My father—who if his own name weren’t Bob probably wouldn’t be able to spell that—filled out the birth certificate while my mother was sleeping off the drugs they used to give women to spare them the horrific childbirth experience.
That, of course, was back in the Bad Old Days when they didn’t realize that the fetus was being drugged as well—otherwise known as the Good Old Days, when nobody was the wiser and nobody was feeling any pain.
I always figured that when it was time for me to give birth, I’d want those same drugs.
Am I a wimp? you might ask.
Um, yeah. I’ve never been good with pain—I’m the first to admit it. I stub my toe; I scream. I get a sliver; I cry. I see blood; I faint.
By the time I got pregnant, I had heard enough gory details from my friends to know that it would be in everyone’s best interest if I were knocked out before I reached the stage where it was a toss-up whether to call in the obstetrician or an exorcist.
I envisioned drifting off to a medically induced la-la land, waking up feeling refreshed, and having somebody hand me a pretty, pink newborn, even if my husband spelled its name wrong while I was out.
Alas, that wasn’t to be.
For one thing, we knew that our firstborn son would be named after my husband, who is conveniently familiar with the spelling of Mike.
For another, when—about five minutes into my first pregnancy—I asked my doctor about drugs, he recommended a childbirth class where I would learn to use breathing and imagery to control the pain. Call me jaded, but I didn’t see then and I don’t see now how huffing and counting and focusing on a flickering candle or, God help me, a favorite stuffed animal, can possibly make you forget the nine pounds of wriggling human forcing its way out of you the same way it got into you nine months—and nine pounds—ago.
As the scientific theory goes, what goes in must come out. Eventually. Somehow. And the coming-out part is never as much fun as the going-in part.
Whose scientific theory is that? you might ask.
It’s mine. And you should trust me, because I’m an expert.
If you’ve ever eaten all your Halloween candy before the calendar page turned to November—or if you’ve ever done too many shots of tequila on your birthday—then you’re an expert, too.
But if you can’t relate to childbirth or vomiting up a pound of chocolate or a pint of hard liquor, think about this: back when Mike and I were first married, he and my father carried our new couch up two flights of stairs to our one-bedroom apartment in Queens. When we moved a few years later, the movers we hired couldn’t get the couch out. No matter which way they turned it, they couldn’t make it fit through the doorway. They finally told me that the only way to get it out was to remove one of the legs.
Now, normally, I don’t balk at being the decision maker in our marriage. But, normally, strange men don’t request a saw to disfigure our furniture.
I tried to reach Mike at work to see what he wanted me to do—in other words, to ask his permission for the couch amputation—but he wasn’t there.
So the movers sawed off a leg; the couch fit through the door; they moved it to our new house up in Westchester.
When Mike arrived that night, fresh—not!—from his first train commute and ready to collapse, he immediately noticed that the surface he was about to collapse onto was tilting dangerously.
I explained what happened.
He was incredulous.
Okay, not just incredulous. He was other things, too. Including royally pissed off. Now that I’ve had almost a decade of enlightenment regarding Mike’s daily commute to the city, I can attribute his fury that night, at least in part, to an hour spent on an un-air-conditioned railroad car sandwiched in a middle seat between two large businessmen who carried on a conversation across his lap. But at the time, in my seminewlywed overanalytical self-absorption, I concluded that everything was all my fault.
Him: “How the hell could you let them cut the fucking leg off the goddamn fucking couch?”
Me: “I had no choice.”
Him: “We got the fucking couch in. They’re goddamn professionals and they couldn’t get it out? And what kind of movers carry a goddamn fucking saw around to cut the legs off people’s furniture?”
Me: “They don’t. I ran out and bought one.”
Him: “You bought the saw?”
Me: “The goddamn fucking saw. They told me to.”
Him: storms off, spends sleepless night trying to keep balance on the aforementioned—and seriously listing—goddamn fucking couch.
Me: spends sleepless night sobbing into pillow over first significant married fight.
When I say significant, I refer to the fights that stand out in a couple’s mutual memory. Not the arguments that happen along the way: arguments about the thermostat or what color to paint the bedroom or who should buy the Mother’s Day cards for his side of the family. I’m talking Fight, fights. Lying-awake-at-dawn-crying fights. Who-are-you-and-what-have-you-done-with-the-man-I-married fights.
Actually, I can count on one hand the number of fights and sleepless nights we’ve had in our marriage.
After the moving ordeal, our next sleepless night—and, incidentally, our next significant married fight—was a year or so later, when I was ten centimeters dilated and pushing. Does that fight count? I mean, I truly wasn’t myself at the time.
Who was I? you might ask.
I was Lizzie Grubman meets Shannon Dougherty meets Valdemort—a temporary state brought on by the sheer physical agony of childbirth.
And Mike—who was supposed to be coaching me—was just plain stupid at the time, a temporary state I’ll chalk up to low blood sugar. I’ll admit that it was due in part to the fact that I wouldn’t let him visit the hospital cafeteria—or even the vending machines—for the twenty-four-hours-plus that I was in excruciating labor, lest he miss the big event. That’s how stupid I was. I kept thinking that any minute now, there would be a baby. I kept thinking that for, oh, sixteen thousand minutes or so before it actually happened.
Anyway, here’s how stupid Mike was: He brought up the couch story in the midst of my agony.
“You can do it, hon,” he crooned. “You can get this baby out. Unless you want me to run out and buy a saw so that we can cut off one of its legs?”
Har de har har, right? Funny guy, that Mike.
Of course, he then found it necessary to make like Jay Leno and regale the nurses, the doctor and a passing orderly with the Couch Monologue. They all had a good laugh at my expense while I writhed and moaned and cursed the epidural that didn’t work and swore that if the baby ever came out I would be a single mother because I was getting a divorce.
As it turned out, I didn’t.
As it turned out, neither did my parents, although they’re such opposites that most people say it’s a miracle they’ve stayed together all these years.
Anyway, as I was saying before I went into my longer than anticipated digression, my father—who is good at many things, including, fortuitously for us, fixing freshly sawn-off couch legs—has never been good at spelling. He likes to tell people that’s because he’s an accountant—as though an accountant requires prowess only with numbers and not with that pesky alphabet.
So when he filled out the paperwork after I was born, he left out the second “a,” and by the time anybody figured it out, it was too late. My mother woke up and I was Barbra and that was that.
My three older brothers used to