In July, two nights after my daughter was born, I took the subway home from the hospital in the very early morning and spilled water all over the floor of the N train. The water poured out of a vase of celebratory roses sent by my parents, which I had put in a paper bag and nestled between my tired feet; when I fell asleep the vase toppled over in the bag and slowly seeped its lifeblood out through the brown paper. I woke up several stops from home and noticed other passengers on the train dodging long, ropy strands of liquid that webbed the dirty train floor. I tried to move my feet out of the way of the flowing watery net, but then realized that I was the origin of the mess. A few of my fellow passengers regarded me with distaste. What’s in the bag, you dumb fuck?
I could have lifted the roses up out of the bag to show them, but two a.m. on a Saturday is no time for New York City show-and-tell.
Just before my daughter’s birth, the World Cup ended with a rousing Spanish victory in the championship match. I’d watched the final game in our apartment while my wife, big-bellied, puttered around a week past her due date. I felt lucky watching the game—wasn’t I supposed to be diapering somebody instead of enjoying this lazy freedom? A few days later, when our child was born, sports—watching sports, reading the sports section, giving a shit about who won a particular game—all of it fell out of my life completely.
Before that freefall into sportslessness, though, something funny happened in the hospital: just after my wife went into labor, after I filled out the admissions paperwork that I hoped would convince the twin gods of Medical Care and Health Insurance to smile on our coming child, I ran into Claudio Reyna in the elevator. Now retired, Reyna had for years been one of America’s most talented soccer players, a tough, skillful midfielder who could retain possession, distribute the ball quickly and wisely and build an attack; his nickname in Europe (yes, Reyna had a nickname in Europe, which sort of says it all right there) was Captain America. There he was, not too tall, standing next to me in the elevator with a cup of coffee. So was Claudio Reyna’s wife having a baby too? Was I going to hang out with Captain America on the maternity ward? Would we drink beers together at one of the cheesy bars near the hospital and talk about the U.S. national team’s unforgettable run to the quarterfinals in 2002? Would our kids become pals?
No. Claudio Reyna got off on the sixth floor, two below the maternity ward, before I had a chance to say anything (thus continuing my streak of speechlessness in the face of American soccer legends). And I kept going up, trying to convince myself I was ready for my wife’s labor and delivery.
We’d taken classes and read books, even written out a birth plan, though my wife and I should have read the skepticism in our doctors’ faces when they referred to the document we’d composed. The teachers we’d had, the cheerful illustrated books we’d been through, the parenting DVDs we’d watched had been filled with empowering rhetoric about breastfeeding and parent-child intimacy and the wisdom of midwives; these texts had convinced us that we had a say in the care we received during the arduous process of labor. But we didn’t. The night my wife delivered, a dozen other babies were born in the same hospital; there weren’t enough doctors and nurses to go around; we were left alone in a room until the very final moments of labor (known as “the transition,” a mild-mannered euphemism for something that Homer, had he written more about women, would surely have described in more graphic and heroic terms, perhaps employing a memorable page-long simile).
I wasn’t allowed to stay at the hospital with my wife and newborn child because we hadn’t paid the extra $500 per night for a private room, which would have included a narrow folding cot and all-night visitation privileges for me. But we couldn’t afford that, so from the very start I began to learn about the privations of a low-pay daddy. Hence my solo journeys through the New York subway tunnels on the first two nights of my daughter’s life, exhausted, off-kilter, unbelieving. Still, I was exhilarated: we’d had our baby. Soon we would be bringing her home. Not yet, though—not on that night of spilled flowers, the second and final night that I rode home alone with the enormous news that I was a father. When the train doors finally opened at my stop in Brooklyn, I left a paper grocery bag full of water on the subway platform and carried the vase of thirsty roses home in my hands, carrying it carefully, aware that it was fragile and that I needed to start paying attention to how I held things in my arms.
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Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
