Planting Dandelions (9 page)

There were days that the only thing holding me back from kicking him out was the thought that my pain-in-the-ass husband would be an even bigger pain-in-the-ass ex-husband. And I would have to put up with him, because of the children. As long as I was stuck with him anyhow, I might as well keep him close enough to take out the trash and help with bedtime.

I find the flip side of this line of reasoning useful even today.

“I will be the ex-wife from hell,” I promise sweetly, whenever I catch him admiring someone younger, blonder, and bouncier in the side-view mirror. He chuckles and gives a heartfelt “whoowhee.” Today, I like to think, he is happy to be stuck with me.

Nobody should have to stay in a relationship that's broken beyond repair, but there's something to be said for sealing off the exits. Being legally trapped together should be the right of any committed couple willing to endure it. When you've got to turn and face each other, there's a chance you can work it out.

Patrick did come home that night, and I let him stay, because we didn't know what else to do. After three nights sleeping apart and two days not speaking, we went to a marriage counselor. Her name was Nancy. She hardly said much of anything. She didn't have to. Just having a neutral third party in the room made us more mindful and aware of what we were saying to each other and how we said it. It didn't take long to turn things around. Our issues weren't the insurmountable, irreversible barriers they had felt like. We weren't the bad people we felt like. The issues were just issues, and we were just people who needed to upgrade a few skills. The fact that we both kept showing up for our weekly sessions became visible evidence of our commitment to each other, and that goodwill began to spread into the other days of the week. A kind word here, a soft gesture there. We were still so fragile in that first month or so of therapy. If we came up against any degree of conflict, we would back away from each other as if from a fallen wire. “Let's save this for Nancy,” we'd agree, and somehow manage to avoid it until then. By the time we got to Nancy, the issue in question wouldn't seem like such a big, snaky thing anymore. Gingerly, we began to try it at home. Clutching our photocopied diagrams of “How to Practice Active Listening,” we'd approach a topic like students learning a foreign language. “I think, uh, no, wait . . . I feel . . . you should, no, wait. What was the question?”

The birth of our third and last child mirrored love's labor. My prior two birthing experiences had started out as all-natural, at-home deliveries. The first was successful, but there were complications with the afterbirth that required a night in the hospital; the next labor was long and painful, and ended with an emergency C-section. I was younger, and cockier then, and very controlling. When things didn't go according to plan, I had a hard time accepting it, and added unnecessarily to my fear and pain. The third time was different. I still had ideals, but I was willing to let go of expectations. I didn't have anything to prove, but only wanted what was best for me and my baby. I hoped to avoid another caesarean, but neither did I want to repeat a long and difficult labor before winding up in the operating room anyway. I had to trust my doctor, accept advice, and be ready to make compromises. I gave myself permission to ask for help, and seek relief, if I needed it. I had a birth plan that I took seriously, but held lightly.

When our son was born, the sun was setting outside the delivery room. I felt no pain. I had no fear. Patrick stood at my side, holding my hand, his golden hair haloed by the dying sky. Our eyes burned into each other, as if we were the only two people in the room, in this marriage. But we weren't. This birth would add to all that was already between and behind us, binding us and holding us, sometimes against our will.

He squeezed my hand, hard, and with everything I had, I bore down and pushed.

A
friend of mine changed her daughter's diaper in front of me the other day. I couldn't hide my shock, and let out a little gasp.

“What?” my friend said.

“No penis,” I said, pointing.

Of course, I knew there wouldn't be. It wasn't like she'd crossdressed the baby and I'd been duped. I have plenty of friends with daughters. I've seen vulvas. It happens that I own one. But having changed my own children's bottoms approximately 18,000 times, I am conditioned to expect a penis inside a diaper. When there isn't one, I experience an irrational jolt of panic, as if maybe it fell off.

In our family, penises are standard-issue equipment. We have four of them, or rather, they do, my husband and our three sons. I am the odd woman out, the minority. It's not how I was raised. I had a sister, a mother, and a father. No brothers. Females were the ruling class, and I was part of it. I don't remember ever plunging ass-first into a toilet bowl in the house where I grew up. Not much was constant or predictable about life at 20 Armstrong, but you could reliably count on the seat to be down, day or night. It was there for me.

In my adult home, vertical is the default position for the toilet seat. Patrick and the boys seem to view it as a kind of Murphy bed. Available if needed, but otherwise up and out of their way. If there were toilet seats with spring-loaded hinges that snapped down like mouse traps, I would install them. Instead, I give shrill demonstrations in seat raising and lowering, which have a deterrent effect, but not in the way intended. The boys become reluctant to raise the seat in the first place, and pee all over it. Every time I have to wipe the fixtures behind them, which is every time they go, I wonder why we don't just rip all the moving parts out. The technology—seat hinges and flush lever—is evidently too complicated for them.

I've heard that some European public toilets are simply self-flushing stainless-steel closets. I wish IKEA would figure out how to flat-pack one. They could call it the PIPÜ. The boys could have that, and I would have my very own bathroom, a sanctuary of glistening ceramic, with a deadbolt on the door and a toilet seat cemented to the rim. I could even put a rug on the floor, right next to the pedestal, which in reality has to be wiped down at least once a day with window cleaner.

“I just wiped here this morning!” I yell. “Seriously, how hard can it be to control a penis?”

Patrick shrugs. “Pretty hard, sometimes.” There's no point in getting technical. The kinesiology and pneumatics, if he could explain them, would be lost on me, a stranger in a strange land. No matter how long I live among penises, I'll never really understand them. I'm like a mechanic who services imported cars but has never actually been behind the wheel of one. I don't know how they handle, first thing in the morning, bursting to pee. Apparently, like a fire hose.

The boys love to hear the story about the time I was changing one of their diapers on our bed, in the dark, when Patrick woke up shouting and flailing. I froze where I stood, a clean diaper dangling from my suspended hand. Was he having a nightmare? A heart attack? After a few seconds of incoherent cursing, he became conscious enough to realize, and convey, the source of his distress.

“The baby! The diaper! Cover the baby!”

“Huh?”

I looked down to where I had positioned the baby horizontally on the bed. I could just make out the last droplets of a stream that had arced impressively over his own head and splashed down on his father's. I flung the clean diaper over the source, but it was too late. I threw another over Patrick's face, trying to be helpful.

“Always,” he sputtered, “cover that thing during changes.”

Well, how was I to know it would go off like that?

Ten years later, my son still regales his younger brothers with “the time I peed on Dad's head.” They hoot and slap the ground. Way to get one over on the alpha male. More, and worse, potty talk inevitably follows, accompanied by pantomime where indicated. Somebody farts. Then everybody farts. More hooting. More farting. I pretend I am Jane Goodall, living among the chimps. It seems less beneath me that way.

Today, the smallest male was observed urinating off the front porch,
I mentally narrate from behind a blind of laundry.
At feeding time, one of the troupe passed gas loudly, which caused much excitement among the other juveniles
.

“Wait!” someone shouts. “I've got to go pee!” There is the pounding of sneakers through the hall, the crash of the doorknob as it hits the inside bathroom wall, a forceful hiss that fades to a tinkle, footsteps receding, the screen door slamming shut.

I am conducting an experiment to see if the subjects can be taught to raise and lower a simple hinged mechanism,
I tell myself as I open the bathroom closet, reach for the window spray and paper towels, and turn to face the toilet.

“I have a son,” I said, for the first time to anyone.

Through the telephone, there came a soft, trembling sigh, a breath of pure tenderness. “Oh,” said my father, calling me by my baby name,
“Kiki.”

Moments before, giving birth in my own bedroom, I had never felt more a grown woman. “Kiki,” he said, and I was four years old.
Look what I made, Daddy. It's a surprise.

It's a boy.

“A
boy?
” my mother said. She was as shocked as I was. Babies in our family were girls. What other kind was there? “We like to keep it a mystery,” I told the ultrasound technician when I declined to learn the baby's gender. But there was no mystery. I'd always known I would have a girl. We referred to our child as “she,” exclusively, right up to the moment I saw her penis.

I couldn't believe it. “A boy!” I said, laughing. “Oh my God, a boy!”

I have a son.

Saying those words made me feel mighty and mythic, like an empress or a pioneer. I embraced them. I was head over heels in love with my new man. I could wait a little longer for a girl.

I was pregnant again the following year, and my dreams of a daughter were reawakened. I monitored my body for any variation from my first pregnancy. Differences in weight gain, nausea, appetite, heartburn, muscle aches, cravings, or aversions were all evidence that I was gestating a girl. I researched sex determination to learn if there were factors of conjugal timing or position that might have tipped the chances in an X chromosome's favor. What I learned was that it was wholly up to the sperm to deliver the goods. Human eggs come only in grade XX. It's an X or Y sperm that gets the deciding vote on gender, and the odds are inherited through the father's line. It was all on Patrick.

I added up the chromosomes. Patrick had only a brother, and between them, they had sired only sons. I scrambled a branch higher up the family tree. His father had only a brother. I went to visit my father-in-law, intent on shaking out an aunt or two. As he walked me through ancestral gravestones, touched that I was taking such a keen interest in his roots, my hopes withered. It appeared that my husband's family had lost the recipe for girls somewhere on the wagon trail. His paternal line had produced a grand total of one girl in the last century, a statistic so anomalous that her birth was either a miracle or the fruit of adultery. In either case, Patrick was not directly descended from her, so our odds were not improved.

I had to know. “What is it?” I asked the ultrasound technician, peering at a blob on a screen. It was like sexing an earthworm. I couldn't tell which end was which, let alone identify the parts in between. The technician pointed to a tiny peninsula, dangling in the amniotic sea. “Definitely a boy. No question.”

If there was a spark of a chance that the technician didn't know a foot from a penis, I didn't permit myself to kindle it. The baby was healthy, and very much wanted. That's what mattered. His brother would have a buddy. And I wouldn't have to buy new clothes. Not one sweet, pink, smocked, eyeleted scrap. I was keeping a running list of girls' names on a piece of notebook paper, carried over from my first pregnancy. I tucked it away with my memorabilia as a keepsake for the boys, a roll call of their ghost sisters. Good-bye, Sophia Faye. Good-bye, Ruby Evangeline. Good-bye, Genevieve Leigh. I guess I thought I would give birth to a line of Royal Doulton china figurines. Royal Doulton can have the names. Given my sons' DNA, it's highly unlikely that our family will ever have need.