We had a hard time. That’s okay. A lot of people have a hard time. It’s the cruel joke of wannabe parenthood: you spend your teenage years—probably your early twenties and maybe much more than that—nervous at the prospect of accidentally conceiving a child, and then, when you really want one, it proves to be agonizingly difficult. Like, it’s at least ten times harder than finding a healthy salad at the airport. (That airport Cobb salad is not healthy—come on!)
If you are one of those people who was able to have a child immediately—all you had to do was think about children and there they were, hiding peanut butter crackers in the cracks of the sofa—congratulations. I salute your fertility and your fortune, and envy you. May you have eighteen children, enough to field your own World Series.
It was not that way for Bessie and me. We knew we wanted to have kids; there wasn’t any hesitation about that. I had nothing left to add to the New York nightlife scene; by my mid-thirties, I was essentially a puttering ninety-nine-year-old man. For a while we tried the old-fashioned way, which is exciting—like removing the restrictor plates in a NASCAR race, which may or may not be the first time you’ve heard baby-making compared to NASCAR. But it wasn’t working. It didn’t work for so long that we decided to go to our doctors and solicit their professional medical opinions.
My man doctor worked in a second-floor office overlooking a park where people walked small dogs and fell asleep on benches after their morning methadone. He was tall and European and, like me, a huge cycling fan. We spent a little bit of time talking about my cancer history and a lot more time talking about the Tour de France. Lance Armstrong had just had a new child with a new girlfriend, which puzzled my doctor, who had been under the mistaken impression that chemo had rendered Armstrong sterile and he couldn’t have any more kids.
“If you see him,” he said, “you should find out how this is possible.”
I told him I would see what I could do.
“Please ask,” he said.
He called with my results a week later.
“Very low.”
Say that again?
“You are not sterile, but you are very low,” he said. “Very low. Your chances are basically—”
Yeah, yeah, I got it. The odds of Bessie and me conceiving naturally were around that of a Cleveland Browns Super Bowl. We were going to need help. I did have one bit of good fortune: that banked sperm. It was living in a little brownstone building on East 31st St. For many years I had sent a rent check to let my sperm live in a freezer without room service or HBO.
Bessie and I were about to enter the magical, wildly expensive, and often very frustrating world of fertility medicine. It was a three-year journey that would take us from a basement office on the upper Upper East Side of Manhattan to a “family center” in Brooklyn which felt as family-centered as a tire repair store, and finally to a clinic at New York University. Along the way there would be a lot of consultations, shots, pills, tests, failures, tears, and hours upon hours of loitering in waiting rooms. Parenthood was not assured. But I would read an astonishing number of New Yorkers and Sports Illustrateds.
I need to double-underline that this experience was approximately 100,000 times harder for Bessie than for me. She was the person absorbing the shots, taking the pills, making her confused body boil and rage. I just had to be the knucklehead with the needle. I took my knucklehead needle job seriously, however. When we began trying in vitro fertilization (IVF), there was a climactic shot called the hCG shot. The needle looked like something you’d use to put down a panther at the mall, and it had to be mixed together correctly and delivered at a very specific time. Bessie would lie down nervously in the living room and I’d sit over her—you may recall John Travolta hovering over Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction—with Bessie begging me to count it down—5, 4, 3, 2, 1—before plunging in. One time I hit a vein and the needle shot back out, blood splattering over me. We both screamed, and I had to do the whole deal all over again—new needle, new shot, new 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Happens all the time, the nurse said later.
I kept telling myself that if these shots had to be delivered precisely and perfectly, there was no way they would give it to a knucklehead to try at home. But the process would stress us in ways we’d never been stressed. And it was exhausting and costly. It sounds tacky to talk about—how can you talk about money when potential parenthood is on the line?—but it’s always a hurdle, in the back of your mind. How can it not be? Every IVF treatment costs about the price of a lightly used Honda. I don’t want to talk specific amounts, but know that now I own several lightly used nonexistent Hondas.
A cruel razor of fertility treatment is that it’s pass/fail. There is no moral victory. It works or it doesn’t. There are, of course, people who get pregnant on the first try. We were not those people. We would raise our hopes, and it would crush us again and again. You begin to distrust the whole ritual. You turn away from science. One day I went into a religious gift store not far from our apartment, explained my situation, and bought candles. It was very comforting how seriously they took this request—as if lighting a candle to deliver a baby made perfect, rational sense. We lit the candles before every test we took. We were paying for the cutting edge, and we were down to the candles.
We got numb to the failures and began to close the door. We couldn’t admit that to each other—it was so raw and unthinkable—but we confronted the reality privately by ourselves. Some couples just don’t get pregnant. It was okay. We began to consider other options, like adoption. This was a long and complicated process too, but it could be just as rewarding.
In the lowest times, we realized how much we wanted this. The ambivalence that had lingered into our thirties was long gone. It got hard to walk around the neighborhood—we’d walk 100 yards to the bakery and pass a dozen happy couples pushing strollers, and it was quietly heartbreaking.
Exhausted with IVF, ready to move on, we went in for one last try. One final, beautiful, hopeful lightly used Honda. It was shortly on the heels of a failed attempt, and frankly, this time we just went through the motions. There was none of the intensity of before. No 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Just get it done, Bessie would say, lying on the couch.
We knew better than to get our hopes up. And we were in the car on our way to what we thought would be the world’s loneliest couple’s vacation when we got a call from the doctor’s office. Bessie was afraid to pick up the phone. She’d had enough bad news from that number. When she picked up, she listened for a moment and then gasped. She put her phone on speaker and asked the nurse to say it again.
You are pregnant.
Say it again.
Pregnant.
And then we both started to cry.
It is more than three years later and Jesse is here and so is Josie—also an IVF production, this time considerably less stressful—and yes, we have lost all perspective from those low moments. We get overwhelmed and frustrated with our kids like anyone else. We chase Jesse in the store, we struggle when he hurls his breakfast on the floor, we shake our heads when he throws a screaming tantrum because we won’t let him drink the water in the humidifier. It’s not like we say, Well, Jesse, we were considering giving you a time-out, but we remember full well the nights when we lost all those embryos and we never thought you were possible. Nah. It’s still hard, exhausting, and the peanut butter crackers in the sofa are no joke.
When the kids are asleep? That’s when I feel it. I’ll be walking down the hallway to our bedroom and I’ll have my mind on something dumb like a basketball score or some nonsense from work and I will pass their little room. For a long time it was this sad unused room that we never were quite sure what to do with. Is it an office? A guest room? A storage room for unnecessary crap? I used to ride a stationary bike in that room. That was never what that room was for.
That’s going to be the baby’s room, we would say. But there were a lot of long gray months and years when it belonged to nobody.
Now it’s getting late, and as I pass by, I sense the kids, new and thrilling, still a joyful mystery.
That room belongs to somebody.
That’s when I know how fortunate we are.
★ Yes! We are in our early days here. Chapter One. Maybe Chapter One and a Half. We haven’t even got the car out of the driveway. If you are a parent of vast experience, you are permitted to laugh at me here. I know you are laughing at me. You look upon me with a mixture of pity and wonder: You really have no idea. And it’s true: I have no idea. Well, I have some idea, but not enough of an idea to consider myself anywhere close to an authority. My brother, whose daughter is on the verge of her teens, treats me like I’m still in the first season of Breaking Bad. Wait until Season 4, he says, when it takes your kid two hours to dress before school. And of course there are parents with kids older than his kid who are warning him about high school and boyfriends and Snapchat. That’s the thing about being a parent: there’s always somebody a little bit further down the path, chuckling about your impending doom. You can be the parents of a fifty-eight-year-old, and parents of sixty-year-olds will be like, Oh, man, fifty-eight is a walk in the park compared to sixty! Wait until your sixty-year-old steals your back brace.
★ I’m scared by this new era of hyperjudgmental overparenting—you’re supposed to raise children this way, not that way, and in French or Mandarin, and organic-only, farm-to-table, gender-neutral, pasteurized—or is it unpasteurized? I’m not sure. Fresh advice arrives almost daily, unsolicited. Your child is not supposed to have soda or sugar or pants that contain polyester fibers until he or she is thirty-seven. You should be enrolling in prekindergarten in the second trimester and Swedish summer camp in the third trimester. By ten months the child should be able to walk, subscribe to the New York Review of Books, and play the oboe. If your children cannot do these things, they will wind up a stowaway on a barge. New York is abundant with this kind of obsessive parenting culture—it gets amplified by magazines and newspapers, which love nothing better than to prey upon the insecurities of new moms and dads, who then become paranoid that they’re failing if their four-year-old can’t name all the justices on the Supreme Court or pronounce “mise-en-scène.”
★ I refuse to join this ridiculousness. There are plenty of things I worry about with my kids—I hope they stay healthy; I want them to go outside and run around as much as possible; I am terrified they’ll become Jets fans, and I will move my family to the Maldives to prevent it—but parenting has made me a lot less judgmental. I have no idea what I’m doing. Who am I to judge? I empathize with any mom or dad trying to have an honest go at the job. Unshaven dad chasing his kids in Whole Foods while wearing sweatpants and Crocs? I feel I know you. I am you. When I see a parent trying to alleviate a child’s tantrum, all I think is, That could be MY child’s tantrum, and no offense, but I am very happy it is instead YOUR child’s tantrum. I have no urge to give that parent unsolicited advice. I want to give that parent a beer. Or three beers.
★ All the time you hear people say, “Oh so-and-so, she makes parenting look so easy.” And I think here the operative word is “look.” There are people who are capable of making parenting look graceful, even glamorous or stylish, and of course there are people fortunate enough to have armies of nannies and tennis coaches and baby stylists (what, you don’t have a baby stylist?). But mostly I think easy parenting is a mirage. Parenting is brutal at times for everybody. The nerves fray for everyone. The handbook becomes useless. Improvisation takes over. When it starts to go sideways, I find it helpful to imagine I’m in a Marx Brothers movie in which nothing will ever go according to plan. You will bathe your child, dress your child, get your child fully ready to go out the door on a cold winter morning—it’s like preparing a 201-year-old man for a space walk—and right as you are ready to step out that door, he will squeeze a tube of yogurt on his head. And then you have to undo everything and start all over again. I’ve learned to embrace this randomness, because it’s not random at all. It’s the gig.
★ Your own parents, of course, are a reservoir of extremely useful and slightly dated parenting advice. Raising you was almost surely a very different experience for your parents. They were probably younger, fitter, more energetic. Back then, in olden days, parenting was less expensive, less obsessive, less manic. Your mother was not Googling ergonomic baby shoes at 2:00 A.M. Being a new mom or dad was viewed as a normal human passage, not extraordinary life theater. Parents back then smoked, let their kids sleep on their stomachs, ride in the front of the car. My brother and I always tell ourselves our parents had it easy. All Mom and Dad had to do was dump us out into the yard! When they wanted us to come home, they just yelled from the back porch! We took care of ourselves! This is partly true but mostly our own inane foggy recollection. Of course it was hard. Of course it was anxious. Years have a way of sanding off the rough edges and softening the hard times. My mom talks about us having chicken pox as if it were some hilarious cocktail party she went to.
★ Grandparenting is quite a different deal from parenting. It’s the difference between being a journeyman starter and a well-paid left-handed relief pitcher. At this point in her life, my mom is not going to come down and take care of the kids for three weeks. Nana can come in and face two batters. Jesse and Josie love it. I love it too. But there are some helpful guidelines. Early on, my brother offered this advice: When you entrust the child to a grandparent, you have to relinquish all control. And this means everything. You can’t worry about Grandma or Grandpa doing it the way you do it. Grandma may attempt to find organic crackers at the truck stop, but if those don’t work, it’s straight to the sour cream and onion Pringles. Grandma might not let the toddler watch more than ten minutes of TV, or she might let him watch There’s Something About Mary in its entirety. It’s okay. If you don’t want your kid to eat Oreos for a midnight snack, don’t give your kid a grandparent.
★ People will tell you that parenthood is a leveler, and that is true. It is common ground between you and people who in no way resemble you. I have discussed parenthood with my mother and my mother-in-law and with Guy, my wise, cigar-smoking neighbor, and, because of my job, with Roger Federer and Beyoncé (the latter as Beyoncé’s baby, Blue, cried in the background). Beyoncé’s bodyguard even recommended a stroller to me. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say he recommended it, but he really talked that thing up. It was curvy and tall and resembled a hotel in Dubai. I went home and told my wife that we should get this stroller because Beyoncé’s bodyguard had recommended it, and she looked at me as if I were wearing a Big Bird costume. I had visions of pushing this stroller around the neighborhood, and when we invariably got into conversations about the relative merits of contemporary baby strollers, I would mention—casually, of course—that we’d purchased this stroller on the recommendation of Beyoncé’s bodyguard. After a few weeks I would have probably just shortened “Beyoncé’s bodyguard” to “Beyoncé.”
★ We did not get that stroller. It cost about $1,000 and weighed as much as a grizzly bear.
★ I live in a neighborhood infested with children—they’re crawling out of the cracks in the sidewalk, demanding vegan ice cream sandwiches—and every once in a while there’s a revolt: a neighborhood bar, frustrated with $8 tabs and picking up chewed popcorn from the floor, gets huffy and declares that kids aren’t welcome anymore. I understand the backlash. If I am twenty-four and having twenty-four-year-old cool times, I do not want to look over at a bunch of flabby dads sharing pretzels with their toddlers and asking them if they “made a stinky.” But is this really an epidemic? Can’t everyone time-share the bar? Let’s be clear: nothing that thrilling ever happens in a bar before nine o’clock. By then kids—and their parents—are long gone. If you are single and in a bar at 3:45 P.M. you have bigger issues than my kid coloring a Dr. Seuss coloring book next to you. Also, please pass the crayons.
★ Before I had children, I was always mystified by a classic, perennial human-interest story: the pesky toddler who somehow manages to wedge him- or herself inside a crane game at the arcade. You know the kind of game I am talking about: those games in which you put in fifty cents and try to move a flimsy metal crane around and pick up a candy bar or a rainbow-colored bear worth about eight and a half cents. Every now and again a small child somewhere somehow wedges himself or herself up through the delivery chute and crawls into the game, suddenly trapped behind glass, amid the bears and candy bars. It happens surprisingly often, and it’s the kind of story local news stations and the Internet go bonkers about. And I used to think, How the hell did that happen? What is wrong with that child’s parents? Today, as a parent, I can totally see how it happens. My toddler’s main ambition in life is to get into things he’s not supposed to get into. He sees that arcade machine as a glorious challenge. Nothing would make him happier than getting inside it. It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more. This is the essence of parenting, right? Stop your kid from getting into the crane game.
★ At the moment we are in the “can’t go out to dinner” portion of parenthood. The baby, Josie, is easy—you can take a baby to a three-star Michelin restaurant and drop a champagne bottle on the floor, and that lump will just lie there in a basket and snooze away. Toddlers, nope—no way. With Jesse we try to get away with it—enough time passes that we think, Okay, maybe we can pull it off—but taking him out to eat is like walking into a dining room and opening a mesh bag full of vampire bats. Chaos instantly. We make adjustments: we feed him a little before, we order before we sit, we ask for the check to come before the entrées. Doesn’t matter. Within moments he is running around the restaurant, taking his fork to strangers’ meals.
★ My wife and I have occasional gentle disagreements about food. My wife is adamant about giving the child the best food—organic only, if possible, avoiding the processed junk and fast food that is a staple of the American diet. I agree with this mission 100 percent. I also believe the child can have a hot dog without turning into a serial killer. (Not a street-cart hot dog. Don’t be crazy—those completely turn you into a serial killer.) I also plan one day to open a chain of kid-friendly restaurants called Family Trough, in which the whole clan can eat soup, nachos, and whole apples facedown in a rectangular trough you can take home with you if you don’t finish.
★ Embrace the hand-me-down. Before we had kids, I had an aversion to the idea of hand-me-downs. I was too focused on the me-down part. I obnoxiously thought Jesse’s fashion style needed to be built from the ground up, with no prior influences and certainly no pre-barfed-upon Ramones T-shirts. My wife wisely overruled my stupidity and collected as many hand-me-downs as possible. I realized this was the proper move within forty-eight hours of Jesse’s birth. When you see the exciting materials that come out of a small child, you realize you don’t want to own any piece of clothing that costs more than a hot pretzel.
★ Of course, in a moment of affection you may vacate your senses and buy insane fashion wear for your kid. Not long after Jesse was born, we bought him a pair of jeans that I think cost more than my rent did in college. It was wasteful and mortifying, and I’m turning red as I type this. But you had to see these jeans. Cute little French shop (of course) in Manhattan (of course), and my wife and I were having one of those weekend walks in which our family felt the way families look in Tommy Hilfiger ads. Jesse was being such a good boy, so much that we wanted to reward him, which he didn’t ask for or need, of course, but it was this perfect autumn day, and when we walked into the French baby clothes store, Bessie saw this adorable pair of jeans that could fit nicely on Kermit the Frog. The price was more than either of us had ever spent on jeans, for ourselves, as adults, and surely we could have walked up the street, like, two blocks and found baby jeans that were basically 97 percent as good for, say, ten bucks. (I feel like I am confessing to a murder.) And now Bessie is seeing the ridiculousness of it, saying, “This is too much to spend” and folding up the adorable baby jeans, but suddenly I am bolting past her and throwing down the credit card for those jeans. And they turned out to be pretty adorable. I regret nothing.
★ I have no idea where those jeans are now.
★ Not long ago I took Jesse to see some of my old bike friends at a bike race. I was carrying him around and I ran into my friend Kenny, who is in his fifties and one of the better bike racers in town. The last of Kenny’s kids had just graduated from college—someplace fancy, like Dartmouth. The kids were out of the house. The crazy parenting highway that I just started on was suddenly wide open to Kenny. He could do just whatever. On weekends he could sleep until ten. He could just linger in restaurants for hours upon hours. He could go on bike rides twice a day. But when Kenny saw me with Jesse, he walked up and asked, “Can I hold him for a second?” He took Jesse and his twenty-five or so pounds and he pressed him close and gave him this long hug and brushed a hand through his hair. I thought Kenny was going to tear up. And after a while he said, “You know how much I have missed this? You have no idea how you are going to miss that one day.”
★ It was beautiful. And yes, I was hoping that Jesse would poop so we could find out how much Kenny missed that.