The real reason my wife suggested we celebrate Kathryn's eighth birthday a full two months early by taking her to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? This:
A crystal skull cake.
I'm just happy she didn't suggest we take Kathryn to Sex and the City. God only knows what kind of cake she would have made for that.
As odd as it was to be interviewed by the Japanese, it didn't hold a candle to being showered by Koreans.
Let me back up a bit.
It was late 2005, a month or two before the twins were born, and in the back of a Babies "R" Us, two Koreans had cornered my wife. Admittedly, this was not hard to do. Given her size and range of motion at the time, she could just as easily have been cornered by two pill bugs. As if you needed proof:
Sitting:
Standing:
The Koreans had clipboards and questions and the look of people way outside their comfort zone, like Lutherans with tambourines and flowered necklaces. They had been there for a while, wandering the store, timidly approaching people, and I had done my best to keep Sharon away from them, because I knew that whatever these people wanted, if Sharon could help, she would. And she'd probably bake them zucchini bread to go with it, too. And it turned out that what these people wanted was to shower an old pregnant lady. And videotape it.
Viola!
Okay, what they wanted was to interview an old pregnant lady, and in return, they would throw her a baby shower, and they would broadcast the entire thing on Korean TV. Of course, Sharon said yes. And then she rushed home to start grating the zucchini.
A few days later, our tiny New Jersey rental house was the scene of the most bizarre impromptu baby shower I've ever witnessed. The film crew arrived late in the evening, with wrapped presents, pink streamers, and a bowl of salad with no dressing. As they set up, we greeted our guests, who were really just neighbors as we had moved there not but a month before and we still knew very few people. Looking back on it, we probably should have brought in people from farther afield, because from that evening on, our neighbors never really looked at us the same again.
As everyone was getting into place, the producer told us two things about Korea. One, Korean women were beginning to have children later in life, and by that he meant in their late twenties. This has caused quite a bit of concern, because do you know what comes after having babies in your late twenties? Having babies in your early thirties! And what comes after that? America! America comes after that. America, with all its problems and social ills, comes when women start having babies in their late thirties. And that's why the film crew had been there that day, in the Paramus Babies "R" Us, looking for pregnant women in their late thirties to interview. The producer told us that, of all his previous assignments, this had surely been the hardest because it necessitated spending hours upon hours in that store approaching strange women asking, first, if they were pregnant and, then, their age, something that ranks up there with elective scrotal surgery in the pantheon of things men do not want to do.
The other thing we learned is that Koreans do not typically throw baby showers.
After a few minutes of filming idle chatter over salad, each guest was handed a pre-wrapped gift to present to my wife, then hustled over to a corner of the living room for an individual interview which always began with the same two questions: What gift did you bring to the shower, and why did you choose it? Strangely, neither of those two questions were actually included in the broadcast version of the event, possibly because the majority of the guests answered with "I don't know" and "I don't know" respectively. The questions following were much harder hitting, often including whether women over thirty-five should have children, and whether the guests thought my wife, sitting not five feet away and bending the room with the gravity of her bulk, was making a mistake. To their credit, nobody said yes to the latter. They didn't ask me.
A few months later, we received an envelope containing a videotape of the program. It turned out to be a sixty-minute science program about pregnancy, featuring footage of not one, not two, not three, but four complete vaginal deliveries, which is four more than I had ever seen up to that point. The baby shower came somewhere near the end, or so I was told by my wife who was still able to look directly at the television by that time. The whole program was in Korean with no subtitles, so we still have no idea what anyone was saying, and it will probably stay that way until we find someone with a strong constitution and the ability to speak Korean.
Maybe we'll look for just such a person at the Paramus Babies "R" Us.
"You didn't."
"I did."
"Aw, hell," I said and excused myself to the kitchen to make a bowl of olives and a couple of martinis to go with them. This one was going to be ugly.
It was Thursday afternoon and Thursday afternoons mean two things in the Looky, Daddy! household: babies and martinis. It all started just under a year ago when I attended a night out for moms of multiples. It was me and about 15 moms of twins or triplets, drinking and eating, sharing stories to make blood run cold, and cursing our spouses. Each of the four types of moms was in attendance: Power moms, Working moms, Yoga moms, and Mom moms. And me, of course, The Dad.
One of the Yoga moms, whom we will call Jennifer because that's her name, was in awe of me. Absolute awe. She was sitting there, right next to me, and these big 'ol waves of awe were radiating out from her and toward me. Frankly, I wasn't surprised--I am, after all, The Dad. Okay, so it wasn't me per se that she was aweing over, it was my ability to get out of the house, twice a day, on time, in the dead of winter, with a 5-year-old and not-yet-one twins. She confessed that she and her 5-month-old twins never left the house, and on the few times she had tried, it had taken her hours to get everything together and each time she had eventually just given up, turned on Teletubbies, and wept bitter tears as she brewed herself a new pot of coffee, her third or fourth of the day.
An intervention was clearly required.
The problem, I told her, was not that she couldn't get out of the house, it was that she didn't have enough of an incentive to get out of the house. The only reason I had my crew out the door and into the car by 7:45 AM, I explained, was that doing so meant I earned myself one less child for the next 7 hours. So even if I had to drive to school in my flannel pajamas and houseshoes (which I did on countless occasions), I was getting out that door.
"What you need, Jennifer," I summed up, "is the right incentive to leave the house."
Thus the 3-Martini Playdate was founded. It has been going strong ever since.
I returned to the table with the bowl of olives and the fresh martinis. "Oprah? You TiVoed Oprah?"
Jennifer looked sheepish. "She had Julia Roberts on."
I gasped audibly. Julia Roberts was a name that hadn't been mentioned in my house since the twins were born. Hearing it then, even when The Mom was safely far away in her office on Madison Avenue, sounded wrong, like a betrayal. For those of you who do not know, Julia Roberts has twins. In fact, she had twins at just about the same time that my wife, The Mom, had twins. And this is why her name is not mentioned in our house:
Before twins:
After twins:
Julia Roberts is a living, breathing assault to the self-esteem of twin-moms everywhere. The Mom mutters a curse and spits on the ground whenever she passes a photo of this hell-woman.
"Oh, that is so not good."
Jennifer begins the litany. "Did you know that six weeks after having her twins, Julia was already starting a new film?"
Six weeks after my twins were born, my wife still hadn't seen daylight. I remember one time when, in between the round-the-clock nursings, I opened the curtains of our bedroom only to have her bleat at me like a startled and blind veal-calf. I shut the curtains quickly. It was scary.
Those were dark, dark days.
"Please don't compare yourself to Julia Roberts. She's got nannies, housekeepers, handlers, personal trainers, and loads and loads of money," I pleaded.
"She claims her twins love each other," she countered.
We both stopped and look at our two sets of twins. Jennifer's were fighting over one of two identical toys. Mine were pulling each other's hair.
"She's probably not around them long enough to see this kind of stuff," I hypothesized. "Plus, her nannies probably keep each one in a separate wing of the house. Those kids probably don't even know they are twins."
"She said she likes her kids as much as she likes her friends," Jennifer continued.
"Sucky friends," I countered and raised my martini glass.
"She claims having twins has made her marriage stronger."
"This from a woman who married Lyle Lovett?"
"She even said the B word."
I cringe again. "Blessed?"
"Yes."
"Then she's dead to us. And to your TiVo."
"You're right. She's dead to us."
And we muttered a curse, spit on the floor, and clinked our martini glasses together.
Then, while Jennifer got up to rescue one child who was being sat upon by the other three, I got up to make another bowl of olives. And two more martinis to go with them.
This past week, as you may have read, The Mom stumbled and sprained her ankle on her daily commute in New York City. This kind of thing happens there all the time and she said nobody gave her a second look either during or after the incident. But almost exactly two years ago to the date, The Mom stumbled and sprained the exact same ankle in an event that came very close to knocking the world off its axis and sending us all spinning into oblivion. That's because she was 8-months pregnant with the twins and approximately the size of a small moon. From the impact alone, we are lucky she did not generate an earth-swallowing dust-cloud ushering in another Ice Age and bringing all humanity to the brink of extinction. (Except, of course, for Canadians who might never have noticed.) There is still a small crater in the spot where my wife and her belly landed.
Fortunately on this occasion, The Mom was a mere two blocks from our house when she stumbled and she was lucky enough to have been spotted by a dog-walking neighbor. He, with the aid of a back-hoe and half a dozen immigrant workers with leaf blowers, managed to get The Mom and her hijacked-by-twins body back home safely.
Now near our house is a hospital. It is a small hospital, within easy walking distance of our house, but it lacks many features that a young family might need, like a pediatrics ward or a NICU for at-risk births. Before the twins were born, we interviewed with many local pediatricians and one had this to say about our local hospital. "It's okay to go there if your child gets a scratch or a bump." Then she paused thoughtfully. "Or a scratchy bump," she added, making the list as comprehensive as possible. But we thought for a sprained ankle it would be fine.
Never have I seen a hospital staff as excited as they were when I helped my wife through those emergency doors. She was treated like royalty. Very big royalty. People came out of the woodwork to ooh and ahh, coo and squeal at my wife's enormous rotundity. Then they learned about her ankle. "It's not labor?" they wailed. Doctors, orderlies, and candystripers walked away crestfallen as they learned that, in fact, no water had broken, nothing was dialated, and the contractions were still months apart.
Still, a sprained ankle on a woman who weighs seven times more than she weighed only 8 months ago is nothing to sneeze at, so my wife was "fast-tracked." Sadly, this meant that we were whisked away to a separate wing of the hospital which, it would seem, few staff had ever heard of, much less visited. (I have since then learned that over a third of the workers at this hospital believe the "fast-track wing" to be a myth.)
We found ourselves in an area there were about six examination rooms radiating out from a central nurses' station. There were no other patients in the other examination rooms. There were no nurses at the station. Not a single computer at the nurses' station was on. And there we waited. And waited. It occurs to me now that they probably sent us to that remote hospital wing with the idea of waiting out the twins. If my wife weren't in labor yet, dadgummit, then she'd stay there until she was! That'll teach her!
But anyway, to make an already long story short, eventually someone came through the ward, possibly using it as a shortcut from one place to another, and I scared the living crap out of her by emerging from our little room and asking when we would be seen. She was properly horrified that we had been there so long and rushed away to get a doctor. I swear I saw her cross herself several times as she scurried off.
The doctor finally arrived, switching on the computers as he came in, and with his arrival, the rest of the visit was pretty run-of-the-mill. Except for the x-rays. It took multiple orderlies to get The Mom onto the x-ray table, and, while they struggled to get her and her ankle into the proper position, one poor man kept trying to pour buckets of water over her saying they'd get her back to the ocean if only she could hold out until the tide came back.
Just another day in the life of The Mom. God bless her.