The Bomb

Recently, as I sat at my desk plodding through our finances, I heard my son make a pronouncement to his mother out of the blue, the blue being the wellspring of perhaps half the pronouncements of any three year old. What he said was, "Mommy, you gonna have a baby." First, there was a pause, a long pause, a moment where we made certain that we had heard him correctly. That pause, in turn, was followed by A) my wife's laughing look of incredulity, and B) my deep desire to wash the kid's mouth out with soap.

It's not as if his Kreskin moment was at all likely. My wife is still nursing. She is on the pill and with the demands of cleaning, laundry, feeding, laundry, cooking, laundry, diaper changes, laundry, bathtimes, laundry, bedtimes, laundry, playtimes and laundry there is little opportunity for intimacy, let alone the energy. Nonetheless, his prediction momentarily terrorized me. Bin Laden's an amateur compared to my kid.

We have two children, the boy, almost three, and the girl, who turns one next week. They are the lights of our lives. We adore them. Every day is joyous. Happiness fills our home. Mornings bring revelations of delight. We live in a state of bliss, blah, blah, blah. I'm done reproducing. We have filled our world allotment; a replacement for me, a replacement for my wife. Raising kids is expensive. Besides, I'm getting old. I'm frickin' tired. These little blessings are killing me.

My wife would, I think, like one more. At one point her argument consisted of the bleak, "If something happened to one of them then they would still have an extra sibling." "What if something happened to two of them," I countered. "What a depressing thing to say," she admonished. Other than putting my head in my hands, I still don't have a response for that.

We tried for several months to get pregnant the first time. We got a little gizmo that tested her urine every morning to determine how close she was to ovulation. My wife kept a careful log of the results. There was a little cartoon egg that would show up on the gizmo's screen when fertility was optimum, which meant it was time to get busy. Our term was, gettin eggy wid it.

After five or six months of gettin eggy with no success, I was sitting on the sofa one evening with my leg propped up when my wife got home. Earlier that day I had been informed by an orthopedic surgeon that I would need to have my trashed ACL replaced. I was in a funk. My wife plopped down next to me and handed me a card, a thoughtful get well gesture to cheer me up. The card simply read, "You're going to make a great daddy." It was a hallmark moment.

Aside from an already scheduled anniversary getaway a couple of weeks later that consisted of my hobbling and her throwing up, it was a wonderful pregnancy. A giddy, excited, perfect lead-up to our first child. We wanted. We planned. We got.

A couple of years later, in the middle of a frustrating morning futilely battling cables for the TV and the DVD and the Tivo and the cable box, I looked up to see my wife, hovering. She had this guilty sort of smile on her face; the kind that says, "Remember those six hundred dollar shoes I liked so much..." She was holding our son, probably as a shield. "What?" I asked impatiently, struggling to keep from being strangled by an errant cable. She lifted her shoulders in a sort of shrug and cocked her head, which only amplified that damned smile. "Honey, what!?," I repeated. In a sheepish voice and pushing the boy a little closer, she said, "I'm pregnant."

Apparently, the noise I made was otherworldly. I don't know. I don't remember it. I only know that the next sound out of my mouth was the rather panicked, "How do you know?"
"I just took a test," she offered.
"Go back and take another. Right now!"
"I don't have to pee."
"Drink some water. I'll get you a glass."
"I'm pretty sure about this," she said.
I repeated the otherworldly noise.
It wasn't exactly a textbook example of the supportive husband.

Of course, I came around. It only took me a week or so to get over the shock of unexpected familial enlargement. We had talked about having a second, but thought that another year would be better timing. It wasn't the perfectly planned and executed expansion of before. It didn't matter, though. I ended up just as excited as I had been for the first, maybe more so since the doubts that go with first time fatherhood were absent. After the birth I adapted and found the energy (barely) for the doubled workload. We moved on with our larger household, happy in the knowledge that we, or at least I, had completed the mission.

On the day before Valentine's Day, two days after my son had made his "baby prediction", I was reading the news, relaxing as the kids napped. My wife had just finished getting ready for work. She came over and stood behind me, reading over my shoulder. She leaned down, snuggling her head against mine, kissing me on the ear. "I love you," she said softly. "I love you, too," I replied, remembering she can be a romantic as Valentine's Day nears. She stayed close, her head pressed against mine and purred again, "I love you." I turned to look at her and it hit me. "Are you pregnant," I asked very slowly. She winced, "Yes."

Believing perhaps in our boy's oracular abilities, she had taken an EPT. It was positive. It was a strange moment, filled with dread for me, and I suppose for her, though her dread had more to do with my reaction than the actual pregnancy. I hugged her and said it was ok, that we'd work it out, without having any idea how. She said she was not ready for another, not yet. I said I wasn't ready for another, at all. "Who knows," I added optimistically, "maybe it was a false positive." I'm whistling in the dark. Our OB has told us those are very rare.

That night I couldn't sleep. How will we afford this child? How will I find the energy to raise three all under the age of four? Where will they all sleep (our home, though large, is only two bedrooms)? Infinite issues and so few answers. This is not what we, what I, wanted.

.....................................................

Today, she had a blood test; a more accurate determination, especially considering she couldn't be more than a week and a half along. They put a rush on it so we could get the results this afternoon. She called a little while ago. It was negative. She was crying, not sobbing, just sad.

I started writing this before we had the results of the blood test. I had two endings; the doom of the impending third child, and the dodged-a-bullet climax of no new baby, but neither one works now. They don't work because I feel sad too, and not just for my wife.

It's strange because it's not as if we lost a baby. There wasn't a baby to begin with; just a little stick that said she was pregnant when she wasn't. There was no conception.

Or, perhaps there was. Perhaps something was conceived in me because in the last 48 hours, wedged in between the worry and stress about it all, I had begun to warm to the idea. One more? I don't know anymore and not knowing is something, considering three days I ago I was certain I didn't want another. It was easier, I think, to not have a choice about it.

Funny how these things can turn you upside down. Perhaps, in a couple of days when our heads clear, she and I will talk... talk about, maybe, maybe one more.