In my next life I'm coming back as a man. I will have sex with my wife and knock her up and then in the hospital I will watch while she figures out how to get the baby out of her. And after my daughter is born, I will play with her when I'm in the mood and stop when I'm not and I won't get all psycho about it. I will throw her up in the air super high and get her wound up right before she's supposed to go to sleep and then I will let my wife, her mother, put her to bed.
I will have the best body I've had in years because having a newborn means that I will get up so early in the morning, I will end up going to the gym regularly. If my child doesn't eat or sleep or move her bowels for days or weeks on end, I won't worry about it.
"Would you stop worrying?" I will tell her mother, my wife. "What do you get yourself so worked up for?"
And then I will go out. I will enjoy life more than I did before I had children because fatherhood has shown me dimensions of my heart I could never have imagined, and everyone I know will agree it's made me a much better man. At night I will sleep like a baby because I am a man. I know it is my wife, her mother, whom my daughter will hate in 14 years. Not me.
But I am not a man, I'm a woman, I'm the wife, and what's worse, my in-laws are coming for dinner and I'm flat on my back in bed, sick as a dog. But Adam, my husband, is a dreamboat and goes with our baby, Olive, to buy all the groceries while I sleep.
I wake up to the smell of browning sausages. My sweet husband is at the stove with the cookbook open. I fall in love all over again. Then I look at the bag they came in and do a double take. He didn't buy them from Esposito's. We live in the sausage capital of the world and my husband may as well have brought back breakfast links from Denny's.
"Adam. Why didn't you buy them at Esposito's?"
"Because I was in the cheese store buying the bread and they had these, so I thought I'd try them."
"Are they the fennel ones?"
"No. They didn't have the fennel ones."
"Oh no."
"You know what, Cathy?" he says throwing the wooden spoon on the counter. "Do it yourself." He goes into his office to seek refuge.
I know he's right. But on the other hand he did bring home inferior sausage product. We're cooking a sausage ragout. Sausage is the main ingredient and it's corrupted. I knock on his door and try to apologize.
"I'm sorry, honey. I should have just been thanking you. That was so nice of you to do the shopping. Really. I just don't understand how you could not go to Esposito's. It's right next door to the cheese store. When they didn't even have the fennel ones, why didn't you just think to go next door?"
He starts yelling at me. He accuses me of torturing him. He's pounding his finger into the desk to illustrate how I pretend to apologize and then continue to stick it to him. Part of me thinks: Forget it. I'm fussy about food, and if that is the price the world has to pay for me getting over an eating disorder 20 years ago, then so be it.
But I've heard this before. I've seen the finger-pounding-into-the-desk gesture before. People tell me I am a bully. The speechwriter I dated before I met my husband explained to me, in a museum, after I kept showing him over and over a painting I loved, that he saw it the first time I pointed it out and that he didn't like it.
"You seem to think," he told me, "that if you continue to explain to me in different words why you like it, that I will change my mind. I saw the painting, I heard why you like it, and I still don't like it. So quit making me go back and look at it."
It is true. I think everyone will see things my way if I just explain them properly. So I keep explaining. I keep talking. I keep trying. The speechwriter told me I was a bully. My husband thinks I am the biggest bully ever. Maybe I am. But someone's got to grab the reins. In marriage, and especially in parenthood, someone has to be paying attention.
For example, who do you think is the one who noticed that most babies Olive's age seem to do nothing but sleep, while Olive is always awake and incredibly alert? Not Adam. When I brought it up, he told me I was insane. I believe his actual words were something like: "When she's tired, she'll sleep. Quit looking for something to be upset about."
At Olive's next doctor appointment, when I casually raise the issue with her pediatrician, it turns out I am not insane.
"They need a lot of sleep," the doctor says. "Babies her age should be sleeping 12 to 16 hours a day."
"Oh," I say nonchalantly, but panic is ringing through my head like a car alarm.
"How much sleep is she getting?" the doctor asks me.
"She's not getting that much," I say.
"Well, she should sleep 10 to 12 hours at night and take three naps during the day."
"Really," I say. I quickly do the math in my head and realize Olive sleeps only about nine hours a day.
"How much is she sleeping?" the doctor repeats.
"Not that much."
"Is she napping?" Napping? Never. "Not really. Whenever I put her down, she wakes up."
"You have to get her to nap."
"How?"
"Figure it out."
I can't believe this is this idiot's advice: "Figure it out." I hate our doctor.
"You have to do whatever it takes," the doctor says. "Rock her, walk her, put her in the Baby Bjorn, put her in the swing. Do whatever you have to do. But she needs to take naps. Babies need a lot of sleep. It's very important. It's when their brains develop. What time does she go to sleep at night?"
My husband and I explain, sheepishly, that she goes to sleep when we do, around midnight, or that sometimes lately we try to trick her by pretending to go to sleep and turn off all the lights at two or three in the morning if she doesn't seem tired yet.
"No," she says, scolding. "That is too late for a child to go to sleep. You're going to be in big trouble when it is time for her to go to school. She needs to go to bed by seven every night and she needs to take three naps every day -- and they need to be uninterrupted and 45 minutes long."
I'm hysterical on the walk home.
"Adam, what are we going to do?"
"I don't know, Cathy. We'll put her to bed earlier. That's what we'll do."
"But we're seven hours off schedule."
"We'll figure it out. Would you calm down? Anyway, if she doesn't nap then, whatever."
I hate him. This is how we will figure it out: We won't and we won't worry about it. That's his big plan. He has no plan. He's not worried and he doesn't care. He sleeps through the night anyway. He hasn't got a clue.
Clearly I am the only responsible parent in this family. I'm going to have to figure this out by myself. I always have to do everything by myself. I look over at Olive. She is sleeping. I calm down. But the seven-hour bedtime-sleep deficit is still freaking me out.
"Adam, what are we going to do?" I ask him again.
"You're driving me crazy."
I look at him and know I am going to leave him.
"Don't wake her up," I hiss at him. "And when you tell me how we are going to close the seven hour gap between what we are doing now and what the doctor says we have to do, then I will calm down."
"You are really out of your mind," he says. "Do you know that? I don't know how we'll do it, but we will. Tonight we'll put her to bed a little earlier. And we'll keep doing it until we get her to bed at the right time."
"But how long will that take?" I ask.
"I don't know, we'll do it 15 minutes every few days. So I guess it will take a few weeks. We'll do it gradually."
Gradually? What a horrible plan. I can't believe I married this man.
But crossing the street I make a startling realization: I've never done anything gradually in my entire life. And Adam does everything gradually. That's why I married him and why I must stay with him forever. He is the most important person I know. He is capable of doing things gradually.
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