PARENTING: DAY 1

It's common wisdom that parenting is tiring but what the bastards who are in the know don't tell you is that the exhaustion starts on the goddam first day, no, wait, it starts two nights before when you arrive at the hospital for the induction of labor and overnight, every 30 to 45 minutes someone else knocks or swings open the door to take vital signs or give you a form to fill out or check the linens or check the cervix, and the first night is spent sleepless too because of the anticipation of finally getting to see your little one the next day.

The problem is when the next day becomes the next night and the cervical dilation and effacement progress and your brave wife's labor is accompanied by the terrifying decreasing pitch of fetal decels, and you have to refrain from whispering under your rank breath, "put the oxygen on, goddamit," because the first clause would be tender, but it'd be hard to explain that the damnation of god is meant for this situation, when you arrive at a point that all labors somehow share, the moment that your terrified loved one looks at you, pleading for help and you can't do anything, all of your influence and work at the this very same medical center don't mean shit because no one's returning your pages and what are they going to do anyway, are they somehow going to magically change the asynclitic positioning and arrest of progress?

Exhaustion gives me vertigo, as I've discovered over the past couple of years, and I have become oddly accustomed to feeling the world spin off its axis over the past few days, striking at will.  "Oddly accustomed" would be a great travel-blog, "oddly accostumed" would be a welcome store around Halloween.

The fatigue sits next to you while you wait for the docs to come and talk to you about the cesarean section, it sets next to you instead of on you because the vertigo tilts everything off kilter, while you silently pray, at 2 in the morning suddenly stricken by the realization that you could lose your family in one fell stroke, your pregnant wife and expected daughter, and you don't ignore, you wallow in the knowledge that so many prayers seem to fall on God's ultimately deaf ears, an understanding that you've approached by realizing that prayer doesn't change things, it changes you, but you're finally wise enough to realize that you rarely want to be changed.

And then, in the OR, sitting behind a curtain with your wife's oddly disembodied head, body hidden by blankets and drapes, all you can think of in your exhausted mind is of the Wizard of Oz and whether there's actually a c-section going on or if some sly Midwestern grifter is just pulling levers, until they hold up an actual baby, covered in actual vernix, a little hairy but by no means the karmic response to own of your funnier med school anecdotes, and while they close your wife you and she put your faces close to your child's.  Three twenty five AM, the 3rd of August, 2012, 5 pounds, 10.7 ounces, 18 inches tall, your little girl.

And then during the day you make the 45 minute to hour commute back home that you always make, same assholes, different cars, only this time to pick up your mother-in-law, who'd been waiting by the phone in your house since arriving from Syracuse two days before, and then you drive back to the hospital, and you spend the day delirious with comparisons of eyes and ears and lips and expressions, and then you drive your mother-in-law back, and then you drive back again because your family is actually still in the hospital because of the c-section, and that's where you need to be, with your family, and at some point you realize it's Day 1 of being an actual parent, when the rules change and now they've changed you.

And now I'm a writer fueled by the drug of exhaustion.

This is what terror looks like:  me wearing a clean, AKA "bunny", suit over my street clothes so I can go into the OR where my wife is about to go under the knife for a c-section.