New Beginnings. Jill Barnett
that. See the colors? Pink or blue. We’ll have to send them sometime in October. The baby’s due around October 10th.”
For a few heartbeats her mother said nothing at all. Then Beatrice sank her shaking head in her hands all over again. “Oh my God, March.”
So the wedding was briskly-planned and Renaissance-styled, outdoors in a lush park high on a breezy San Francisco hillside, and the best of days, the way March wanted it to be. The wind was a participant; it kept the bright silk kites flying high in the air and rang the many wind chimes they’d hung in all the trees; it ruffled the sleeves of Mike’s white shirt and blew at their long hair, hers topped with a flower wreath and trailing with candy-colored ribbons.
The wind billowed and flowed against her embroidered peasant dress, made of cotton the color of kite string, and whatever direction that wind blew, it outlined the softest beginnings of the change in her once youthful and free life, the rounded bulge of her first pregnancy and a future: motherhood.
Mike had been working at Spreckles for a while when his son Scott made his long, difficult entrance into the world, at exactly three-thirty in the morning. Labor for March lasted more than twenty-four hours, much of that time with her acting uncharacteristically irrational, banishing him from the room one minute and the next, calling out for him to never leave her.
By the time he first held his son, looking like a small red face swamped by a blue-striped blanket, Mike was blurry-eyed, over-emotional, numb, his hands crushed by hours at her bedside, and he was sapped dry of everything, especially sleep. When asked to, he dutifully counted the fingers and toes and came up with nineteen the first time, then twenty-two.
“Count again, Mike,” March insisted.
“Look. He has one head. I’m not worried.” But Mike was worried. Nothing would ever be the same for them again.
The baby became the center of their world. Everyone’s world. He would come home from work to their apartment in Redwood City and meet his mother or mother-in-law, both of whom were there so often it seemed as if they were living with them. Both women handed out advice that often contradicted each other’s.
Already he spent a third of his life on a crusade of germ warfare, boiling everything that came into contact with anything “baby.” (He had read all the baby books himself. On occasion, March had even accused him of memorizing some of them.)
To go anywhere they needed a moving van for all the child paraphernalia. March was determined to breastfeed and had a frustrating and uncomfortable time. She cried as much as the baby at first.
All of those changes he could handle. What scared him was something else altogether. He was a father, a word that held roiling meaning for him and caused him plenty of internal anguish and self-doubt. He was responsible for his son, for his child’s life and future and happiness.
Ahead lay a world of strangers who could easily swallow his child whole if given the opportunity. Life, people, took big bites out of you. Mike felt this immense, overwhelming responsibility to protect his son from everything he knew awaited his child, and it scared the hell out of him.
Finally one night, when he paced the room with the baby so March could sleep, he made a promise to his son, and to the world in that room, and mostly to himself: he would never be distant and demanding. He wouldn’t be the thing that stood between his kids, the way his father had often put himself between Brad and him. He would definitely not come into the house one day a week to rule the roost, carve some meat, and expect those slim, atavistic moments to stand for fatherhood.
Still, every morning, Mike got up at five am, just his father had for so many years, and he went to work at a job he hated because the paycheck was good and the insurance even better. He had a family, so he did what was expected, everything Don Cantrell had said to him.
March accepted the news that she was pregnant for a second time without too much terror. Scott wasn’t even a year yet, and honestly, she was too tired to summon up any negative emotion. Again, the pregnancy was an accident, one that happened during an exhausted night when Scott was barely four months old.
A few months into her new pregnancy, Mike came to her one night. (He’d been reading the latest books again.) One of the things she had always adored about him was his ability to see even a small modicum of possibility, and to embrace it with his own Cantrell enthusiasm.
But her pregnancy was now his sudden obsession. Any day she expected him to double over with Braxton Hicks pains. On that night, after he had read somewhere that infants inside the womb could hear, Mike had come to her with a grand idea to start their baby’s education early.
“If a child can hear, what if he can learn?”
“Just what are you thinking?”
“Let’s teach him to count.”
“Great. He can help us during the contractions. I can hear him now, calling out of my uterus: One! Two! Three! Breathe…Push!”
“March. This is serious. What if it’s true? We have to try this.”
She snapped her fingers. “I have an idea. Let’s teach him algebra. Geometry? Trig? You took calculus, didn’t you? Or we could always call my dad over to teach him. Maybe by the time the baby is a toddler he will do polynomial equations with rational coefficients and even draw sketches of the seven continents.”
But despite all of her sarcasm and teasing, Mike had been undaunted. At night he read to her belly, which was fine because he often read some kind of classic literature, Call of the Wild, David Copperfield, The Grapes of Wrath, which made her fall asleep more easily. For the first three months she could have slept twenty hours a day without being read to.
She loved it when he read poetry. Mike’s deep voice reading the metaphysical poets, or Beat poets like Cohen and Ferlinghetti. It was sexy as hell. The only real argument they’d had was when Mike decided to read a popular contemporary fiction novel and for some unknown reason picked Rosemary’s Baby.
Every day there was something new. He moved the radio by the bed and played the classical stations, old standards, musical soundtracks and the Beatles. The eight-track tape player in the car had everything from Bach to Bob Dylan, the Smothers Brothers to Hair. One night she awoke to him hovering above her protracted stomach, counting in Spanish.
About three weeks before Phillip was born, Mike was sound asleep after one Spanish lesson, two Wagner arias, Peter, Paul, and Mary and multiplying the sevens. She was wide awake at two thirty in the morning, the baby tumbling and kicking her ribs like crazy.
Since it was partially her husband’s fault she was sleepless, she leaned over and punched him in the arm. “Quick. Mike. Wake up.”
“What?” He sat up, disoriented. “Is it the baby? Don’t move. I’ll call the doctor.”
“No…no…It’s not the baby. I want you to get the protractor, honey, and draw an isosceles triangle on my stomach, then later we can go over to the Castro District and I’ll get pi, 3.1416, tattooed right here.”
Groaning, Mike flopped back on the bed, “Funny. You wake me up for jokes.” He stretched and yawned. “You can’t sleep again, right? What time is it?” He glanced at the clock, turned and faced her. “You laugh at me, sunshine, but wait and see. This kid’s going to be Nobel Prize material.”
Months and months later, when their wonderful son Phillip finally spoke something other than baby gibberish (much later than Scott since Scott spoke for him most of the time, a fact that drove Mike crazy), Phillip’s first word was “Mama.”
For two long and wickedly hilarious months he called Mike “Mama.” To March, the only way it would have been even funnier was if the baby had called Mike “mamacita.”
Eventually, from