5/2/93

Boy, Oh Boy, Oh Boy

My wife and I agreed to have one child. We did not agree to have one every minute.


    It only dawned on me when my wife told me I'm a heartless creep, a miserable jerk, an inconsiderate lout and a lazy bum. Great guns, I realized, she must be pregnant.
    I don't know how it happened - I mean, that I became all those nasty things - considering that she married me because I was supposed to have been none of them. But a lot of water has broken under the bridge since then, and we agreed to let history be a thing of the past, we buried the bullet and bit the hatchet and started to try all over again. That was then. That was before the birth.
    It was a normal birth: she yelled at me, I yelled at her, the nurses yelled at both of us to stop yelling, and even before the newborn had stopped yelling my mother was yelling "Mazel tov!" and giving solid advice.
    The newborn. My first. A little girl, the size of a Tnuva No. 1 chicken. Cute, but so immature.
    When she was one minute old, I became a father again. Another plucked pullet. Another girl. Another quantum leap in the phone bills of my graying years.
    Already that was more children than we had planned to have. In fact, we didn't want any, but compromised. We agreed to have one. We did not agree to have one every minute.
    Daughter number three was born just as soon as the Doc could get his hands back into my wife. Three kids in 120 seconds. A new family record.
    After a moment, I was seized with a madly rational thought: maybe there were more. Maybe the Doc was going to reach in and touch someone else. And then another and another. Maybe he was going to yank out a pancreas and say mazal tov, another healthy girl. My fertile imagination went wild. Suddenly, the Doc seemed like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat. (Later, he would conclude his show by pulling thousands of coins through my nose. )
    "That's enough," I shrieked, "I'm only paying for three."
    "Only" three. Huh.

SO THERE I was, sitting on a hospital bed, picking the daggers out of my wife's eyes. The blame was mine, the credit hers.
    What other women get done from the age of maybe 21 or 25, this gal started doing at 40. "Life begins at 40" and all that. Her friends were on the threshold of grandparenthood, and she would have been content to skip it all.
    We may have started late, but we were married a year and a half and already had three kids.
    I suggested that it might be fun to raise kids for a while, just for a change of pace. She didn't think that was very humorous, because we were hardly able to cope with what we already had, which was a cat.
    We began to understand that in a few days, a lot of children were coming to live in our extremely quiet house. It was a disquieting thought. Wait till The Cat gets a load of this.
    We spent the days before the homecoming in a doomful state of determined denial. It is difficult for two comfortably self-centered yuppiesque types nearing middle age to suddenly be targeted with such a lot of need. And we weren't even sure yet that we'd ever come to like the little howlers.
    The hospital took pity on us. A smiling lady came and showed us that tending tiny triplets is really as easy as one-two-three. Aplombly, she taught us how to change a diaper and showed us how to offload the lactose and then burp the customer. Nice and easy. Neat as a pin. Just like in a commercial.
    We got the babies home. "Tea? ," my wife said Britishly. "Thank you," I responded jauntily.

    A baby whimpered. Then another. Mummy got the milk going, while I went out and sterilized the neighborhood. Three babies were now hollering, the milk boiled over and there was somebody at the door. The person at the door was not a hospital official explaining that there had been a dreadful error and that they would take care of everything. We plugged in a baby to a bottle like the smiling lady showed us. The milk came right back at me like a geyser, and, at the same time, down and out like a bog. Disgusted, I changed my shirt and a diaper.
    We fed another, changed three, burped two. We found some more milk and took delivery of another tractor-trailer-load of diapers. Too late. More bog. While my wife changed her splattered shirt, I took up her position. I wasn't quick enough and someone made pee-pee at me. There were babies crying, and for all I knew there could have been Scuds falling, but I couldn't live another second with someone else's pee-pee on my person. I changed all my clothes and scrubbed my violated body with Janitor-in-a-Drum and a blowtorch. Urine! Yuck!
    The wife cranked up the washing machine. We rallied and got through the feed, mopped up and finished just in time to start preparing for the next feed. I wondered aloud if it would be okay if I watched a bit of TV first and didn't get an answer, which I took as a no. Mummy got the milk going and I got out a fresh diaper. A moment later I remembered, and got out two more. We came up with a plan. You feed No. 1 and I'll burp No. 3. No, no, No. 2 is crying, feed her first and I'll change Nos. 1 and 3 unless - will someone get the phone! - No. 2, what did we call her? , yeah, check that she's had enough to burp, and eat her before you, ach, I mean - tell him I'm busy dammit! - but first sterilize everything all over again.
    Yes dear, I said. I noticed I was lactating. Somebody made in her crib, the telephone was ringing again and for the first time in my life I didn't care if the Montreal Expos won that day.
    My in-laws came to visit to make matters worse, and I felt my first long tooth coming through. It was autumn.

THOSE WERE THE first days, more than two years ago. We still haven't had that nice cup of tea. That, like everything else, will have to wait until the kids are married. You shouldn't think I'm exaggerating; our family life is organized like a UJA mission, and the schedule, or The Schedule, does not provide time for tea, or, for that matter, food of any sort, or any pleasures not guaranteed by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
    We're about to celebrate our 6,000th diaper change and frankly, I've come to see the exudations as perfume, their progenitors as princesses and their mama as maybe not such an amazon after all. And I suppose that having waved the white disposable flag and given up all hope of becoming things I was never going to be anyway, I can now wipe a dirty little tushy without gagging and know that, yea, a Daddy has been born.
    We've come a long way, babies.