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December 2009
My son was born seven months later after twenty-six hours of labor, two ineffective epidurals, and two worthless rounds of intravenous narcotics.
It turns out that some redheads are genetically resistant to painkillers.
Lucky me.
Ken was amazing through the whole process. He responded to all the orders I barked immediately, held one of my legs while I pushed, and watched me expel a little bald person out of my sliced-open vag hole like it was no big deal. He even cut the gnarly purple cord that came out with it.
When Ken handed the baby to me, I’d expected it to have its eyes closed like a little puppy but not this one. He stared me dead in the eye—glared was more like it—as if he were blaming me personally for what had just happened to him. I gave him my swollen boob as a peace offering. He accepted but refused to take his eyes off of mine the entire time he nursed.
“I hope you’re amazing,” I whispered down to my beautiful, healthy, oddly alert, and suspicious newborn, “because I am never doing that again.”
Ken sat on the edge of the bed, and I watched him almost as intensely as our son watched me.
Would he cry? Would he be moved? Would he be freaked out? Would he be a good dad?
But all my worries were put to rest the moment the nurses came to take our son for his first bath.
Ken left with him and returned an hour later, pushing the hospital crib and talking a mile a minute. “They let me dry him off after his bath and change his diaper, and when you change his diaper, you have to remember to fold the front flap down because of his umbilical cord stump and—” Ken pulled out his phone and started showing me pictures he’d taken inside the nursery. “He’s so long. Look at him when he was all stretched out. Twenty-one inches. And his head size is in the ninety-fifth percentile—”
“Yeah. I could tell while I was pushing it out.” I smirked, but Ken ignored me and continued his energetic recap of everything I’d missed in the last hour.
God, he’s talking so much.
And smiling.
This is weird. Why is he acting so weird?
And he’s in half of these pictures. He actually had someone take pictures of him with the baby.
Oh my God, is Ken…excited?
Excited Ken was something I only got to see on the first day of football season every year and whenever he stumbled upon a Hugh Grant movie on TBS. But there he was, pacing around my hospital room, grinning and rambling about percentile ranks as I patiently waited for him to give me my baby back.
Ken wasn’t going to be a great parent. He already was one.
I, on the other hand, had to work at it.
When I came home from the hospital, I looked like I was still five months pregnant. I was horrified by my postpartum body. All I wanted to do was chain myself to my treadmill and survive on a diet of hot water with lemon until the weight came off, but I couldn’t. I’d chosen to breastfeed, which meant I had to eat. A lot. Then, I had to keep eating, even after the baby was weaned so that I would have enough energy to chase him around. Every meal—hell, every bite—was an excruciating battle between wanting to be a good mother and wanting to be thin.
But, I wanted to be a good mother more.
I started meditating to help myself stay focused on what was really important. I learned about gratitude. I learned that, instead of hating my body, I should be thankful for everything it had done for me. And during process of soul-searching, I also learned why I’d been so perfectionistic and self-harming in the first place; I had been born feeling incomplete.
I’d spent my whole life looking for something to fill that sense of emptiness—boys, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, achievements, the quest for perfection, piercings, fast cars—but none of it had worked because the void wasn’t existential. It wasn’t emotional or imaginary. It was physical.
The emptiness was in my womb.
Ken never wanted to get married or have children, but he set his wants aside to take care of my needs. He opened his home to me when I was lost. He gave me a ring when I needed to feel secure. He showered me with support during though tough grad school years. And, no matter what color I dyed my hair or how sick I became, he always gave me his unconditional acceptance. Ken never once put any pressure on me to get healthy; he simply gave me the one thing I needed to do it myself.
My son.
Our happily ever after would have culminated there, but like his mother, Mini Ken had been born feeling incomplete as well. I could tell the moment I’d laid eyes on him that he was searching for answers. As he got older, he would roam the house, a determined scowl on his beautiful face, looking under beds and inside cabinets. Always searching. Never finding. I couldn’t figure out what my smart, serious little boy was missing until he turned two and finally found the words to tell us.
“Mommydaddy,” he said, his big blue eyes shifting from mine to Ken’s, “when is my sister coming? Will she be here tomorrow?”
Mini Ken began asking about his mythical sister every day. He would go into our guest room and say, “Dis is my sister’s room.” He told us she had blonde hair and blue eyes. He said he would share his toys with her and push her on the swing. He even had the perfect name picked out for her—Frosting Spider-Man.
My heart went out to him. I knew firsthand what it felt like to miss someone you’d never met. I’d felt that way until the day he was born. If my little boy wanted a sister, I wanted to give him one.
Ken, of course, did not.
But, in true Ken form, he set his wants aside for ours.
That, and the fact that I promised him a vasectomy if everything went well.
