“By all means.”
And pass out she did. Once the baby pops out, you assume that’s the end of it, that they stitch Mommy up in five seconds and you go about your merry way. But in reality, a C-section is major surgery, which means layers upon layers of dermis and subcutaneous tissue must be repaired, the stitches made only after the placenta and the amniotic fluid have been removed. My wife slept in relative peace while I sat there, watching the silhouettes move ominously to and fro on the other side of the curtain and hearing the awful sounds of a medical vacuum sucking up the afterbirth.
“Are you guys almost done?” I asked.
“Not quite,” said the doctor. “We have to massage her uterus back into place from the inside.”
“Oh Jesus, don’t tell me that.”
I could see the doctor on the other side of the curtain laboring feverishly, as if he were mining for coal. Meanwhile, the baby was over in the corner of the room, having his vitals checked and his umbilical cord snipped (they don’t allow the father to snip the umbilical after a Caesarian for reasons of sterilization). He was perfect—a real live being created out of virtually nothing. He was much better off than my wife or me, frankly. No mixed-up intestines for our second kid; only our third one would get to experience that particular thrill. They started to wheel him away to the nursery while my wife was still being stitched up. The nurse asked me if I wanted to leave her to go with my son, and suddenly I felt as if I was being torn between loyalties. My poor wife was still a piece of meat lying on a cold surgical table. But you only get to be there for the first few moments of the child’s life once.
I went with the baby. I bathed him and changed him and swaddled him under a warm light in the nursery. Eventually, he fell asleep and the nurse encouraged me to go to the postpartum recovery room to do likewise.
I staggered out into the hallway. It was later in the morning now. My son happened to be born the day the president was being inaugurated. I dragged my body through the maternity ward as nurses and doctors and patients in wheelchairs gathered around every available TV set to watch the ceremony. I walked past all of it oblivious to the moment, like a caveman who had just woken up after being frozen in ice.
Inside the room, there was a little loveseat that pulled out for fathers to sleep on, and for thirty minutes I sank into a sleep so dark and black, I felt as if I could never be pulled out of it. There are many memorable things about watching a child being born, but what sticks with you the most is the exhaustion—the toll of the process, for both you and your wife (your wife more so), from conception all the way to delivery. It’s the sense that you will never find yourself more physically or emotionally drained. It’s almost as if God planned it that way. It’s almost as if He designed it so that you won’t be surprised when you find yourself running on empty for the next two decades.
EVENING AT THE IMPROV
The hardest part of giving a kid a bath is getting the kid into the bath. When my daughter was a baby, we could just throw her in the sink against her will and wash her like she was a saucepan. But as she learned to walk and talk and developed working muscles, getting her in the bath became more and more difficult. I had to find a way to get her to want to take a bath, which meant offering bribes or threatening punishment, often in tandem. You’ll get candy, or you’ll never get candy again.
Then, one night, I figured out a third technique. I went up to her while she was playing downstairs and told her the exciting news.
“Mommy bought you something at Target today!”
“She did?”
“Uh-huh. But it’s upstairs. Let’s go upstairs to see it!”
She flew up the stairs and I quickly closed the baby gate at the top of the steps behind her so that she couldn’t get back down. The girl was three years old now, but the nuances of opening a baby gate were still a mystery to her. You had to push down on the tab while simultaneously lifting the gate up, and I deliberately used my body to shield my hand every time I opened it so that she wouldn’t learn the technique. It was the only thing I still had over her.
“You closed the gate!” she wailed.
“I know. That’s because it’s . . . BATHTIME! BATHTIME BATHTIME BATHTIME!”
“Noooooo! I don’t wanna take a bath! You tricked me!”
She grabbed the bars on the gate and rattled them like a caged prisoner.
“Sweetheart, I tricked you because I love you,” I said, “and because there’s yogurt in your hair.”
“Did Mom get me anything?”
“Oh, yeah, she got you some underwear.”
“I DON’T LIKE UNDERWEAR!”
“Well, I thought the underwear was exciting. My mistake. Let’s hop in the bath now.”
“NO!”
“Umm . . . please?”
“NO!”
Then I had an idea.
“We could tell jokes,” I said.
“Jokes?”