The Life of Baby Kessel
SETTING:
Baby Kessel lives at Cottontail Hollow with his two older siblings and his mommy and daddy.
Cottontail Hollow is in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, nestled between a park and the commuter rail tracks.
Cottontail Hollow has a treehouse in the backyard, a playroom in the basement, and a litter box that Esme the cat never seems to use.
It's ten days before the due date, and Eljay's gained 45 lbs so far. The baby's height in the 75th to 90th percentile, according to our fifth (and hopefully last) ultrasound. Eljay states worriedly, "I'm gonna die in childbirth from delivering such a huge baby. She writes up a will, leaving all the kids to Jesse. Eljay wistfully moans, "if only I had childbearing hips...." Jesse looks wistfully at Eljay's once adorably small hips, now hidden beneath her bloated belly....
Eljay just wants the baby out. Jesse just wants his wife back, to end their Hard Times. Eljay wants her soul mate back, that funny smart guy that called her babe-o-rino and taught her the Pythagorean theorem and the politics of the Diaspora. They go to the obstetrician, who has promised to induce the baby this week. "No," the doctor says, "Can't do it. Your cervix just isn't ripe. Giving you drugs won't do anything."
"Oh, Jesse, let's go running so the baby will come early," Eljay says after the doctor's appointment. "I can't take another week." They took the kids for a walk to their new schools and played some basketball in the park. They had tried spicy food, hard sex, and a fender bender, but nothing could budge this baby from his hideaway. The fender bender resulted in a long "false labor," and a liability lawsuit worry from the woman who hit us, but nothing more. Playing basketball didn't even produce false labor. It DID produce a thrown-out back, so Eljay couldn't drive at all the next day.
"Next week I can justify it, the doctor says. "Between his size and your back problems, we'll plan on starting the induction process on Thursday." "Another eight days," thought Jesse and Eljay. But the end was in sight. They told Jesse's parents to come up Wednesday night. All week strangers stopped Eljay on the street and said "that baby looks like he is going to be out any time."
"Why would the baby want to come out," offered their therapist, "when he's in heaven now?" Jesse contemplated the Eden myth as a biological memory of birth -- the garden of Eden represents the womb, the forbidden fruit represents the cervix and its ripening, the expulsion from Eden represents birth itself, and Lucifer (the angel of light) represents a baby's first experience of vision. Eljay grimaced at the stretched analogy and went on to gain another twenty pounds and waddle through doorways and gave up driving altogether.
Thursday morning, Jesse signed the employment contract at work and signed up for health insurance. They met at the hospital where Eljay was getting a prostin injection, which softens the cervix. The staff was not too hopeful that the baby was coming anytime soon. "This only works when the baby is overdue and you have had multiple births," said the nurse. "Don't count on it happening tomorrow because we can't take you to give you pitocen when the labor rooms are full," said the doctor. "And we are full now, so it won't happen till Monday."
Eljay and Jesse's heart sank in unison. How would they explain this to his parents? How could they make it four more days?
They went home and suddenly Eljay was seized with energy. "It's going to happen tonight," she told Jesse on their way to Johnnie's. Jesse had heard it a lot of times before, and had seen a lot of false labor, so he didn't want to get his hopes up. He preferred instead to think of the baby as coming on Monday, when it was a more sure thing. "Well, he'll come when he comes, tonight is fine or Monday is fine," he said.
The Mugawump and Kat's Kitchen called five times to tell Eljay that she had a good malpractice suit if the hospital did not induce immediately. They like to sue people. "And Kathy's an expert in Med-Mal," the Mug reminds us with each call. The Mug offered also to take the baby when the kids had visitation. "I guess they've finally decided to be nice to you," offered Jesse. "Nah, they're just drunk or stoned or something," replied Eljay, not ready yet to believe that the Mug could achieve niceness.
They put the kids to bed, and Eljay forced poor Jesse to perform sexually once again, because she had heard that semen contained some stuff called prostaglandin, which acted as a cervical softener. She also had heard that oxytocin, released during the female orgasm, induced labor. Jesse thought, "I like having an annual fat woman, but this is ridiculous," as he tried to find a way to enter her amidst this enormous baby and his life support system. But he managed to give her two or three orgasms, knowing that he'd be off the hook for more sex for a long time if he was successful.
At 1 AM Eljay started getting cramps two minutes apart on her right side. At 3 AM, she woke Jesse and began to take a shower. "It's probably nothing, but call," she told him. It seemed like hours before he found the right number and Eljay began to suspect this could indeed be it. The cramps got harder, the doctor said to come in, Eljay woke up Johnny, they left for the hospital. Jesse was thrilled at getting to run all the red ligts at three twenty in the morning, hoping for a chance to say to one of Massachusetts' finest, "My wife is having a baby."
At the hospital, they headed as usual for the check-in desk. "Fifth floor," shouted the guard, with one look at Eljay. Jesse was gleeful at getting to cut in line and avoid the red tape.
Labor and delivery... [tk] They hooked her up to a monitor to make sure the baby was not stressed, and indeed it seemed as if the time had arrived. Even though Mercury was retrograde till May 12 , [tk]
Eljay remains in the hospital for four days. Johnny comes to help celebrate a small birthday party for Spike in the hospital room on his birthday, the 4th. Spike is thrilled that he got a baby brother for his birthday (and Coco demands a baby sister for hers!) and tolerates the delay of his birthday party at home. The Worry of the Week is that the baby is deaf since he failed his hearing test at the hospital and doesn't respond when Spike and Coco scream and smash dishes. Johnny thinks if he's deaf, it is God's way of giving him a defense to having Jesse as a Dad. (Jesse tends to be noisy). Eljay and Jesse think he is perfect anyway.
Jesse brings Spike and Coco to school, and presents The Story of Passover. (It's a preppy private school so we're the token Jews). Most of the kids know some of the story from the Rugrats' Passover Special, and the rest enjoy getting some matzoh during class time. Spike and Coco watch "The Ten Commandments" and insist on hearing "The Passover Story" on the way to school every day.
Jesse sleeps in the hospital cot for the four nights fulfilling his nineties husband and fatherly duties. The nurses demand on day 2 that Eljay walk down the hall to get her pain pills. It takes 15 minutes to do the 100-foot walk. On day 3 Jesse takes Eljay for a wheelchair ride outside around the parking lot, which precludes Eljay's cabin fever. Peter and Polly visit while doing the AIDS walk down Memorial Drive on day 3. On day 4 the kids accompany Eljay on her wheelchair ride, and Eljay can walk, more or less.
The baby gets circumcised that evening. They give... [tk]
Spike and Coco watch "The Ten Commandments" for the second time, having discovered that Grammy owns a copy. Eljay catches the scene on Mt. Sinai and exclaims, "That's the mountain I saw at each contraction during labor!" Jesse concludes, "That's good karma, since I was born at Mt. Sinai hospital." Eljay concludes that the baby is the Messiah. (This conclusion leads to some of the most infrequently said sentences in the world, such as... "The Messiah has poo in his diaper" or "The Messiah spit out his pacifier.")
-- the curious look, the betrayed look and the Amazing Shrinking Woman [tk]
When he is looking around with his eyes wide open and his mouth pursed, he is in curious mode. When we give him the pacifier and he wants his bottle, we get the betrayed look. When we are changing him and he purposefully waits till his diaper is off and pees on us, he gets the coy look. Jesse has that look a lot, although he hasn't peed on Eljay lately.
Meanwhile, Eljay's visit to the doctor finds her down fifty pounds in 13 days; Jesse cannot believe this kind of weight loss is possible. Eljay fears the last fifteen pounds will take fifteen years, as this is actual fat and she will have to actually diet, meaning no more cheese doodles and hershey's syrup.
Eljay's Worry of the Week is the inability to ever again achieve orgasm. Jesse does a provocative dance and thankfully, this turns out to not be the case.
The baby loves looking at dots, studying them for many moments with great interest and expectations.
Jesse makes up the formula poem, all the five and six year olds in the neighborhood love it and adopt it as their anthem. We drove down to New Jersey, a very long ride indeed with three kids. Jesse figures out why faraway vacations that require long drives with children are a bad idea and Virginia Beach is cancelled indefinitely. The baby doesn't like the pattern on his car seat and screams until we stop and take him out. This makes the ride much longer. He develops real tears, much to the pride of his parents.
His hobby is looking at polka dots. His religion is The Glow. That is what we call the dimmer lights on the third floor that he gazes at with religious ardor. The most important thing in the world to him is... well, you know... yes... Formula....
The baby had a bad day and cried all day no matter what Eljay did, bringing back bad memories of Spike's colicky infancy and thoughts of live objects flying out of windows. Eljay decides that he is not the Messiah at all, but the Anti-Christ. We should have named him Damien, instead of Julien.
They decide to call the pediatrician, to see if his formula should be changed (Coco was on soy formula). Eljay asked Jesse to pick up some at the store on the way home from work and in typical Jesse fashion, he brought home one of each of every kind of formula, so the baby could try them all. The pediatrician was somewhat ambivalent about the change in formula, clearly thinking Jesse and Eljay were nuts. "So this has only been going on one day"? "Oh no, the baby has gas all the time, said Eljay, after Jesse gave her the phone knowing he was seeming like a crazy person and wanted Eljay to rescue him as usual. Eljay had never been anyone's anchor of stability and conventionality before, so this was a new fun and challenging role.
The baby seemed to do well on soy, although he got noticably shinier and developed small patches of pimples on his cheeks.
Eljay decides to deny him food. "He's getting too fat!," she says. "You're nuts," responds Jesse." [tk]
Much of the afternoon is spent trying to get him to smile again. This entails lots of different voices and enthusiasm and behaviour that otherwise might get you committed to the local state hospital. He smiled at Eljay first, preferring to play the sticking his tongue out trick with Jesse. Finally he apparently decided that sticking his tongue out goes with smiling, so he smiled at everyone while sticking his tongue out, an obvious precedent to later social skills at cocktail parties. Eljay then taught him the open your mouth trick, so then he stuck his tongue out, smiled and opened his mouth. Jesse taught to him to raise his eyebrows.
Suddenly the baby is not boring. He makes noises back when we ask him a question, and seems to think he is one of us, participating in all discussions, with excitement and pleasure. Eljay decides it is time for him to be ahead to Esme' the cat on the answering machine message. Esme' enjoys chasing string, which th ebaby can't do yet, but in a few weeks, the baby will both have discovered string and then have discarded it as dull, while Esme' will still be chasing string.
Eljay tells Jesse the baby is way ahead of the norm for these skills, several weeks anyway. Jes