Exploiting My Baby (4 page)

We decide to subscribe to a service like Netflix, only for porn, which allows you to rent any two films at a time and exchange them for new ones through the mail. Then we hit the jackpot: At a hotel, we stumble across our first so-called parody porn, a graphic reimagining of
The Brady Bunch
, in which Jan engages in girl-on-girl action, Marcia pleasures herself with a dildo she keeps under her pastel bed and Alice has sex with Sam the Butcher, played by Ron Jeremy. The sets, costumes and sound track are so true to the original, you almost don’t mind when an actual laugh track punctuates the dialogue. Depending on when you hit puberty, you may have had sexual thoughts about Greg or Peter, and now you get to see the whole bunch in a variety of X-rated situations, all of which manages to seem like innocent family fun. This one was so excellent, we went on to rent parodies of
Gilligan’s Island
, and
Happy Days
, worth seeing for a three-way with the Fonz during which he points to graffiti on the bathroom wall that reads, “Sit on it.” Surprisingly, much care is taken to avoid anachronistic tattoos, and even the lingerie is true to that era. Extra points to the casting director for finding an amazing Mr. Cunningham (he doesn’t do sex scenes) and getting Ralph Malph to dye
all
of his hair red. Aaaaay.

If you’re squeamish about pornography, this is a good place to start, and there are now parodies of
Seinfeld
,
The Cosby Show
,
The Office
and others. Porn parodies of hit movies have been around forever, but the sitcoms are a new twist. More laughs, more tension breakers, more Fonz.

We watch porn, we have sex every other day, I toss the ovulation sticks but desperately clutch my certainty that this whole endeavor is doomed, and oddly enough, this combination works almost immediately. In less than three months, I am pregnant.

I send out that I’m Not Fertile energy to the universe, and the universe is totally unfazed.

The Secret
is all fine and good until it blames you for a little—okay, an excessive—amount of worry. I feel for couples who can’t conceive, who go through months and even years of expensive, grueling invasive treatments that make them feel like losers, and I would hate for anyone to truly believe their own gloomy thoughts are the cause of their troubles. That’s why I tell you that while I am a statistical sampling of one, I have personally debunked the Law of Attraction insofar as it pertains to the functionality of reproductive organs. It doesn’t matter what the hell you’re thinking; if you are having lots of sex and there is nothing medically wrong with you, if your body is ready, you can’t think your way out of a fertilized egg.

The real secret is this: The universe is random and unpredictable and chaotic. Meditate on that.

two

(You’re) Having My Baby, or Anka Management

 

 

 

M
y husband knows I’m pregnant before I do, because of salmon and popcorn. One I eat to excess, one I throw across the room.

After ingesting a huge hunk of salmon for dinner at the restaurant down the street, I bring home leftovers and chow them down for breakfast the next day. Around noon, I declare that I will need to go back to that same corner bistro for the salmon again, which I scarf down with some asparagus and capellini. I have leftovers for both breakfast and lunch the following day. That’s five straight meals consisting mainly of salmon.

Something seems fishy.

Since I was eight years old and realized that bacon was basically Wilbur from
Charlotte’s Web
, I’ve been mostly a vegetarian. For lack of a more nuanced way of putting it, meat grosses me out and I can rarely eat animal flesh without thinking of gnawing away on a creature that was once mooing, swimming, or doing whatever it is chickens do. For that reason, I eat fish rarely and, if I do, order it well done and with a side of yucky face. Aside from which, it’s my philosophy that if you’re going to binge, if you want to lose yourself through the low-risk-high-shame vice of overeating, you go either crunchy (box of Snyder’s pretzels, fistfuls of tortilla chips) or sweet (any offering from a Whitman’s Sampler excluding the Cherry Cordial). You don’t waste valuable calories on something rife with protein and nutrients, but instead you look for a certain yummy, comforting jejuneness.

As for the popcorn, instead of cramming it down my salmon-hole, I throw a bowl of it across the room at my husband, having lost my temper during a fight I pick over nothing.

Before the bowl even lands, I’m ashamed and confused. I thought my days of uncontrolled temper tantrums were over. I’ve thrown lots of things in my time, hitting rage bottom the day I almost got arrested for spraying a $26 tube of self-tanner on the door of a spa that refused to exchange it.

See, they sold me “dark” instead of “light” and really should have taken it back or exchanged it, but the spa lady gave me a lot of attitude and a flat, snotty refusal, after which I left in a huff, slammed the door with a few insults about her customer service skills, and sprayed the door with the entire tube of offending “dark” tanner. It’s the kind of idiotic, out-of-control, petty moment you are glad no one has witnessed, until of course the spa lady tracks down your number and calls to tell you not only has the outburst been witnessed, it’s been captured by security cameras. She threatened to press charges for vandalism. I apologized profusely, made a lame joke about bronzing her door and offered to pay for any damages. I did this not only to avoid court, but because I was genuinely in the wrong. I hung up and vowed never to lose my shit—in public
or
private—over nothing ever again, because even if you don’t get busted, your conscience is like a security camera that picks up every angle, records your worst moments and logs them with brutal detail.

The hormonal popcorn tossing, along with the sudden, obsessive salmon-eating, tips off my husband that I’m not quite myself.

After work, my husband stops by the drugstore for a home pregnancy test. My period is not late, and I know the test, like my outlook, will not be positive.

I pee on the stick, floss and brush my teeth to kill some time while it soaks and almost forget about the white plastic stick teetering on the edge of the sink. Two pink lines. This can’t be right. I pee on the other stick. Two pink lines. I read the instructions again, knowing the Mister is wondering what is taking so long. Two pink lines means we did it.
We did it
. I think about coming up with some clever way of telling him, something we’ll always remember and can tell the child over and over until he’s sick of the story. Now I’m really taking forever in the bathroom trying to conjure something magical. My mind is both racing and blank. I got nothing.

I just casually walk over to my husband sitting on the couch and show him the stick.

We grab each other and I start cackling, or more accurately, I toggle between a creepy, not-totally-appropriate-to-the-situation guffaw and making an Edvard Munch
The Scream
face. There is a chorus of “holy shit” and “oh my god ” and we both don’t know quite what to do, or what this means to our ability to spend money on flat-screen televisions and overpriced Sunday morning omelets. We take a picture of the stick, and of me posing next to it, neither of which comes out; the stick is unreadable (and so is my face, though strained and greasy are easy adjectives). Those tests just don’t photograph well. On the other hand, because this idea doesn’t turn out to be very original, I later notice that every pregnancy blog on the Web features the very same photo, positive pregnancy test sticks captured with perfect clarity, so chalk that up as our first parental failure. And my pregnancy has gotten off to a start that is not only out of focus, but hacky.

The next morning is just like any other, except it’s four thirty a.m. and I’m pregnant.

As I’m fumbling around for a couple of tablets of folic acid to down with my herbal tea and grabbing a protein bar to eat in the car on the way to the studio, I hear Paul Anka and Odia Coates belting out their number-one hit from 1974, “(You’re) Having My Baby,” which my husband downloaded the night before and is blasting through our apartment. It was a favorite of Adam Carolla, who once spent half of our morning show breaking down the lyrics. If you’re looking for a romantic tune about procreating with vague references to abortion, this is your song. It starts out fine: “Havin’ my baby, what a lovely way of sayin’ how much you love me” before it turns into something creepy: “Didn’t have to keep it, wouldn’t put you through it. You could have swept it from your life but you wouldn’t do it. No, you wouldn’t do it.” Oddly enough, that wasn’t even the controversial part of the tune. At the time, there was a feminist outcry against the song’s seemingly sexist tone, specifically the possessive pronoun “my.” To this day, when playing the song live, Anka sings “having
our
baby.”

Daniel and I belt out the original chorus together (“Havin’ my baby. You’re a woman in love and I love what’s goin’ through you”) and he hands me a CD of the song, which I listen to the entire way to work, on a loop.

Months before, we’d gone on a weekend getaway to Avila Beach, a small town in San Luis Obispo County just a couple of hours north-west of Los Angeles, basically a poor man’s Santa Barbara. On the agenda: (1) Get some clam chowder in one of those sourdough bread bowls; (2) Get close to the seals on the pier; and (3) Figure out whether or not to have a baby.

On our way back from doing the first two, we walked about two miles from a cheesy glass-bottom restaurant docked in the ocean back to our hotel, a dodgy mom and pop that smelled of mildewed bathing suits and sour buttermilk with top notes of ass. As we walked on the curvy, friable highway along the shore, we tackled the biggest question of our newlywed lives: Is having a kid an inspirational gift or a dream-crushing burden?

Just like I didn’t want a big wedding, because giant parties and tiered wedding cakes have no meaning for me personally and I didn’t want to be sucked into the culture’s pricey rituals, I wanted to make sure having kids wasn’t just falling prey to society’s biggest con job. For those of us who aren’t baby crazy, who didn’t grow up around babies, who saw babysitting only as an easy way to steal beer and make free long-distance phone calls, to those of us who see ourselves first as worker bees and achievers and not sweet-voiced nurturers who can’t wait to decorate a nursery and laminate ultrasound photos, this kid thing was in no way a slam dunk.

There is a paranoid part of me that always thinks I’m being conned, and that wants to watch my back to stay one step ahead of The Man. So we tried to tackle the decision from a practical standpoint, methodically reviewing pros and cons.

First we brainstormed the cons. Kids are expensive, consume your time, make it hard to travel to random beach towns because you feel like it ... and create a whole new level of fear. I get nauseous just thinking about what could happen to my dad riding his bicycle on the way to work. When I was a lifeguard as a teenager, while the other guards secretly drank rum from giant plastic cups, I sat slathered in zinc worrying that some kid was going to drown on my watch and I would die a slow death of regret and melanoma. I’m a worrier, and I worried about how much I would worry. Just seeing a prepubescent boy on a skateboard makes my mind shriek,
Careful, kid! You are one Hostess wrapper from a broken femur. Or a persistent vegetative state.

Having a child opens you up to all kinds of emotional liabilities.

With the hotel coming into view, or maybe we were just smelling it, we came up with the pros. It would seem sort of sad to be in our fifties and sixties with no kids, no homey pictures on our desks at work, no college dorms to visit, no grandkids. It could be fun to mix our genes, see how the recombination turns out. It might be nice to have built-in caretakers when we’re old, someone to wax my mustache in my twilight years and make fun of Daniel’s old-man ear hair and perhaps feed us rice pudding by hand. And it might be sweet to shift our focus from ourselves, and liberating to live in the sloppy mess of parenthood instead of hustling for the next work-related validation.

The most pressing pro is something I struggled to articulate, but which I’ve always thought of in terms of a giant menu that you get when you pull up a chair at the table of life.

There isn’t much on it.

When it comes to experiences that are Big, the menu is limited, less like an IHOP and more like the entrée options at a catered function. You can move to a new city, fall in love, follow your dream—or have kids. Maybe I’m missing a couple, but the kitchen is limited and if you wait too long, they run out of things. I’m not exactly the kind of girl who came up with baby names in elementary school and rocked her dollies to sleep. I envy women who love babies, who know just how to hold them and comfort them, have always known. I was not that girl. Still, if having babies is the life-altering, perspective-giving, kick-ass miracle that people say it is, why would we want to miss out on one of the few peak experience entrées on the universe’s menu?

I’m a sucker for research, for polling everyone I know about every decision I make, but could anyone really give us a straight answer? Once you have kids, you can hardly admit it’s a sham; you’re in too deep. However, one thing struck us as we headed to our hotel room in Avila Beach: If parenthood truly sucked, no one would have more than one child, and the vast majority of couples do just that. This seemed the weightiest evidence of all.

That was it.

We were 51 percent sure we wanted to have kids. Procreating won by a slim margin, butaWis a W. We were back to the hotel and had put a mint on the pillow of our future, or maybe a turd, but we were willing to chance it.

So, I head into work with the Paul Anka song in my head and this hugest of all secrets in my heart and uterus, just wanting to grab every single person and tell them the news. The plot that was hatched that day at the beach is in full flower.
“I’m a woman in love and I love what it’s doin’ to me. Having my baby.”