Want to see pictures of my baby? I do too, so I take a look at this screen that’s about the size of my first TV, which was also black-and-white and made by General Electric. Unlike that TV, this screen shows ultrasounds, a gray pyramid of my wife's insides. In the corner of the screen is the GE logo. Bringing good things to life, the heartbeat looks like an insistent computer cursor.
The doctor says he or she is about two centimeters long. He or she is shaped like Australia. He or she looks expensive. Jill and I have come to the doctor’s office to look at the screen. Jill is under a sheet. I’m sitting in a chair. The doctor is talking to us, offering suggestions we intend to take on the walk home, such as “One hot dog is fine.”
We have a guarded, respectful attitude toward childbirth. We don’t want to know the sex of the baby, for instance, the surprise of which we consider one of life’s unmissable water slides. On the recommendation of doctors, Jill will have a c-section; she ays they can take the baby out through her nose if they want, as long as there’s a gallon of anesthesia and a squad of doctors present. I get to be there, too; Jill said I can bring my Gameboy. At least I think that’s what she said.
For us, this has been a two-year haul through an infertility system built when the boomers finally decided to have kids. We’ve endured much associated with the clock ticking on wannabe parents: appointments and probes, shots in the belly and shots in the dark. We’ve done private things with public instruction. Things that ended in our bedroom with Jill saying: “We have to do this! We have an appointment!”
In those two years we’ve also noted how the less a parent talks to their already-born kid, the more the kid seems to scream in the candy aisle. We notice how boomers buy for their kids the way you buy vanity plates for a vintage car. How boomers want every element of the day planned, right down to the back seat of the minivan. How boomers want every risk removed.
“There’s risk in every relationship,” Jill says. Boomers have made an industry out of knowing as much as possible when producing a baby. Peer inside, eat flawlessly, with no hot dogs, and no cursing lest the fetus hear you. We mock how boomers have bled the fun from something that’s been happening for enerations in caves and cabins and fields and lot of other uninsured places. Consider the magazine called “Fit Pregnancy,” which Jill picked up the other day. One ad trumpets the “fetal phone.” You use this device to jump-start your baby in life by placing one end on the mother’s tummy and the other end on your common sense, and hatting away.
I’m not sure Jill and I have anything to say to our kid yet. Maybe “Hi I’m your daddy” or “Hi I’m your mommy,” as if the kid wouldn’t figure it out soon anyway. Maybe we could talk about the end of “Seinfeld.” I’d be tempted to whisper a curse word and e if my kid still gets into college.
I think there will be time for talking later. Screaming and cursing too. Because there’s risk in every relationship. But there’s a little less in Jill’s and mine now, as we look at that insistent little cursor on the screen, and at Australia.
Jeff Stimpson, 37, lives in Queens, N.Y. with his wife Jill and their baby son Alex. Stimpson writes twice a week for his essay Web site, JeffsLife. The address is http://members.tripod.com/jeffslife/HOME.HTM His e-mail is jtstimpson@aol.com
