So Alicia became the next phase. And then puppies. And then secret agents. And then some other thing. I’ve lost track at this point. We never went to Miss Rhonda’s class again.
On a shelf in our basement, we still have all the remnants of her infatuations: Charlotte the bus, the dresses, a toy car wash my brother-in-law constructed for her. Each group of toys represents a phase in the girl’s life that she’ll never repeat, a person she’ll never be again. Sometimes I miss those versions of her. Sometimes I have to fight the urge to listen to some dwarf song while I’m working because I want to get a whiff of the memory because the memory is the only real connection you have to that version of the child. Even a photo is hopelessly inadequate. I look at the photos now and find it hard to believe those phases ever existed. I need something tangible to unearth the feeling: a song, a dress, a magic wand, whatever. In my head, sometimes I can hear that choir at the end of Snow White still singing, and I can see the girl lying stone-dead on our couch. I miss seeing her like that. I miss having the chance to save her.
CAESARIAN
My wife and I agreed that we needed to have a second child because an only child is 90 percent more likely to have an imaginary friend who wants to murder you in your sleep. Besides, our daughter was getting older now and my wife wanted her to have a “friend” in the house, as much as a two-year-old can be friends with a baby that doesn’t do anything but sleep and cry.
It took a year for us to conceive our second child. This is a common ordeal for the average middle-class American couple that puts off having children until their thirties. We knew so many other couples that had experienced fertility problems and miscarriages that it was more surprising when someone we knew had a child without being consigned to thirty-eight consecutive weeks of bed rest. Turns out God WANTS you to conceive when you’re eighteen years old, apparently so that you can spend your twenties miserable and penniless and living in a camper.
Months passed and our frustration over failing to have a second child grew more acute. Every new period that arrived felt like a horrible defeat. All that hot sex for nothing! My wife asked me to go to a urologist and he told me that, when trying to have a baby, the male should only orgasm once every three days, in order to build up a hefty payload. You really wanna saturate the woman’s reproductive area, like it’s an Iowa floodplain. I tried holding out for three days at a time. It was not easy. By the second day of the abstinence cycle, I was ready to hump a mailbox.
Sometimes my wife’s cycle would arrive a week late and we’d cross our fingers and hope that the pregnancy had taken root, getting our hopes up higher and higher the further we got away from the cycle date. Then the period would drop and the entire project would be reset. I felt like I was raking up a pile of leaves only to have the wind blow them all away. The process became torturous—the idea of a second baby finally arriving seemed so far away that I felt as if we would never get to it. We wanted every failed pregnancy test to be a mistake. Hey, it came from Target. Just how reliable could it be? Of course, the second we finally got a positive, we took the exact opposite stance. Hey, it came from Target. It can’t possibly be wrong!
So it took a while to finally break into the bank vault and get my wife successfully pregnant again. By the time I got her to the hospital to be induced, we had essentially been waiting for the boy to arrive for twenty-one months. My wife didn’t feel like waiting one second longer.
The nurse came into my wife’s hospital room to check her cervix. It needed to be dilated to ten centimeters before she could start pushing the boy out. It was not at ten centimeters. It wasn’t even close.
“We’re gonna have to apply Cervidil,” she told us. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the drug Cervidil, it is—according to its own website—a “vaginal insert for cervical ripening,” which I think you’ll agree makes a woman’s cervix sound delicious. Cervidil must be applied directly to the cervix, which is akin to someone trying to jam a thumbtack into the back of your throat using a boxing glove. The nurse began the application.
“OH JESUS CHRIST!” my wife screamed.
“Almost there,” the nurse noted.