Before the malrotation, before the phone call from the operating room to let us know if our new son was going to live, there were the arguments for and against a third child. Having a third child means you should never again expect the world to sympathize with you. Even people with two kids deserve some compassion because until you have two children, you have no idea how big a pain in the ass two kids are. You think it’s going to be double the work, but it’s not. It’s four times the work because you’re managing both the kids and the complex relationship between them, which is exhausting. The burden grows exponentially. That’s two children ruining your pizza instead of just one.
People with four or more kids are crazy people who belong in jail, but three edges between being dedicated to family and being a glutton for punishment. I was never 100 percent into the idea. While we were in the trying-to- conceive stage, my wife would tell me to get away from the microwave whenever I heated my leftovers so that my testicles wouldn’t get bombarded with a dash of extra radiation. But sometimes, I would stand in front of it anyway.
“Get away from there!” she said once.
“Are you sure? Because, you know, we’ve got two nice kids. Tempting to quit while we’re ahead, no?”
“I know. I know it’s not the easiest decision. But seriously, stop cooking your balls.”
So we knew three kids would be a world of shit going in. But after a while, we deluded ourselves into thinking it would be relatively easy. We were veterans of the birthing process. The wife would go to the hospital, get C-sectioned real good, and we’d be all set to go. That’s one of the perks of having extra kids. You get to walk into that hospital acting like you own the place. You get to sneer at all the newbie parents who have no idea where the delivery ward is. There are no surprises waiting for you.
Except when your wife begins contracting at seven months and needs to be rushed to the hospital for early delivery. Except when they bring out fancy new high-resolution ultrasound machines that look ready to transform back into Optimus Prime at any moment, machines that end up detecting certain “abnormalities” in the fetus. Except when a team of doctors including an ob-gyn and a high-risk fetal specialist comes in to explain to you and your wife that your son might have some kind of genetic hiccup, and then the specialist proceeds to hop onto Wikipedia in front of you because she knows so little about the condition she thinks your son might have.
We were in the antepartum unit when they told us about the fetus. His head was too big. His tongue was too big. The openings to his kidneys were dilated. They feared that he might have a genetic defect classified as an overgrowth syndrome—a suite of conditions with possible symptoms that range from the benign (you have a big head) to the severe (you are mentally retarded).
The ob-gyn suggested we might want to hold off on tying my wife’s tubes during the C-section in case anything happened to the child and we wanted to try to have another one to replace it. There was no warning for any of this. A new and far more difficult future was suddenly THERE, eating us up and spitting us back out.
“I know this is a lot to absorb,” said the ob-gyn. “We’re going to leave now so you two can talk about it in private.”
When the doctors left, my wife burst into tears.
“I wasn’t ready for that,” she said.
“Neither was I.” I knelt by the hospital bed and gripped her hand. “But this is not the end,” I told her. “It’s not. Don’t think this is the end. There’s so much more of this life and so much of it will be good, I promise you. There will still be graduations and Christmases and weddings and everything that’s wonderful, everything that’s so much better than this. I swear it.”
“I saw his face on the ultrasound. He was beautiful.”
“This is not the end.” And I wanted to believe that. I hoped that, through the hot tubs and giant amusement park mousetraps and late-night arrests, perhaps we were trained for this exact moment, that we had enough strength and love to make it through the birth, the interminable wait for test results, the surgery, and the phone call. That phone call.
? ? ?
The baby had survived so much up to that point. He was delivered seven weeks early, but he could breathe. His eyes and heart and kidneys were all functioning properly. At one point, a neonatologist who never removed her surgical mask told me that the baby’s brain scan had come back negative. He wasn’t going to be mentally handicapped. He would be able to talk and think and learn just like his brother and sister could. I wept tears of joy in front of the doctor. She patted my arm gently and scurried away.
The baby had served nine days in the NICU so far with little complaint. But now came this. Now came the disembowelment.
I took the phone from the receptionist, and as I put it to my ear, I had a split second to imagine what it would be like if the surgical assistant told me that the baby’s digestive system was compromised. That the baby would die. And the vision seemed so possible that I felt as if it were now inevitable. I prepared myself to deal with it. This was meant to be. He was meant to live this long and no longer, and I will not spend the rest of my life bitter. I will not pine for some imaginary little boy with perfectly arranged insides who has the ability to live for eighty years because that’s not who this boy was. He was meant to be dead. Please, God, don’t let him be meant to be dead.
“Mr. Magary?”