Wonderstruck

Photo by William Brawley/Flickr

By Andrew Forrester

I’m staring at this fleshy alien, wrapped straightjacket-tight in a swaddling blanket. He’s sort of quietly writhing in a clear plastic box, and I’ve thought about a dozen times that, even for a hospital, this all seems overly clinical. A plastic box? It looks like something from the Container Store, something much more suited to storing winter clothes or high school yearbooks, or maybe small reptiles. But instead, it’s holding my newborn son, and I’m having one of those dad moments that can come off as trite but which are really quite profound: my newborn son, sleeping. My son.

For some reason, when I think of a typical dad on the day of his first child’s birth, I think of Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. I don’t actually know the movie that well, but Jimmy Stewart’s husband-cum-dad persona—businesslike and anxious all at once—seems about right for a day like today. But whereas Jimmy would be rushing in and out of the hospital room for work and occasionally haranguing nurses about his concerns while never quite connecting with his actual child, I am trapped in something that feels more like a thriller than whatever genre It’s a Wonderful Life falls into. I’m frozen, heart pounding, anxious without anything resembling businesslikeness. That’s my baby. James. If I take my eyes off him for a second, what will go wrong? Suddenly, we’re in the movie Speed, but the bus is my child, and I’m Keanu, and the point is that something disastrous could happen if I fail to—what?

I don’t know. But I am a dad now, and my child is sitting in a plastic tub, and his head has turned to the side, and if I know anything about babies, it’s that they can’t control their heads, and I wonder if I should get someone, because what if he can’t breathe in that position? He’s so tiny and vulnerable, and no one in this hospital, not even my wife Megan, seems to care. But I’m also so tired, and I’m not even the one who did the actual having of the baby, so my tiredness seems selfish. But I’m still so tired. And it seems like the best thing would be to pick him up, so that I can control his head for him, but I also want to lie down. I want to lie down so badly, but this couch I’m sitting on is an affront to dads, moms, birth partners everywhere. It’s manufactured to fit maybe a ten-year-old comfortably, and honestly, I should probably have a word with someone in charge, because this is unacceptable—how do they expect fathers of newborn children who have no head control to be able to sleep on this nightmare bench? How do they expect us to sleep at all?

The hospital has a policy of encouraging “sleeping in,” which just means that they want mothers and babies to spend their nights together, I guess because that way they’ll get used to each other. I am a rule follower, so of course I’m determined to align my thinking with the hospital’s. They are the experts. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old grad student, and it’s not like I’m even studying something useful. My qualifying exams on Victorian literature have not prepared me for this moment, except that I can now amuse myself by talking about how Megan’s period of “lying in” is over. No, I don’t know anything about biology or child development, so if this very domineering nurse says James should sleep in the room with us, then the very domineering nurse must be right.

I decide to take a chance and pull my eyes away from James for a moment, because that’s what you have to do. Like watchers on some ancient city wall guarding something precious, fathers throughout history have had to take breaks to eat, to sleep, to use the chamber pot or whatever. I turn to Megan. The clichéd thing to say is that she looks beautiful, lying there in her hospital bed, a soft, angelic glow somehow coalescing through the commingling of the fluorescent hospital lights. (I know nothing of physics, either).

But, while Megan is very beautiful, the truth is that she looks tired. Tired with an edge. Tired like an old person, which is to say, tired with a kind of wisdom, and a kind of impatience. Leading up to the birth, Megan has been understandably emotional and a little fearful about the realities of labor, while I have tried my best to be everything Steve Martin isn’t in the Father of the Bride movies. I am loving. I am supportive. I am calm. I am rational. I am not going to rip hot dog buns out of their packaging in the grocery store or sell my family home to a ruthless developer, only to buy it back at a higher price. But something strange has happened now, and our roles have switched, and I have upped the ante. I am far more emotional than Megan ever was. I’m a quivering mess, and even in these few seconds, even as my head has rotated on my spine to look at Megan, I’ve thought, “I wonder if he’s dying back there.”

Megan can tell. Not that I think James might somehow be dead. But that I am terrified.

“You should go,” she says. Not lovingly. Not angrily. Just a curt statement of fact, stating the obvious. “Murder is bad.” “Two plus two is four.” “You are about to explode into a thousand anxious pieces, so you really should leave this hospital.”

“What?” I say, and suddenly I do sound like Jimmy Stewart, with that steel guitar shock in his voice. What? Mary! You want the moon?

“You should go. You need a break.”

“I need a break?”

If I need a break, then I am an absolute disgrace. This woman has just given birth. Strike that. She hasn’t “just” done anything. This has taken nine months. There has been vomit. There has been vertigo. Uncomfortable below-the-waist exams. A preeclampsia scare. And she still went to work every morning at six-thirty. Then she did this.

I look back at the baby. He’s alive, but now he has hiccups, and they seem far too powerful for someone who is only seven hours old. I make a mental note to check with a nurse when Megan and I are finished talking.

I’m trapped again. I can’t take my eyes off him.

“Yes,” she continues from behind me, “you need a break. You’re tired. You should go home and take a shower.”

“I—what?”

I can’t even argue.

It sounds so good. I want to do it. I need to do it. I—

I’m crying. Not hard crying. Sad movie moment crying. The kind of crying you can hide from your boss or people on the street, but not from your wife.

I chance a look back at Megan, who assesses me. I am a suspect, and she is the detective behind the two-way mirror.

“Yeah, honestly, you should probably just go and sleep there. Go home and come back refreshed. I’ll send him to the nursery. People do it all the time.”

Who is this woman?

I cannot send my newborn child to the nursery like some sort of cigar-smoking father from the 1940s. I cannot Jimmy Stewart my baby.

But it sounds so good, too. It sounds so, so good. We have been at the hospital for over twenty-four hours. I spent the night on a different nightmare bench in a different room, while they induced Megan, thanks to the preeclampsia scare.

“Okay,” I say, no longer crying, watching James once more. “I’ll go home and shower. Then I’ll let you know. I’ll probably come back, but I’ll let you know.”

“You should just sleep there,” she says again. Her eyes are narrow, and she has not so much as nodded reassuringly.

“I’ll let you know.”

I drive home in a daze. The hospital is not close, but somehow, I’m already in my driveway. Linda, my mother-in-law, is inside, watching TV on the couch. I give her a quick update and head straight for the shower.

You know how, in movies, when characters are sad, and it’s raining, you feel like, okay, maybe you guys are laying it on a little thick here? And you think back to your high school English class, and remember how your teacher talked kind of patronizingly about “pathetic fallacy,” and convinced you that reflecting a character’s mood in the weather is a little bit lazy, don’t you think? Well, crying in the shower isn’t an example of pathetic fallacy, but it’s in the same vein. It’s bad writing.

It’s still what happens to me.

I turn on the water, strip down, step in, and weep. I mean, weep.

And I talk. It’s kind of like praying, kind of like pleading.

What have we done?

We shouldn’t have done this.

Why did we do this?

I’m not cut out for this.

In the back of my mind, I know that these thoughts, like the glowing postnatal woman and my current state of crying in the shower, are clichés. Every dad thinks these things. But there’s also a part of me that thinks, no, really, I am specifically not cut out for this. Other people can do this. I cannot. I cannot shepherd this tiny perfect human into adulthood. I cannot shoulder that responsibility. I am sure to break him, physically and emotionally and all the other –allys. Megan is so strong and I am so weak, so out-of-control, so ready to lie down and sleep in an actual bed with sheets and a mattress that extends beyond the length of your average park bench.

I want to do it. I want to stay home, and sleep, and go back refreshed, like Megan said.

I dry off and get dressed and decide to run the idea past Linda.

People talk about bad mothers-in-law like it’s a given thing. Like you’re as likely to have an overbearing, judgmental mother-in-law as you are to have an overbearing, judgmental barista at one of those artisanal coffee shops where they expect you to have an espresso preference. But I have a very good mother-in-law. She’s kind and supportive and would rather die—seriously, die—than put her opinions where they don’t belong. She is a good person to run this question by.

“Megan says I should sleep here, but do you think that’s okay, because I feel like I’m failing her in some way if I do that, and if I’m failing her then I’m also failing as a dad, and I just feel really bad for leaving her and bad that she’s sending him to the nursery and I—”

Obviously, I am crying again. Weeping, again, actually, and to my mother-in-law.

There is often shame in weeping. We look at the exaggerated mourning rituals of other cultures, and we judge them. Or at the very least, we wish they would show some dignity. Weeping in the shower is embarrassing, but in a contained way, an I-can’t-believe-I-did-that way. Weeping to a mother-in-law, even a very good mother-in-law, is horrific. I wish I could show some dignity.

Linda jumps to her feet, which are wrapped up in fuzzy white slippers, and pulls me into a hug, and I don’t exactly realize it, but this is what I need. A second strange shifting of roles, for me at least. From father to child. She holds me, only for a few seconds, and she lets me cry, and she doesn’t try to tell me what to do or think, though she does answer my question.

“I think it’s totally fine if you stay here,” she says. “You don’t need to feel guilty.” And it’s like she’s given me permission. No one has given me permission for a long time. I’m a dad now. I’m a permission-giver, but for the last hour, I’ve been silently begging for someone to take authority from me, to take decision-making power from me, to relinquish me of my choices and my worries and the weight of fatherhood, and here, Linda is doing it, and Megan has already done it, and I just have to accept it.

I do.

I stop crying, and we laugh a little, and then I go to our bedroom—the room that Megan and James and I will share for the next six or so months—and I get in bed. I take a break. I read a bit. I check my phone and text Megan. I’m comfortable, and there is no baby to watch, and if, for a second, I am fearful of the night after next, when James is here in this room with us and I can’t take my eyes off him, and no nurses roam the halls outside, waiting to be accosted with questions about the hiccups that shake their patients’ miniature bodies, then it’s only for a second, and soon, I’m sleeping. Hard.

The next day, I arrive at the hospital room before James does. I sit on the nightmare bench, and I tell Megan about the night before. About weeping in the shower and crying to her mom, about realizing that I was overwhelmed and guilty and terrified of failure, and that, even if I’m still all of those things, the break was nice. I’m grateful for it.

Megan is warm again. “Of course,” she smiles. “We were totally fine.”

And then the nurses wheel in James, in his little plastic box. And he is totally fine. He’s tiny and helpless. All he really wants is milk, and even that is a struggle. The nurse has to help him latch, which, if I let it, will worry me, too, because what if he’s not getting the nutrition he needs, and what do we do when we get home and the domineering nurse is gone, and and and.

The nurse lifts him from his Tupperware container and brings him to me, so that I can hold him for a moment before I give him to Megan to nurse. The very moment he came into the world, our doctor said, “I think he looks like you,” and she was right. Even I could see it. I see it now. He’s my son, and I don’t know what all that means, but I know that I love him, and I’m afraid of him. I know that I will hurt him, and he will hurt me. I know that I’m proud of him.

He is wonderful, and I am wonderstruck. And I can’t take my eyes off him.

•••

ANDREW FORRESTER is a writer and teacher who recently received his PhD in English literature. His work has appeared in academic journals, Full Grown People, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son.

Getting Ginger

paw and hand — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Michele Coppola

My ex-husband died and left me his dog. It wasn’t an official bequest, but since all of his friends claimed to love her to death, really, but just couldn’t take her in, I drove five hours south to pick up the rickety Staffordshire terrier named Ginger who we had rescued together ten years prior.

“It’s wonderful what you’re doing,” said my ex-sister-in-law when she called me. “I’m sure Marty is smiling down on you.”

Not likely. The first time he’d gone to the hospital in liver failure, I’d texted him and asked if he wanted me to come down and get Ginger—but the only response I got was second hand from a mutual friend. He said that even though Marty knew he wasn’t able to care for the dog properly, he’d be damned if he was going to let me take her away.

“Alcohol is what’s taking his dog away,” I’d said angrily. “The same thing that’s taken everything away.”

•••

Ginger had been our first foster dog when I brought her home from the shelter a decade ago, her hopeful eyes looking up from a skinny, dun-colored body dangling with exhausted nipples. Confiscated from a home where she’d already been bred twice, the last go-round resulted in nine puppies who’d drained her completely. It hadn’t been hard to do since she’d barely been fed and had nothing to drink save a puddle of muddy Oregon rainwater. Marty and I were in love then—with each other, and with the idea of turning our three-acres-and-a-trailer into an unofficial dog rescue.

After several weeks of fattening her up and teaching her a few commands, we re-homed Ginger with an affable long-haul driver, who took her on cross-country adventures and fed her truck-stop meatloaf. It was a fine life for a sweet dog. But a year later, a bad accident on the interstate took the trucker off the road for good and brought Ginger back to us, also for good. Once she was again curled up on our couch, Marty and I found we couldn’t part with her.

“Animals were also close to McGuire’s heart,” read the article about my ex-husband’s death. At one time he’d been a popular DJ in the small town where he’d lived most of his life, and his passing made the front page. He was indeed an animal lover, poetic and soulful, with a malleable heart that never seemed to recover from the blows and dings that come with daily life. We were immeasurably compatible, and when we moved in together, we didn’t spend the weekend unpacking; instead, we used our rent money to take a road trip through Northern California, pulling off at scenic overlooks to make out and licking fast-food barbeque sauce off each other’s fingers. Tunes from an old Allman Brothers’ CD completed the new love movie montage.

Eight years later, he refused to look at me as we sat in our second marriage counselor’s dim office. “I’m not giving up alcohol for her,” he said. I felt my face flush red—not with anger, but with embarrassment. How lousy a spouse was I that my husband wouldn’t even consider sacrificing a half rack of Milwaukee’s Best to keep me? I remember wanting to protest that I’d cooked all of his favorite meals whenever I had the time and that when my face wasn’t mottled and puffy with crying, I wasn’t half-bad looking. But I didn’t. Instead, I moved into the other bedroom and told him I wanted a divorce.

•••

That memory still cuts me as I reach over to the passenger seat in my car, where Ginger is now coiled into a petrified ball. My hands smell like french fries and old socks after I pet her—just like the house where Marty had been living. It’s been seven years since I tearfully agreed to take our three other dogs to Portland with me and let my ex have the member of our canine family most likely to never leave his side. Ginger is fourteen now. When I tried to put the leash on her back at Marty’s house a couple of hours before, she hid behind his roommate. Finally I got her to come to me and I stroked her ears, something I remember she always liked. Still, her expressive brow was wrinkled with worry.

I’m a little worried myself. My current husband Bryon isn’t happy about having a third dog, but I have promised him that I will find Ginger another home quickly, something I already know will be nearly impossible. He and I squabble frequently; you can smell the dependability and routine on him like a nose-burning aftershave, and sometimes his rigidity is beyond exasperating. While he likes animals, he certainly didn’t want a house full of them. But he did want me, and I come with canines that bark when a squirrel sneezes and a cat who sleeps on his head. He never swats her down in frustration, though. He gently lifts her from his face and places her, carefully curled in the same position, at the foot of the bed.

We argued about Ginger the night before I went to get her. “I don’t mind you going to get the dog. I understand that,” he said. “What I don’t like is all the baggage that comes with her.”

“What baggage?” I asked, wiping away yet another large, infuriating tear from my clammy cheek.

“Yeah, what baggage,” he said, turning back to his laptop. “Go. Do whatever you need to do.”

I hate like hell that nearly every emotion I have comes out in tears. I don’t miss my ex-husband; during our marriage I slowly realized that this was how it would end for him and it’s why I left. And yet … there is something so profoundly sad about the way Marty slowly deteriorated in the last few years, like watching a fragile sandcastle that took a whole afternoon to build get washed away in the tide. But I still wasn’t prepared for his death when it happened, and now Bryon looks at my downcast eyes and thinks I’m hiding remnants of an old love. What I’m actually trying to conceal is the fact that I am beyond angry that after all of this time my husband thinks I could still be carrying a torch for my ex, and also furious that Marty was in such deliberate denial about his condition he wouldn’t make arrangements for Ginger, the companion he swore he loved more than anything in the world.

Back on the road, I stop for a sandwich at a drive-thru outside of Roseburg. I tear off a meaty corner and offer it to Ginger, who sniffs it warily, then buries her nose back in the dirty crocheted blanket that had been on Marty’s bed back at his house. I took it so that the old girl would have a familiar smell to comfort her, and also because I recognized it as one I had made for my ex many Christmases ago. Just one more thing from the past I’m dragging into the present that my husband and I will absorb because it’s what we do. We are boring and stable and responsible.

And yet, I am immensely appreciative of the fact that I have a working vehicle and the gas money to come rescue Ginger and a comfortable home where, until I find her a permanent situation, she can spend her days snoring contentedly on the couch. These resources are at my disposal in no small part because of Bryon, the man who has already called me twice to make sure I’m doing okay on the slick mountain passes. I feel reasonably sure that if the situation had been reversed—that I died and Marty were called on to come get a dog we’d owned together—he would have been both unable and unwilling to help. Not that he wouldn’t have regretted his impotency; in fact, my guess is it would have taken at least an entire bottle of booze before he didn’t feel bad about it anymore.

The sky is a watery blue-gray when I pull into the driveway of my house, the sun resigned to another day behind clouds. Ginger sits up in the passenger seat and shivers. I can barely breathe when I think about having to convince some reluctant person to take her in and then leaving her there to curl up in the dark corner of a strange-smelling place, leaving her to wonder why the man she loved so much didn’t want her anymore.

•••

“So we have a third dog now, right?” says Bryon, who is sitting on the bed smirking and rubbing Ginger’s belly. It’s been two weeks since I brought her home, and in that time we’ve discovered that in addition to being somewhat deaf, my ex’s dog is a bit incontinent, requiring potty breaks every two hours. Unfortunately, she is also petrified of the doggy flap, so we must get up and let her out several times a night. My husband doesn’t complain about it; he just rolls out of bed and stumbles to the back door with a sigh. I’d be happy to do potty duty, but Ginger wakes him up when she’s got to go; she sleeps on the floor by his side of the bed and follows him to the kitchen, where he feeds her bits of the flatulence-inducing cheese that she loves.

“Well, no, I’m still working on it. I posted her picture on Petfinder,” I say halfheartedly.

“Oh come on. Who’s gonna want her? She’s old, deaf, has to pee all the time. But she’s such a good guuuurl,” he purrs into her floppy ear. Ginger rolls over on to her back and snuggles her grey muzzle into his lap. She attached herself to him immediately when I brought her home, and if I’m being honest, I felt a twinge of resentment. Dogs live in the moment, so it’s entirely possible she didn’t remember me at all—but apparently she knew instinctively that Bryon, with his understanding eyes and strong, warm hands, was someone to be trusted.

I get up and wrap my arms around him. “Thank you,” I whisper. I love him so much for this, for the absolute conviction that society will start to unravel if he doesn’t step up, for believing that dismissing this dog to become someone else’s problem is just wrong. That is what Bryon does—even when it’s exhausting, even when I tease him unmercifully about his Eagle-scout code of honor and wish he could just relax, already. What I didn’t realize is that it’s hard to lighten up when you’re made of such sturdy stuff.

Perhaps Ginger knows what I am just learning: that in the end, love is really about showing up, again and again and again. I was there for her. Bryon is there for me. No matter where I step in this marriage, even out to the edges of his tolerance and my good sense, the floor is sound; there are no soft spots, no decay. It will hold me up, even with the added weight of my ex-husband’s elderly, incontinent dog.

•••

MICHELE COPPOLA is a veteran radio personality, copywriter, and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Oregonian and Spot Magazine as well as the literary journals So To Speak, Melusine, and Short Story America. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she shares a bed with her husband, two dogs, and two cats. Ginger passed away a little over a year ago in Bryon’s lap.