“Yes! I think they live in the townhome right next door.”
“Is that right?”
“How is she? We don’t get down there much because we usually have to rent out the house during the summer. You know, they’re making all kinds of noise about building on the lot next door—”
“HEY!” my wife shouted, pointing at her belly. “Pregnant woman here!”
My father-in-law took umbrage. “We’re just having a nice conversation, Schatz.”
“Will you get out of here already?”
“All right, all right.”
He looked at me and laughed. “Good luck, Drew.” Then he sauntered out of the room, as casual as if he had just gone shopping for groceries.
Finally, after hours of waiting for my wife to ripen, she was ready to push. The nurse took one of her legs and I hoisted the other. We pulled her legs back like she was a turkey waiting to be trussed as a second nurse sat sentry over the precious dilated cervix. She began pushing sometime around midnight. After a few hours of trying to pop the baby out, the thing had barely moved an inch. My wife looked exhausted. Defeated. She was looking for the doctor to finally walk back into the room (they don’t have to be there for all of the pushing; doctors are just closers) so that she could end the charade of trying to have the child naturally. At this point, she wanted sleep and a cold ginger ale more than she wanted a second child. The doctor came back in, examined the crown of the baby’s head, and offered my wife two options.
“Okay, so this baby isn’t coming out,” he told her. “And I see his heart rate dropping. So we can keep at this pushing for a bit, or we can—”
That was all the opening she needed. “CAESARIAN!”
“Are you sure?”
“Please. Just get this thing out.”
They handed me a set of surgical scrubs, which I put on with glee because I love pretending to be a doctor. Then the nurse told me I had to gather up all of our stuff because we weren’t coming back to the room. I looked around. There was a lot of shit. I didn’t want to move. I hate moving. This was our home now.
“Can’t I just leave it here for a second?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not,” the nurse said.
“Well, where do I put it? Is there, like, a bus station locker somewhere?”
“They’ll have a place for you to put your things in the recovery room.”
I threw all of our belongings into six different hospital-issued garbage bags and then huffed alongside my wife like a homeless person as they rolled her gurney roughly ten feet to the OR. I was expecting a much longer walk, a walk long enough for me to make some kind of rousing speech about the beauty of this moment to a woman who was half-conscious. Instead, the OR was right there, which makes perfect sense from a medical standpoint, though not from a dramatic one. The recovery room nurse told me to place my bags on a nearby chair, and I begged her reassurance that no one would come and steal my wallet while my wife was being slashed open.
They put a shower cap on my wife’s head and drew a curtain across the top of her stomach. The nurse told me not to go past the curtain, and I obeyed the hell out of her. A team of doctors gathered at her feet and the sounds began. I could hear gooshing and gurgling and all kinds of horrible noises. Not being able to look beyond the curtain only made things worse because it allowed my imagination to roam free, with scythes and ice cream scoops digging into my wife’s body.
“Do you have the baby?” I asked the doctor.
“Not yet. Sometimes, once the incision is opened, they hide.”
And I thought, Where is there to hide? It’s not like a uterus has a supply closet. I looked down at my wife and she was fighting to stay awake so that she could witness the birth.
“I’m gonna be sick,” she told me. The nurse handed me one of those plastic hospital basins shaped like a kidney bean to place near her mouth and she drooled bile into it. She began crying, the tears pooling along the bottom ridge of her glasses’ lenses.
“This is so awful, Drew.”
“You’re doing great. It’s all gonna be over soon.”
“It’s horrible. I can feel them reaching in.”
“It’ll all be over soon and we’ll have a beautiful son and you won’t remember any of this. Not the waiting. Not the Cervidil. Not the monitors. Not even this hospital. Please, just hang on.”
“I love you.”
“I love you so much, just please hang on. I swear to you it’ll be okay.”
Dr. Kleinbaum yanked the baby out and held him over the curtain, like this was some kind of puppet show.
“You did it!” I screamed to my wife. “You fucking did it!”
She gave the baby a kiss. “I’m going to pass out now.”