risk of damage to the fetus. Erin felt betrayed. She had thought pregnancy would be this beautiful, glowing experience. Instead, she had retched through her first four months, mostly alone, and now, just into the magical second trimester, the sickness had (perhaps) migrated to her unborn child. It sucked.

And it sucked in that particular way modern medicine sucks, wherein the huge, amazing advances in technology carry with them a corresponding increase in data, contingency, anxiety. As recently as a few decades ago, there were no alpha-fetoprotein triple screens, no sonograms, no genetic counselors. Most of the women of the world, in fact, still experience pregnancy as a process devoid of medical intervention.

I’m not so foolish as to advocate this approach. I know too many moms who have suffered preeclampsia or given birth prematurely, whose lives and babies have been saved by modern medicine. At the same time, the prenatal process has become so micromanaged. From the earliest stages of pregnancy, parents can see their baby and listen to its heartbeat, and all that is terrific fun. But they also spend more and more time fretting over its development and safety.

The modern fascination with the unborn child—a fascination skillfully exploited by the antiabortion movement—proceeds from a peculiarly modern fantasy: that with sufficient precaution we can keep our children safe from all harm.

         

THE FACT REMAINED: Amnio was the only way to know for sure if Peanut had a genetic problem. But did we even want to know? Wasn’t there something unnatural, unseemly even, about preap-proving the child’s genes? What did it say about the limits of our love? That we wanted a child, just so long as he or she wasn’t too much of a burden? Or worse, what if we got a bad result and disagreed about what to do? These were not discussions we wanted to be having while three thousand miles apart. We wanted to be able to touch each other, to shoulder this together.

At the same time—and I know this will sound pretty caddish, but it’s true—being on opposite coasts probably helped us deal with the situation. It forced us to talk our way past the histrionics and self-pity to the real issues: our fear, our sense of indignation, our guilt, and ultimately our desires as parents. We spent a good week chewing on these issues via phone and e-mail. We were perfectly sweet and thoroughly terrified. I kept reminding Erin that the chances were still one in a hundred, that we shouldn’t worry until there was cause. Then we would both spend another hour on the phone worrying.

There’s a tendency, when a possibility like this gets raised, for the couple to feel that they’ve brought on (and secretly deserve) the worst-case scenario. Erin and I had gotten pregnant too easily! We didn’t deserve such happiness! There had to be a catch! This brand of logic is total shite. But it’s also oddly comforting. It grants you a measure of control over fate, which otherwise feels sadistically random.

         

THERE IS NO need to prolong the drama. Erin had the amnio. The procedure was painful, but it also revealed—after a few tense days—that Peanut was healthy. And that Peanut was…a Peanutta. This was our reward for the big scare. From the earliest days of the pregnancy, we had been rooting for a girl. Both of us had been terrorized by older brothers. So: Great relief. Great rejoicing. Which was important, because, as it turned out, my landlord was just about to give me the heave-ho, meaning we had to find a new place to live.

This is another consequence of having been such late bloomers: Everything happens all at once. In three months we: found a home, closed on a home, moved me across town, moved Erin across the country, visited fourteen states, and set perfectly ridiculous deadlines for our books. (I also quit my teaching job, but you already knew that.)

We live now amid a hundred boxes, stunned and sweaty with the onset of August. Erin is well into her final trimester. She has reached the cumbersome phase. Each morning, a bit mournfully, she weighs herself. She is fast approaching what we have come to think of as the “Jack Sprat Parallax,” the point at which she weighs more than I do. We are deep into the particulars of the final trimester: weekly sessions with the ob-gyn, prenatal yoga, birthing classes. We have had several awkward discussions about perineal massage, which, if you didn’t know, is intended to stretch the vaginal tissues so they won’t tear during the child’s expulsion.

Did I mention that these discussions were awkward?

Erin is also being bombarded with birth stories. The four-day labor, the magnesium-drip delirium labor, the emergency breech labor—she has heard them all. She is a good listener, polite to a fault. My sister-in-law recently related the story of her first birth, which involved a day-long home labor, no drugs, and hanging from a tree. Erin has no interest in such heroics. She has already announced her intention to call for Saint Epidural should the need arise.

Another friend showed us her birth video, which included a rather lengthy illustrated disquisition on the configuration and operation of the (bloody) placenta. And yet another friend has brought it to our attention that Erin will likely poop during the birthing process. I have promised to poop in solidarity.

         

DID I FORGET to mention the baby shower?

I did.

Here’s why: because the baby shower strikes me as one of those events invented and largely nurtured by our fake friends on Madison Avenue. It is intended to supply the anxious parents with everything they need to make sure their baby doesn’t die of cold or hunger or diaper rash or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or boredom. But the general result of such gatherings is that the couple winds up with thirty-seven designer outfits from, yes, Baby Gap.

Now, look: I am just as susceptible as the next person to the sight of a little goo-face tricked out in designer togs. But I also happen to view food, shelter, and love as the only real requirements for the successful nurturance of an infant. The rest is just stuff. Some of this stuff is a matter of convenience: baby monitors, aerodynamic strollers, car seats. Most of it—the fancy-schmancy teething elements, the miniature Doc Martens—is retail masturbation. As a child of the gilded age, Peanut is going to get pelted with thousands of buy messages before she can even hold a penny. There’s no reason to accelerate that process.

Thankfully, Erin and I agree on this point. We both believe that Americans would be a lot happier if they bought less and felt more, and we want to make sure we pass these values down to our daughter. At the same time, people want to buy us stuff. So we decided to throw an informal party that we billed as an effort to establish the Peanut Almond Library. Guests were instructed to bring a book, preferably used. Our final haul included forty-plus volumes, along with three adorable outfits, which certain guests insisted on buying for the child (in defiance of our direct orders) and which I plan to burn in a public Death to Capitalism rally when Peanut is old enough to appreciate the gesture.

         

AS I MAY have hinted above, we are both quietly terrified of the actual birth process. Erin worries about the troublesome physics of the thing. She worries that she will never get her old body back. She worries about handling such a small, fragile creature. My central concern, frankly, is that I will lose the undivided adoration of my wife.

And I will. It can’t be avoided.

Sometimes, I walk into our bedroom and find Erin caressing her belly with a cupped palm. There is a look on her face of such contentment that I know I am intruding. Erin has begun the long process of falling in love with our daughter. I will go through a similar process, but let’s be honest: There is nothing on earth to equal Mother Love. If there were, we would have ceased doing business as a species long ago.

I can feel myself getting displaced. And I can feel myself panicking. A few days ago, I picked a fight with Erin over her decision to give her cat some wet food as a treat. Hadn’t we agreed to feed the cat only dry food? Was it really fair to our daughter to lavish such treats on an ungrateful animal? I was disgustingly manipulative and almost comically furious. It drove me crazy to imagine Erin spending any of her attention on the cat. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out the math: I was redirecting my forbidden resentment of my daughter onto the animal. What can I tell you? I am resentful. And frightened. I’m frightened that I’m going to slip to number two in her book.

All fathers suffer this fear. And I’ve seen more than one marriage brought to ruin by it. My own parents nearly came apart under the pressure of their children. So this is what we’ve been dealing with as we wait for Peanut to make her debut. Can I adjust to a lesser role? Will Erin be able to embrace motherhood without feeling too much anxiety? Will we resist the temptation to bicker over who is working harder? Will our hearts expand as required?

Stay calm, stay happy, and the kid will be golden.

That’s the mantra Erin and I keep chanting. We’ve got to bid adieu to our lives as nervous singles, to the flashy armor of our narcissism, to the notion that we will ever be able to control the course of our lives again. In other words, we’re fucked. To feel such unprecedented love runs against the monstrous self-regard of the era. We can hardly wait.