I had been told to wait in the recovery room with nine women in the throes of labor by a distracted doctor at the main desk. My wife, on the verge of birthing her first son (birth imminent, the chart had read), stalled in the delivery during the final pushing. She had been whisked off to surgery for a c-section, leaving me alone in the birthing room with the beeping Plexiglas incubator warming up in the corner.
"What are you doing here?" an orderly asked as he wheeled in a bucket and mop to begin cleaning. I told him no one, in the haste to get to the operating room, had told me where to be, where to go. "Man, you can't be here," he said, "I've got to get this room ready for the next one. They're stacked up out there." So I drifted down to the desk and to the distracted doctor who told me to take a seat in the recovery room.
The women in the room began, in their individual expressions of pain, to come into a communal tune. Each whelp or moan began to synchronize, a kind of round harmony. The sound was transmitted around the room, an a cappella fugue of agony. The women peaked one after the other. The last one subsiding into a whimper just as the next reached a muscular grunt and growl. It was as if there was only one big contraction that oscillated around the room or that, in fact, the room itself rippled in one long ululation of a continuous sustained contraction. Nurses and midwives whispered to their laboring patients to "ride" the contraction, and the cacophony in the room had the orchestrated order of the squealing shriek of a train of roller coaster cars. As each woman emerged from her most recent bout with her body (her body that now was not her body but possessed by these biological imperatives and hormonal accelerants that split open a body to expel another body), each opened her eyes to see me sitting by the door. And as they focused on me, as they waited for the next spasm to grip them, I could tell they really, really didn't want me there.
2
In high-school health classes, it once was popular to have the students carry around, for days or weeks at a time, ten-pound bags of flour. The exercise was meant to simulate the weight of a newborn baby and the sustained lugging to condition the sexually active or soon-to-be sexually active teenager to the consequence of sexual activity, pregnancy, and the consequence of the consequence, live birth. The flour bags would be hauled to classes, held while eating lunch, babysat in gym class. Some students even dressed their bags of flour or pretended to change the bag of flour's diaper, an apparent mass hysteria to better imagine this potential semiattached dependent human mass.
Ten pounds! It is interesting that the birth announcement boilerplate contains a space for the newborn's weight. What other formal communication announces that information? Obituaries do not state that, at the time of death, the deceased tipped the scales at a svelte 185. Nor do wedding invitations report the fighting weight of the bride and groom. Perhaps there is just not that much to describe when we describe a baby, a baby so easily disguised as a bag of flour. We are left with the basics. Color of hair and eyes can change, and so such intelligence is rarely shared. The kid's size, the length and weight, is hardly static, and yet it is duly noted along with the name and the time and date of delivery into the world. Most likely we broadcast the heft of the infant because all through gestation it has been the focus, this hidden relentlessly growing thing, this curious expanding loaf, a kind of staple. The newborn remains pretty much that way for months outside the womb, a swaddled package. In short, the baby is an embodiment of human weight itself. It boils down to bulk. Ten pounds!
So after the birth of my sons, I gained a different kind of weight. Where my wife had come equipped with organic cavities to host the burgeoning other, I had to make do with these artificial blisters-the Snuglis, the papoose cradle boards, and canvas backpacks-girded to my body by contraptions of harness tack and strap. I had a baby sling, an ingenious device that looked and was worn like a Confederate soldier's bedroll. I draped it over one shoulder and it rode around the opposite hip, and then across the back. The sling was even made out of sturdy striped ticking and expanded like a kangaroo's pouch to allow the baby to ball up inside the enveloping folds. The tug of gravity then cinched tight, suspending the joey in this simulated womb. I could not resist rubbing this new belly of mine, massaging this living dead weight that only occasionally stretched, compressed beneath the smooth skin of fabric. How my body was contorted. And how I contorted my body simply to bear this childbearing. I discovered the shelves and hooks, the nooks and ledges of my anatomy to shift the baby about, not hot potato so much as a slippery, springy sack of spuds. My hips. My shoulders. My lap. My elbow's crook. Any port in a storm. I piggybacked. I made a swing of my distended arms. The baby rode my butt, my hands behind me, the laced fingers saddling his behind. I was, during the infancy, a declension of containment-hold, held, holding. Even when exhausted I could not shed this limp limpid. On my back. The baby bedded down on my front, bore down, bearing his full and concentrated weight asleep on my belly.
It isn't hard to make the leap. The literal weight that must be borne comes to stand, in a very solid way, for the metaphoric tare a parent incorporates. I was weighed down and weighed down. As a father I grew grosser by the day, by the ounce.
3
During the nine months my wife was pregnant with our first child, I gained twenty-five pounds. After he was born, I didn't lose the weight and actually gained twenty-five more pounds during my wife's pregnancy with our second son five years later. I like to think of it as sympathetic pregnancy, my body so in sync with my wife's that I matched her transformation pound for pound. My empathetic sensibilities did not extend, thank goodness, as they sometimes do, to experiencing a parallel brace of Braxton-Hicks contractions or a bout of morning sickness. It might be that I lacked the imagination to actually rewire my body's endocrine system to that degree of reproductive fidelity. I simply grew.
The weight did settle on my belly. As my wife grew rounder so did I. 1 suffered only friends and family, even while they admired and approved of the sensual fleshing-out of my wife, aghast at my own transforming body. "Oh that," I said, "the couvade," invoking the French for the phenomenon in order to (what?) make the weight gain arty or legitimate or scientific or, at the very least, explainable.
Couvade translates as the "hatching" or "nesting" and was first applied by anthropologists upon discovering cultures where husbands performed ritual renditions of labor in their own dedicated hut while their wives wailed for real in a hut next door.
It helped to bring up sympathetic labor as the reason for what was happening to me, to my body. We like to believe that we have control over our bodies, and for the most part we do. We control our bodily functions, command sleep, order movement. To exercise is to take one's body for a walk. But pregnancy puts a lie to such neat hierarchy of control. In pregnancy the body takes you for ride. You are at the mercy of the chemical equations coursing furiously through the body. The body's biological imperative. The physical results are stunning, sudden, and miraculous. Of course that is to say the "you" to whom the highjacking of pregnancy happens is not every "you." It couldn't really happen to me. I could only witness this metamorphosis. And, I guess, while witnessing, I wished to let myself go, to let my body go. Three-fourths of a year when new life is imminent allows the old life to be in abeyance. I let go without knowing I let myself go. I like to think I allowed my body to surprise me with my own generative process. But I believe my body did this on its own. The surprise was real.