A little over a year ago, I would have been driving home to a house I shared with a brown dog and no one else—a house equipped with a refrigerator that never once contained milk. That night I was driving home to a baby petting zoo.
As Alli slept peacefully in her bed, her momma and I bunkered down in the nursery next door in a war-like environment—no infantry, just infants; no gunfire, just currents of projectile vomit; no bombs, just BMs.
Jack’s movements were propelled by his first fundamental building blocks of thought, the foundation from which all his future thoughts would stem, blocks that manifested themselves in the form of raw, instinctual, and simple movement—movements designed to carry him from dark to light, cold to warm, loose to snug, craving to satisfaction, bad to good. Impossibly intricate. Miraculously simple.
Sam had a rough-looking black extension of dead skin that protruded from his belly button. When I first noticed it, I actually thought that one of the blue corn chips I had been eating must have somehow fallen in my shirt pocket before finding its way to my son’s belly during a diaper change.
As brutal as the witching hours were, they were merely unpleasant sprints as opposed to the uphill marathons we ran during the weekends, which had suddenly turned into slugfests with a backdrop of unspeakable volume that made an AC/DC concert sound like a little girl with asthma playing the flute.
“Honey,” I said one night while holding up a gown I was given for Sam, “we can’t be dressing him in this.”
“And why not?” asked Caroline.
“Well, for starters, it’s a gown. He’s gonna get ridiculed by all the other infant boys whose parents have the sense to not dress their sons in gowns. Where’d you get it?” I asked.
“Crenshaw’s,” she answered, referring to a high-end children’s boutique in town.
“Did it come with a complimentary ass-kicking?”
By week twenty it was official. Caroline had more meds running through her system than a middle-aged lab rat.
The babies were starting to move and the various and separated moving appendages gave Caroline the appearance of a proud momma expecting her very first octopus.
Caroline’s pregnancy was like Madonna in the early nineties. It was everywhere.
His skin looked as soft as a cloud, like nothing had ever caught it before, not even a glance, and it wiggled back and forth while he pursed his lips, elastic and perfect, not even creating so much as a crease in his cheeks at any time during his movements, his skin unable to do anything other than return to the first shape it ever knew—the first shape it ever had—the one that would be underneath every shape it would ever take.
