The Emily Fern Diaries: August 2007

Dad wrote this during the birthing classes, when mom looked like this:

The last time I was at Tri City Memorial Hospital was over a year ago. Ann had been a hit-and-run victim on the I-15, and her car had landed upside down. She was fine, but I insisted she get checked out anyway.

After midnight, a man with multiple stab wounds and a badly battered face wandered into the emergency ward and just stood there, bleeding. Doctors and nurses walked by, occasionally swerving to avoid bumping into him. To their credit, it wasn’t immediately apparent just how badly off this guy was. He was stuttering badly, the result of what had to be a cinder block hitting his face. But when the blood began to seep through his wife-beater, a half-dozen thin red lines that just got wetter and wetter I noticed, because I was sitting there, trying not to fall asleep. I remember realizing this was a metaphor for something, but I didn’t know what.

This time we were late, and spent 15 minutes wandering the halls, trying to find the Womens’ Wellness Diagnostic Center. We were taking birthing classes.

When we finally found the room I was happy it took so long. I could tell right away that I’d be looking up at the clock every couple minutes, and every time I’d feel a pang of disappointment that the minute hand hadn’t moved more. Our teacher was Summer, a name she had clearly given herself, because she embodied everything you’d expect someone named Summer to be. Which is how you know. When you have normal parents that don’t want you to be a dirty hippie, being a dirty hippie is all you end up wanting to be. But if your parents are hippies, that’s everything you don’t want to be. That’s why there are so many investment bankers named Ocean. I don’t really know that as a fact, but I have a good feeling that they are out there, and they are popular because people can remember their names easily. Their clients usually leave the preliminary meetings wishing they had someone named Carl or Deborah, but after a while Ocean grows on them and they’re glad they stayed with Ocean, even if it was out of laziness. This is because the Oceans of the world work harder than most people. They don’t want to end up like their hippy parents.

Summer taught birthing classes at a hospital, which made everything seem, at times, horribly horribly wrong. But then at times she made things seem downright tranquil. When two off-duty nurses walked down the hallway catching up in between emergencies, Summer walked to the doorway and held a finger pointedly to her lips. She didn’t opt to simply close the double-doors to give us privacy, she shushed the nurses. To me, this seemed odd. In the natural order of things, you should always give the right of way to those more important to you. In a crowded intersection, all cars and trucks kneel and let the ambulance pass. For this very reason, it seemed important for us as a class, and for Summer as a teacher-but-not-really-a-teacher, more-like-someone whom-the-Tri-City-Medical-Plaza-is-letting-use-a-spare-room-to-show-us-video-clips-of-taut, stretched-vaginas, and-tell-us-that-if there’s-bleeding-in-the-3rd-trimester, it’s-called-“show,” to acknowledge we were visitors in a place where lives were saved and lost. We were tourists. It was as though she didn’t understand her place, and that made me very nervous.

But her demeanor, which my mother would dismiss as flighty, was so calming in its matter-of-factness it made all the unknowns seem less and less important. She’d field questions like: “what if the cord gets tangled and cuts off my baby’s air supply?” with wisdom and precedent, saying “women have been having babies for thousands of years,” which is calming until you realize that you’re not talking about thousands of years of successful reproduction on an average, you’re talking about the little creature that’s floating around inside your belly. To hell with your averages. To hell with your evolution.

We were asked to bring a blanket and two pillows to class. That’s how we spotted other couples entering the hospital, and that’s how we eventually found our way to the Womens’ Wellness Diagnostic Center. We watched them unpacking their things, wondering where they got their blankets and were they on sale. Or did they like leopard print so much they paid full price for it, and would they do it again. We had an orange yoga mat and a blue pillow, and one with cowboys on it. Throughout the three-hour class I recovered from boredom by looking at the other people’s pillows and blankets, and tried to imagine their beds at home. Were those the blankets and pillows that were on their bed at night, or were they in the linen closet, reserved for houseguests? Did they have a linen closest? We didn’t have one, but my parents did when I was growing up. Ann and I had shelves built into the walls in our house, and in there we kept our extra blanket and washcloths and things, but that’s also where we kept all the random junk that didn’t yet warrant throwing away. ACE bandages, board games still in their original shrink-wrap, and a foot Jacuzzi an old girlfriend bought for me years ago. It was nice, but sort of a pain to set up and use. You’d need an extension cord so you could watch TV at the same time, because just soaking your feet is kinda boring, and you’d need towels underneath so nothing else got wet. You’d pour the hot water in and it was always so scalding hot that you’d have to wait for it to cool down, and by the time you got your foot into it, you’d have to turn the TV up because the little motor was really loud. There wasn’t an internal heater in it, really, so the hot water wouldn’t stay at the optimal temperature, not for long. It was much nicer to take a shower and lie down with your feet in the air, and let the bullets of water tickle the soreness away from your arches.

For these reasons I always considered it an oversized junk drawer, rather than a linen closet. It had more junk than linen, and it lacked the properties of an actual closet in the first place.

I thought about the tiny creature sleeping in my wife’s belly. I bet the amniotic fluid in her womb stayed a nice warm temperature the entire time. Nine months is a long time to soak, so I thought about asking Summer if babies ever came out wrinkly. I was pretty sure that they didn’t, but she was the expert, and that’s why we were there, to ask questions. I didn’t, though. Instead I wondered what my little girl would be like at my age, would she be 32 years old and not even have a linen closet? Would she even know that she’s supposed to? That we live in a world where linen closets are one of the ways in which success is measured? I made a mental note to get one before the kid knew any better.

"Can any available anesthesiologist please report to room 7B."

The third time the anesthesiologist was paged, the note of rising urgency in the voice was apparent, so Summer explained breezily: “They’re not allowed to perform surgery without one.” This put nobody at ease, and when the pages repeated more and more frequently it was obvious what was happening in room 7B. And when they suddenly stopped, an awkward cloud draped itself over the room. There wasn’t a cut to commercial. Zach Braff couldn’t lighten the mood with a joke. 7B was dead, and everyone in the room was thinking the same thing. Everyone but Summer, who shrugged it off with a “win some, lose some” sigh, and explained that we needed to make lists of what to bring to the hospital. Two suggestions she had were scented lotion, and some CDs.

I was learning that every parent-to-be made lists of things they wanted to do before their baby was born. Paint the house. Put a sandbox in the backyard. Plant flowers. Pregnancy is a countdown, a clock ticking towards the arrival of the single most important houseguest you will ever have. I was 32, I didn’t even have a linen closet. I was trying to figure out just how long it was between the day baby comes home, and the day baby learns about linen closets and landscaping, because there’s a difference.

For two and a half hours I sat in that classroom, pillows stacked neatly on my lap, silently judging the other nine couples. It helped the time go by. At 8:45, Summer started to wrap things up, telling us the homework, and what next week’s class would be like, and just like we did in fourth grade, we began shuffling in our seats, thinking of which fast-food restaurant we’d hit up on the way home, or did I remember to TiVo my shows tonight. I was content to just wonder where they’d all go, but we hadn’t yet used our pillows and blankets, and that bothered me.

"I want you to find a space on the floor, and lie down, ladies, on your left side. Guys—spoon them."

I wasn’t sure she understood what the actual purpose of spooning was. Spooning is how you silently request sex from your partner, and it’s a lifesaver for shy awkward people. Group spooning is one step closer to an orgy, and even though it was couples-only spooning, it toed the line.

We had brought the yoga mat, and it seated only one, so I settled in behind Ann on the hard hospital floor. It was cold and I told myself that it was in a hospital so it’s got to be sterile, and shut off the part of my brain that would think about how many times that particular linoleum square had been vomited on. Summer took us through a series of cool-down exercises, like at the end of a yoga lesson, which I imagine was difficult for the entire group, as we had been just sitting there for hours, waiting to go home, where, if we really wanted, could spoon in our own beds to our hearts’ content.

I thought about my baby, and what she would think if she could see us now, her mom and dad, trying to imagine that the stress was flowing out of our noses like a river, seven miles west, and pouring into the Pacific Ocean. She would be embarrassed, and rightly so. I smiled. She will decide that her parents are hippies, or at best new-agey, and turn around and apply to an ivy-league university, or a business management program, running as fast as she can, in any direction.