Into This World

Into This World

It was July and it was hot and it was rainy. The kind of heavy, unrelenting rain that turned people’s umbrellas inside out or blew them away altogether, including her mother’s, who would tell her for years afterwards that it was her fault that she lost her favorite umbrella right there in front of Mount Sinai on the day she gave birth. “A real summer storm,” the two weathermen on the TV that played in the triage room said over and over the night before, or maybe it was the drugs that was making her repeat it over and over again in her head? A summer storm the likes of which they hadn’t seen in years.

It was July 29th. It was a Wednesday. Years from now, when she had to fill in her son’s birthdate on medical forms and sports forms and school forms, she’d be surprised that it had been a Wednesday. It could have been any day really, and why would it have mattered, except it was hump day, smack dab in the middle of the week. All the weeks would soon blur into one long nursing-burping-pooping-napping-crying day, but on that stormy Wednesday in July, time was standing still.

Because he was coming.

Out of her.

Like a cork out of a champagne bottle or an egg out of a chicken…

God, she really wanted a breakfast burrito.

“There’s a great Mexican place on 103rd and Lexington,” her obstetrician, who she’d loved for the last nine months but now kind of hated, had told her husband a few minutes earlier, when he mentioned he was starving and she lay there, like a drugged out whale stranded on some island that looked like a hospital, because it was a hospital, wishing she could just get up and walk out of there and the baby would miraculously come out of her body without her needing to eject him. She imagined that this feeling she was having was not dissimilar to what doing heroin felt like, except for the hunger part. Most heroin addicts weren’t ravenously hungry, right? They always looked so fucking skinny.

Maybe heroin was how she’d lose the baby weight.

“This mama is only 5cm dilated,” the OB said. “And Raphael’s is only a seven-minute walk.”

Raphael’s, eh?” her husband said, looking from the OB to her. They still needed a name, preferably an “R” name; her father was Richard, who had been charismatic and funny and a tad bit bi-polar, but now was, sadly, dead. The thing was, they were writers and just couldn’t get past the alliteration issue, because her husband’s last name was “Rosen,” plus there weren’t many “R” boy names she liked. (As opposed to with a book, you couldn’t exactly do a “Search and Replace” of your kid’s name ten years into his life.) They also toyed with Jesse, but her husband had been terrorized for a year in Eighth Grade by a psychotic kid named Jesse Dichter and couldn’t get past it, no matter how much meditation or Zoom therapy he did. Kash was the favorite of their friends and the guys at the local bodega and the weird woman on the subway who’d insisted on touching her belly as if it were a crystal ball revealing the future of humanity, plus it was her maiden name, the name of her father’s family. But was it too hip-hop? Would people in Mommy and Me classes in Brooklyn look at them like were committing cultural appropriation or worse, choosing a name out of the Pottery Barn catalogue?

“Raphael is the angel of healing and guidance,” she said, because she’d pretty much gone through every single “R” name in the books and websites and ChatGPT.

“He’s also a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle,” the nurse added, which was enough for her husband to make a “neck slash” motion with his finger and head out onto the gloomy, rainy, July-steamy streets of New York City to get himself a breakfast burrito at 7:35am on a Wednesday, because what couldn’t you order in New York whenever the hell you wanted to?

Except a baby. You couldn’t order a baby that arrived on time. Yet. Give it a few years though.

“I’m glad he got out of here,” the OB said once he was gone. “He’s been here a long time.”

He’s been here a long time! Yeah, it had been really rough on her husband these last nine hours, streaming the first season of “The Sopranos,” the show that was supposed to be their “we just put the baby down, let’s celebrate,” show, the one that they’d started watching at midnight the night before on the hard fiberglass chairs of the triage waiting area but which, not even two hours later, when she was only one cm dilated and the nurse told them “it could be a while,” he’d decided to keep watching because “she could catch up once the baby arrived, right?” And how was it just last night that they were sitting on those chairs, were admitted for her planned induction, sitting down next to an older Hasidic woman who laughed when they said, “It’s our first,” and proceeded to inform them that she was having her tenth? That she was already a grandmother?

“Wait until your husband tastes that burrito,” the doctor said with a lip-lick.

Men! They could get hungry and satisfy their appetites whenever the hell they wanted to while their wives — the ones who been injected with their sperm, who couldn’t look at sushi or Brussels sprouts or coffee (coffee!) without feeling like they would vomit, who knew where to find a decent public bathroom in every neighborhood of Manhattan, who had to deal with their widening face and widening hips and ginormous tits (those weren’t awful, actually,not until they got engorged with milk) — had to endure a 10-to-30 hour labor to force that sushi-Brussels sprouts-coffee-hating child out of her body while the husbands went around the corner and ate a delicious breakfast burrito.

She slipped another ice chip into her mouth. The doctor had told her, maybe one hour or maybe five ago, that she couldn’t eat anything but the ice chips, because they’d given her the epidural and she was dilated but not yet fully in labor and at risk for puking it all up. The ice chips, she was shocked to discover, were delicious, as good as a steak, but of course, not 1/1000th as good as a steak, who was she kidding.

Fucking A, these were really good drugs. She was really, really, really happy she’d asked for the drugs, she thought, and then her eyes began to close.

When she opened them again, the doctor was in her face, yelling, “You’re an 8!”

Just then the window of a bar in Madison, Wisconsin passed before her eyes, the one that, back in college, she and her friends would walk by on their way to the other, cooler bar. They put on their sexiest outfits even though it was zero degrees and passed whatever guys were sitting in the window that night — in her epidural-ed brain, they all looked like Midwestern football players — and watched in anticipation as they held up a number from 1-10, as if they were Olympic judges. Except they were judging were the girls, or more specifically, their faces and bodies, but who’s kidding, it was just about their bodies. She remembered the night she walked by the bar and got all 8s, a higher score than any of her friends got, and she felt like she’d finally made it.

She’d never have that body again.

“You’re 8cm dilated!” the doctor clarified, his face all lit up like “go-time!”

Wait, what? So quick? Didn’t the doctor just say they had time? And, holy shit, where the hell was Andrew?

“We have to get Andrew back here!” she said, imagining him blocks away, wet but satisfied as he bit into his burrito, the way the cheese would stretch from Lexington to Park Avenues…

“I’m here!” Andrew cried, appearing in the doorway, drenched like wet laundry that hadn’t been put through the spin cycle. She was suddenly so, so glad she procreated with him, even if he did wear dorky nose strips to sleep and pronounced “nightmare” as “nightmere,” and finished Season 1 of The Sopranos while she waited for the epidural to take hold and, unbeknownst to her at that moment, would finish the entire series before month’s end, while she wouldn’t stream another TV series for at least a year.

“Doc texted me that you were close before I could even reach Raphael’s,” he said, rushing to her side, ringing out his tee shirt into a puddle on the linoleum floor. “It’s storming something Biblical out there.”

Was it bad luck to have a baby in a storm? Would this baby somehow absorb the anger and intensity of the thunder and lightning outside the windows of Mount Sinai and wreak havoc on their lives for the next 18 years until he left for college…if he went to college? “I hope he’s as mellow on the outside as he was on the inside,” the doctor had said a few months earlier when she complained she never felt him kick, even though it was clear from the ultrasounds that he was healthy and well. The truth was, it had something to do with his position behind the placenta, but lucky for them, he would turn out to be an incredibly mellow baby and child and teen, even though he’d occasionally come home drunk or high or tell them to “shut the fuck up.”

Speaking of high…

“Can you feel your legs?” the doctor was asking her. “We need you to feel your legs in order to push.”

She couldn’t feel her legs. What were her legs again?

“Honey, we need you to feel your legs in order to push Van out,” her husband interpreted. Van was his favorite default name, the same way Van Jones was his favorite default news correspondent. There was no way she was naming this baby “Van.”

“Like Van Halen!” the doctor said, too excitedly for someone about to deliver a baby as two nurses entered the room and began turning knobs and switches.

“Except Van Rosen!” her husband said, equally ecstatic, which is how he always sounded when he made that quip.

“Not feeling Van,” the nurse, whose name she didn’t catch but who had a smile the shape of a crescent moon, chimed in as she turned a knob on a machine. The epidural, she guessed. “What are the other options?”

“Jesse, Kash —”

“Oooh, I like Kash,” one of the nurses said.

“What about Jesse?” she eeked out.

“Jesse’s the kid who bullies you.”

“Exactly!” said her husband.

“Jesse is…” she eeked out, about to say that she’d never met a Jesse who wasn’t hot, except Jesse Eisenberg who she hadn’t met but had watched in plenty of movies and he was still cute and seemed really nice and…ohmyfuckinggod were those her legs?!?

“Can you feel your legs?” the OB asked, laser-focused on her now, his mind gone from naming and burritos and anything else but getting this baby the fuck out of her belly.

She nodded. Oh boy, could she.

“Good,” he said, smiling his movie star smile and touching her shoulder. She liked him again, as long as he got this baby out alive. “Because there’s something I want to tell you. This baby is, what we call, sunny-side-up.”

“Like an egg?” So she really was going to lay an egg.

“Yes, like an egg. A fried egg with the yolk up.”

She was no longer hungry. In fact, she felt like she might puke.

“Kash is cool, like Johnny,” the nurse went on, somewhere on stage left, her body being center stage — the main event.

“It would be Kash with a “K,” her husband corrected, “for her maiden name.”

The OB ignored the naming session and stared straight into her eyes. “The baby is fine, don’t worry. This is common. I had a suspicion when I felt your belly last night, so while you were resting earlier,” AKA was on heroin, “I did an ultrasound to confirm it. That’s why you were in so much pain last night.”

Was she? All she remembered now was the anesthesiologist forcing her to make a decision about whether or not she wanted the epidural, “because I’m going into surgery and you may miss your window.” Didn’t he know she was terrible at decisions, had in fact wavered for three years about whether or not to have a baby, she who had once considered herself so maternal? And how dumb she’d been, because if she hadn’t been so old when she’d gotten pregnant, maybe this baby would be regular-side-up and not like some greasy fried egg, the kind you eat with bacon and toast and home fried potatoes?

Would her baby be greasy?

“I mean, I also like Van,” the nurse was saying, and since when did the nurse on call get to decide the name of the kid you would have to worry about for the next 40 years?

“No, no, no,” she said out loud, about the name Van but also how scared she suddenly felt, now that the epidural was slowly wearing off not just on her legs but in every bit of her body, like a spell that had been broken with the snap of one’s fingers.

“Look, I understand it’s scary,” the OB said, “but I’ve been doing this for 15 years and I promise, it’s going to be okay. A little uncomfortable maybe, just for a second, but I’m going to put my hand inside you,” and then it was inside her, holy fucking shit! “and I’m going to turn this guy around.”

Just then, the loudest clap of thunder she’d ever heard broke outside her window. Or maybe it was the sound of her screaming.

“Dammmmmmn,” the nurse said. She could tell by the way she was looking at her that had been her screaming.

“Honey,” her husband said, rushing to her side, “I’m here.”

“And he’s right-side up!” The doctor triumphantly raised a fist in the air. “Nothing’s gonna faze this kid, let me tell you. A real rider of the storm, we got here.”

“Like the Doors song,” her husband said.

Into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown…

“Exactly. And now, my dear, it’s time to push.”

Holy shit, there was more? And so soon?

“Babe, you got this,” her husband said. “Remember our birthing class breathing.”

Our!!!!

“He’s so close,” the doctor said. “I’m telling you, this is going to take five, maybe six big pushes. I know you can do this.”

“I can’t,” she heard herself say. Could a baby stay inside her belly…forever? She’d just be that cool woman on the subway with the baby in her belly, be on the cover of People magazine, have a reality TV show. “We’re totally happy, sharing my belly…”

“Honey, you can. You’re a badass warrior woman and you’re gonna eject this kid outta you like a quarterback throwing a bullet across the field.”

What the fuck was he talking about?

“Push #1,” the OB instructed. “Inhale deeply, and then release the air with everything in your body…”

“Ahhhhhh!!!!” she said, pushing pushing pushing as hard as she could, like a quarterback pushing past the beefy guys in the bar window in Madison to get to the burrito that was her baby. The push and the sounds that accompanied it were primal, she was primal, and Mother Nature must have been watching because just then, another massive clap of thunder broke right outside their room. Was she losing it or did the hospital just shake? Was her body now controlling the weather, too?

“Wow!” the OB exclaimed. “Okay, we’re getting there! Just a few more.”

“Go get ‘em, tiger,” her husband said, and couldn’t he see that she wasn’t a tiger but a lion? A lion who could roar like…”

“Ahhhh!!!!” she pushed again, even harder this time, because why the hell not? She was in it now, she was halfway through the hardest HIIT class of her life, and there was no turning back. She wasn’t going to be on the cover of People, but she was going to be a mother.

“I see a head!” the husband screamed, just like every husband screamed in every fictional depiction of childbirth. And there she was, having her own clichéd and dramatic childbirth.

“Push one more time,” the doctor said, his eyes seething into hers, “and then you can go get yourself a breakfast burrito.”

“Ahhhh!!!!” she said, wanting that burrito but wanting this baby more. And then, holy shit, the doctors hands were pulling something out of her and that something was her son and he was covered in goop, not the Gwyneth Paltrow kind but the bloody, horror movie kind, and then her husband was crying and the baby was crying and she was crying and holy shit, she had a son.

She’d done it.

The baby cried and thunder clapped outside the window.

“We have a son!” her husband exclaimed.

“A healthy baby boy,” said the OB, as he snipped that healthy baby boy’s umbilical cord, then put him on her chest. “Jesse?”

“Van?” asked her husband.

“Kash?” suggested the nurse.

“Ryder,” she said with sudden clarity, smiling at her husband, who nodded, and then at her rosy, wrinkled, exquisite son. Her eyes pierced his, which we almond-shaped and soaking in the world, and his mother, for the very first time. “Ryder of the storm.”