The clashing of the perfection of my ideals (along with my emotional commitment to them) with a deeper, unclear source of unease or dissatisfaction (coupled with a sense of fading, as though the Violet that I was before I met and married Stan was slowly becoming translucent) settled into a vague sense of tedium. My life was tedious.
It was tedious to feed Krystal and entertain her during the day. Tedious to clean the house — something I almost never did until Stan would throw up his hands in frustration and clean the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon, giving me a lecture on how easy it was to keep a house clean if I would just clean a little each day — tedious to cook and get dressed, tedious to eat my rice and applesauce and loaf of bread, tedious to be pregnant, to have breath-stopping pancreas pain, to sleep or go to the bathroom or have sex or even make an effort at conversation… it was all so tedious.
So when Stan arrived home from New Jersey and we began the debriefing process (which meant that Stan talked endlessly of his experiences with his estranged family and I listened until he was finished… at least for 15 minutes or so before he began again), I found it all so tedious to be his wife.
When it was discovered that the reason I wasn’t due in February like I had previously tested for — my baby had an early March due date now — was because I’d had a miscarriage and gotten pregnant right away again, I found the information tedious. Stan shed a tear, much to my surprise, and held me close, as though he could reach the baby we lost if he put his hands over my belly long enough, but I was numb to the news. And pissed as hell that I had to wait an extra month to deliver. It was all so tedious to be an expectant mother again.
When my pancreas flared and I found I couldn’t breathe, the first thing I’d do was draw a bath and tell Stan I was going to be out of it for a while. I didn’t go to the ER anymore, since I had to drive myself and sometimes even had to take Krystal. I would just heave an annoyed sigh and run the water hot. Later I’d take some Vicodin and think about how tedious all of this was.
Kisses were tedious. Touching was tedious. Talking was tedious. Smiling was definitely tedious and laughing was absolutely unheard of.
When it came time for me to deliver, Krystal spent the day with some friends of ours from church and Stan took his Nintendo DS with him so he could while away the hours of my labor with his video game. The labor pains were tedious. The drip epidural wasn’t so tedious, but the hours that passed were. When the time came close, the only way I could tell was by watching the contraction monitor show a rising line… up and up and up… though I didn’t even feel so much as a tightening in my stomach. It was tedious.
Just before my son was born, as I was crowning, my OB doctor walked into the birthing room, greeted me and put on some gloves, asked me to push, delivered Phillip, and then left with a goodbye. I could tell that my birth was tedious to her. She spent less than 5 minutes total in my room when my son was born. He came out blue. I wondered if it was because he was too long in the birth canal and I couldn’t feel enough to do anything about it, or if there was some other odd reason. With a sense of tedium, I surmised that it was all my doctor’s fault. She was so unexcited about my baby, and didn’t even smile when he finally began to cry.
To my relief, Stan and I both agreed on circumcision. Cleaning a penis seemed so tedious, and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to do it. I figured they got really dirty when they were unclipped because Stan always tasted like shit when he wanted me to give him head. Either that, or the process was so tedious that nothing could entice me, even though I used to love it. Now it was just a chore. Plus, Stan never returned the favor — not after the infamous herpes diagnosis. Thanks for your dedication, Stan. How tedious.
(I know a little more about circumcision now, and would have chosen differently if I’d had more knowledge about the process of circumcision, but I was a young parent with no real information, and Stan, uncircumcised himself, knew no more than I did.)
Nursing was probably the only thing that felt relaxing once I got the hang of it. Even though I was bone tired from being pregnant and in pain and staying up with Phil, I at least got to enjoy the unique experience of release when I nursed and felt my milk let down. I didn’t even mind that I dripped on the unused side. It was tedious when Stan remarked on my growing breasts, though. I found all of his overtly sexual remarks increasingly tedious. Most of the time, I didn’t let him lay a finger on me. His obsession with lewd comments turned me cold. Sex was just so damned tedious. Thank God I had a few weeks of time to myself, since I’d just given birth and nothing was allowed in there for a while.
But thinking about getting naked was too tedious for me to even consider. Fortunately, I really did get some time to myself, about three weeks after Phil was born. Unfortunately, the circumstances caused considerable trauma to Stan, according to his side of the story.
It was in the evening, around 7 o’clock, that the pain began. It was the first time since I had been pregnant that I’d gotten an attack of pancreatitis, and I told myself I’d go in to the ER this time since I didn’t have my pregnancy preventing any treatment. I told Stan I was going to the hospital.
“Take the baby,” was all that he said. I was grateful that he didn’t make me take both of them. How tedious.
I strapped Phil into his car seat and drove the 25 miles to Corpus Christi ER and checked myself in. The nurse at the front desk asked me what I was doing in an ER with a newborn if the problem was with me. The ER doctor on call that night asked me what I was doing with a newborn in the ER if the problem was with me. The attending nurses asked me what I was doing with a newborn in the ER if the problem was with me. Every time, my answer was the same: “My husband told me to bring him.”
I was so accustomed to Stan’s apparent sensitivity to parenthood (I considered him a babysitter instead of a father, so fully did I protect him from his duties as father — and so fully did he separate himself from those duties) that my answer didn’t seem out of the ordinary at all. But when the doctor told me that there were all sorts of bad germs floating around in an ER, I felt a stab of resentment. Stan could have handled it if I’d left Phil home. I could have pumped or something.
It wasn’t until I started vomiting from the pain in my pancreas that I realized this time was different than the others. Blood work was taken and the anesthetist came in to explain the kind of pain medicine he was giving to me, as well as my condition. I love how doctors drug you and then explain what the hell is wrong with you, when you’re in no position to argue or even understand what they’re saying. I managed to stay conscious long enough to hear him tell me to call my husband and have him pick up my son, that my enzyme levels were off the charts, and that I’d have to have my pancreas and gallbladder looked at once things had settled a little. Then I blacked out.
The next evening, I found myself having difficulty breathing. My breasts were screaming in pain — as I was unable to nurse, or even pump due to the morphine I was on– and even though I’d wrapped my engorged breasts, my chest was still aching in a place deeper; the pain seemed unrelated to an excess of breast milk. I called the nurse and told her I was having trouble breathing. She came in and took a look at me, glanced at my blood oxygen level, and then all of the sudden, I had six people standing over me, informing me that my oxygen levels were so low they needed to get me an emergency scan to rule out a pulmonary embolism. I asked them what that was. “A blood clot in your lung,” one of the nurses told me.
All of the sudden I felt like I was in a House episode. No embolism was found, I was returned to my room, an oxygen mask was put over my face, and I was told that the doctor would come check on me later. During the night, my legs began to shake. They shook violently, and when I tried to still them, the shaking moved up my body. Eventually my legs did settle down and the shaking took up residence in my head and neck, giving me the sensation that I was suddenly cerebral palsied (I learned later that I was suffering from hypoxia, and even later still during a visit from Stan that his father looked just like I did in the hours before he died). It took another day for the shaking to go away, but it was finally determined that I was allergic to morphine and didn’t metabolize it properly; instead of each dose moving through my body, they built up until I had an extreme reaction. I half expected Hugh Laurie to walk into my hospital room, pop a few pills, pronounce some obscure diagnosis that no one had ever heard of and tell me that everybody lies.
It was a monumentally tedious experience. All except for the low blood oxygen and the mystery shaking. And the House fantasy.
I stayed in the hospital for five days. During that time, I’d instructed Stan to purchase a bottle and some formula to feed Phil. Stan called me one night and told me that Phil would cry every time he woke — scream — eat, fall asleep for two hours, wake screaming and scream until he ate, and then sleep for another two hours and continue on this cycle without pause.
“I want to lock him in a closet and just leave him there,” Stan told me over the phone. I was frightened by the intensity of his voice. “I can’t do this. I’m not good at being you. I can’t stand that crying. It’s all the time. I just can’t stand it.”
Stan sounded really serious. I almost left the hospital right then, but I learned that if you leave AMA (against medical advice) then your insurance doesn’t pay for your visit, and I’d been there for a while. I don’t remember what I said to Stan to try and calm him. I was still sort of out of it myself still, but my stomach got heavy and my blood ran cold when I heard him talk about my little baby like that. Images of the movie Sybil ran through my mind and I pictured Phil blindfolded and locked in a wheat silo, alone and in the dark. Being stuck in a hospital with a crazy-talking husband to tend to your little kids is not exactly tedious… it’s petrifying.
I was finally discharged with a scheduled LapCo (laparoscopic cholecystectomy — a gall bladder removal surgery) in a few days’ time.
After I got home and picked up Krystal from one of our friend’s house, a lady from our church came to visit and noticed my screaming son. The first thing she did was take a look at his bottle.
“It looks like this nipple is too small,” she said clinically. I gasped and felt a hot wave of shame run through me. Could it be that Phil had been starving the entire time I was in the hospital? Had I been starving my child? Immediately, I asked my friend for a pair of scissors and cut the hole in the nipple larger. Phil ate ravenously. When we got home, he slept for eight hours without waking.
“Don’t ever leave me alone with him again,” Stan told me sternly that night when I had changed Phil’s diaper and fed him again. Thank God he had enough to eat finally! “I can’t handle his screaming. If you have to go anywhere, I don’t care where it is, you take him with you. Take Krystal too, if you can. Those five days that you were in the hospital have traumatized me so much. You don’t even have any idea about it. I don’t care if he’s eating better now and not crying as much. It’ll take me a year to even be able to change his diaper again.”
God, Stan could be an asshole when he set his mind to it. Good thing I was caught in a world of tedium or I might have retorted with something like, “You’re Phil’s father, Stan. All of this is part of the territory.” Man, what a fight that would have caused. As it was, I made myself feel suitably sorry for Stan, empathized with the mortifying realization that Phil had been starving and we just didn’t know any better, and took Phil with me wherever I went.
Stan was as good as his word, too. For all intents and purposes, I took sole responsibility for my son.
Surgery went well. So well, in fact, that I didn’t remember any of it. One minute I was getting a cocktail in my IV and the next I was being wheeled into my room and told that the surgery was a success and that I had a demerol button at my disposal. It was the most fantastic two days of my life. No kids, no waking life even (with that button) and no crying. Just dreamless, perfect, narcotic-induced sleep.
It wasn’t even tedious.
