Hormone Granger

Let me paint a picture for you.

In a dimly lit conference room, a dozen new and expecting parents sit in a circle. Each anxiously eyes a silver plastic doll and, following instructions emanating from a screen at the front of the room, occasionally leans down to blow into its tiny mouth. "Now give thirty presses on the baby's chest. One, two, three...." The parents do as they're told, and the syncopated pops and puffs of the dolls make it sound as if someone has just switched on the Everlasting Gobstopper machine from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A nurse patrols the room, nodding with approval. This is the world we're living in these days.



It's serious business having a baby -- and I mean that in at least two ways, first in terms of the stuff. The sheer amount of equipment required to host a pooping enthusiast of this caliber is astonishing. But I also mean it figuratively. We've sat in rooms like the one described above and learned how to help our baby nurse if he has trouble on his own. We've learned how to work through the pain of labor with breathing, movement, and positive messages. And we've learned how to save our baby's life if he stops breathing or his heart stops beating. Of course, the seriousness of this business doesn't stand in the way of its often being hilarious. Just ask my wife, who spent a good part of last night's class laughing uncontrollably. Then she cried.

It all started in the portion of the class when we were required to respond to various emergency-type situations. Invariably, the right answer was 1) check the scene, 2) check the victim, 3) call for help, 4) check for breathing, and 5) administer CPR until help arrives. This all seemed simple enough to me, and most of the class shared my approach of repeating these steps like a broken record in response to each new emergency-type situation. Lauren, however, chose to read these scenarios with the kind of critical acuity I normally reserve for Renaissance poetry. For instance, one scenario had us responding to cries of help from a woman who was picnicking with her suddenly unwell baby. As the rest of us began to chant our five steps, Lauren interjected: "Well, the first thing you need to do is to determine whether that woman knows CPR and, if so, decide which of you is going to perform it." She cut to the core of the scenario's hidden complexity. Meanwhile, she wisely evaded my astonished glance to avoid cracking up. Another scenario had us responding to cries of help from two teenagers with an unwell friend on a hiking trail. Once again, Lauren found the loose end. As we chanted the five steps, she leaned over to me and whispered, "No way those teenagers are giving 911 a precise location. They have no idea where they are." Astute, if a little ungenerous to the hiking teenagers of the world.

Somewhere along the line, the seemingly endless repetition of the five steps coupled with the baffling that's-how-they-get-ya approach of my wife to CPR training made me chuckle. That's all it took; she lost it. Face buried in hands, body convulsing, all composure lost. I knew then we were headed up and down the same hormone roller coaster we've been on so many times over the past nine months. Something gets Lar going, and she enjoys a fit of uncontrollable laughter before dissolving into tears. Not sad tears, mind you, but not laughing tears either. It's as if she's experiencing every emotion at once, as if the levee has broken. It's one of the highlights of pregnancy and perhaps a useful metaphor for the experience as well.

The whole of pregnancy, at least from the humble perspective of the wing-man, is a laugh-cry. How else can one be expected to respond to the notion of creating a living being? naming it? introducing it to the sun and the trees, as if they were yours or you understood them? How else can one be expected to respond to the idea of a dog attacking a baby ("Baby Meets Bowser" class -- I know) or the prospect of postpartum depression?

Maybe you have your own answer to that question. Maybe you are a "serious person." I respect serious people. Most of my heroes are serious people. (I was going to write "Some of my best friends are serious people," but seriousness may be my one disqualifying criterion in that area.) But we are who we are. I remember my dad -- a phenomenally unserious person -- once trying to explain to me, a thirteen year-old who thought that every hour was comedy hour, that not every hour was comedy hour. I responded by laughing hysterically. Then I cried, and it was his turn to laugh. Puberty may be as close as I'll ever get to the hormonal turbulence of pregnancy. Or maybe pregnancy is as close as Lauren will ever get to my everyday state of mind.

In any event, twenty-five days stand between us and parenthood.