Peter Nelson

1.
HOW I GOT HISSED OUT OF LAMAZE CLASS

I first noticed it at my grandfather’s funeral --- a nervous habit I have of cracking wise when things are serious or threatening. There was a family with the last name of “Street” buried nearby, and when I saw one of their grave markers I said, “That’s a funny place to put a street.”

It’s not just black humor at funerals. A therapist once told me I make inappropriately deflective jokes in the middle of deeply personal conversations out of a fear of intimacy, to which I replied, “Bite me.”
It’s a flaw, I know, though I take it as an article of faith that laughter is universally good for you, mentally and physically (unless you’re, like, a babbling lunatic) (but maybe even then) and that there is never a time when it’s wrong to laugh except, of course, when you’re under water.
Or hiding.

Yet my history of contretemps involving mots both bon and not-so-bon teaches me that there are indeed times when it’s best to vest the jest and laugh in soft rather than out loud --- times when a mechanism that is defensive to me (my way of whistling through graveyards) can be offensive to others.

Imagine, then, the jokes I wanted to make but didn’t when my wife was pregnant. What’s more serious than gestation? It is possibly the only time in our lives when we worry as much about everything going right as something going wrong, the birth of a child a huge event fraught with consequence and freighted with irreversible life-long responsibilities, not to mention a stressor where neither fight nor flight is possible. Bear in mind, my wife has a great sense of humor and is not prone to taking herself too seriously, but still. We were venturing into undiscovered territory, united as one, but she was clearly leading the expedition --- she needed to know she could count on my support, and that I wasn’t going to drop my end of the canoe.

First to go were the fat jokes, tricky quipping at any time but particularly counter-indicated when the woman you love feels like her body is being taken over by an alien bent on transforming her against her will into her own worst endomorphic nightmare. Out with the fat jokes went the boob jokes, even though I had to nod to the buddy who asked, “So did the Titty Fairy come to your house?” As I watched my wife’s body change from wonderful to weapons grade, phrases like “a front porch you could park your car on” and “tom-toms to make Sitting Bull get up and dance” formed thought balloons above me. Any small expression of suffering or discomfort as her condition progressed was met with as much sympathy and compassion as I could muster, though each occasion seemed to beg an evocation of the old joke where the doctor tells his patient, “You have a week to live but it could be worse,” and when the patient asks, “How could it be worse?” the doctor replies, “It could be me.”

This pranksomeness was driven, I realized, as much by a sense of powerlessness as nervous anticipation. The man is, after all, figuratively and literally the ultimate outsider in all things natal, as much as the kid is, figuratively and literally, the ultimate insider. It wasn’t simple attention-getting, though a vague feeling of crescent invisibility (and of being replaced) seems unavoidable, regardless of how much the man tries to be involved and participate in the pregnancy, and no one likes to feel invisible or replaceable.

I know I don’t.

Making jokes, or at least thinking of them, gave me a false sense of control, an illusion, but a necessary one.

It only got worse in Lamaze class. As a K-12 class clown who hadn’t been in a class for over twenty years, I found my antic instincts dormant but quick to reawaken. Better still, I had an audience of other men to play to who would understand and who (this is key) I could count on for sympathy.
In the awed silence after we all watched an extremely explicit (I mean, full-crotch-cam) video of a woman giving birth, I could have said, “Well that doesn’t look so hard,” but I held my tongue.

When the instructor asked us how we felt about drugs, meaning, of course, how my wife felt about pitocin and epidurals and the like, I considered and rejected any number of cracks about, well, crack, for instance, as in smoking it in the waiting room with the rest of the dads. I held my silence, because this was important stuff.

And when the breast feeding specialist asked the class (I swear to God she said this), “Who can name the two most important things in breast feeding?” I bit my lip until my incisors met, and sweat beaded on my brow like raindrops on the hood of a car, and my eyes rolled back in their sockets and steam shot out my nose, my entire head shaking like it was about to explode…

But I didn’t say it.

I did not say it.

The tension mounted as we approached graduation. Finally, on the last day of class, I broke when one of the encientas innocently inquired if the changing cabin pressure presented any danger to pregnant women flying on airplanes. The teacher thought a moment and said sweetly, “That’s a great question (she always told us our questions were great, even the stupid ones) --- no one’s ever asked me that before --- I don’t know the answer because I don’t think anybody’s ever loaded an airplane full of pregnant women to find out.”

“As if it would get off the ground,” I said.

Aloud.

The words just slipped out.

I could be wrong, but I think I may be the only man ever to be hissed out of a Lamaze class.

After Jack was born, I came to understand the deeper meanings of Compulsive Pre-natal Paternal Jocosity Syndrome and now see each small waggish impulse as Nature’s way of preparing me by gradually increasing my capacity for joy --- otherwise I could not have endured the speechless wonder I felt when my son was born and I held him in my hands.

I think this too. Nature knows what parents can only find out the hard way --- that regardless of whether you’re the mom or the dad, when you set a poop-filled diaper on top of the Diaper Genie because the Diaper Genie is full and then the dog grabs the diaper in his teeth and runs off with it, giving it a good shake as he goes, or when you’re trying to feed your baby yogurt but the kid grabs the spoon with one hand and then your eyeglasses with the other so you free your eyeglasses because they cost you $200 and he immediately grabs the yogurt cup so you take the yogurt cup from him just as he hits you in the face with the spoon and spills yogurt down your shirt so you grab the spoon but he grabs your eyeglasses again and then dumps the yogurt with the hand that used to hold the spoon and then he throws your eyeglasses across the room, all with an innate comic timing that is Chaplinesque, but you haven’t been able to get more than two hours of sleep in a row for the last month and all you want to do is scream and smash the furniture --- you’d damn well better remember to keep your sense of humor. It is, at times, not just the best but the only defense you have.

In that regard, it’s probably not a bad idea to give it a work out in those dark and glowing days before the baby arrives.