The
story of the birth of our fourth child, Jack, starts about nine months before
he was born.
No,
not that. Such dirty minds.
I’m referring to the reactions Kandyce and I got from
friends and loved ones when we told them we were expecting Child No. 4 when
Children Nos. 2 and 3 were not yet 22 months old. For some reason, they found
it hard to understand how the same people they had seen wither – physically,
mentally, spiritually, and financially – under the unending pressure and strain
of 24/7 twin-based hell would voluntarily
create yet another life.
Hey, we were as surprised as anyone. But, seriously, people
couldn’t even pretend to be happy for
us. Not the grandparents, not our closest friends, not our doctor,
After we realized people were not receiving this “joyful announcement”
with the same enthusiasm they had greeted previous such announcements, we tried
to manage expectations by dialing down the joyfulness in our announcement.
Rather than telling people, “WE’RE PREGNANT!!” (to which
they usually replied, “ARE YOU INSANE?!?”), we simply said, “So…yeah…we’re
pregnant…again…” (to which they replied “Ha! Ha! Oh wait—you’re not joking are
you?).
Exactly one person managed to not take a dump on our big
news and that was my grandmother Mary Jane – Jack’s great-grandmother – and even
her kind words came with an asterisk since she was the only immediate family
member after whom we had named an existing child. When I told her over the
phone, at Christmas, that we were having another baby, she replied – after an
uncomfortably long silence – thusly:
“I know it doesn’t seem like it right now. But this is a
wonderful thing.”
That was it. Happy
Baby Havin’, Y’all!!
Our already-desperate situation only got worse as the
pregnancy wore on. Between the time of our joyful announcement and the day Jack
was born, the following things happened:
* I got hired to work in Wichita
Falls in March and left my pregnant wife, 2-year-old twins, and 7-year-old to
finish up the school year in Austin.
* About two weeks after I
moved out, Kandyce was unlawfully fired for whistleblowing and we went the next
five months trying to get her back wages paid to her, meaning our family of
five – and eventually six – had to get by on my rookie reporter wages.
* My kind sister-in-law
offered to keep the twins for a week or so around Easter, so that Kandyce could
pack up the house by herself while simply being pregnant, not pregnant and
chasing down twin 2-year-old terrorists. After just two days, my SIL called,
weeping, saying the twins were just too much to deal with and could we please
come get them?
* We had to pull our oldest out
of her private school in Austin because her principal there put her inside a refrigerator box to “help
her behave.” We moved her up to Duncan, Oklahoma, where I was staying with my
dad and stepmom and commuting to work in Wichita Falls. She enrolled in second
grade there for the last month of school and has pretty much hated me for that
fact ever since. She also didn’t like that Granddad forced her to make her bed
every day. In fact, she probably ranks that above the school on the Things I
Hate Dad For list.
* We all moved to Wichita
Falls over Memorial Day weekend.
* We all moved back to
Duncan over the July 4 holiday. (I refer you to the “family of five living off
a reporter’s wage” passage above.)
* Kandyce’s water broke –
for real this time – and, again, it's really misleading to call it "water" – on the night of July 28 up in Duncan, two weeks prior to
the date we had selected for the baby to be induced.
* Kandyce’s brother drove
her down to Wichita Falls in his truck, with me following. She rode with him because
he is a veterinarian and I’m a smart ass.
We got to the hospital around 1:30 a.m. Since this was her
third pregnancy – the second one being twins – we figured things would go
quickly, and thirteen hours later, Jack was born.
I honestly do not remember a thing about the time between
1:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. I could ask Kandyce, but she just read the blog I wrote
about what a tool I was during Margaret’s birth and is presently irked at me
right now for my actions from 22 years ago. So…I guess I just sat in the
delivery room like a good boy and didn’t eat any cheeseburgers.
There were a few anxious moments when Jack was delivered.
The cord was around his neck and he emerged a little “floppy.” I watched the
doctors’ and nurses’ eyes closely to gauge their level of concern, if any. I
didn’t sense any alarm from them, so I decided not to be alarmed myself.
After a few minutes, Jack made his first, scratchy peeps and
was more or less silent for the next several hours. He was, by far, the
quietest baby we’d ever had. And, knowing he was out of the woods medically, I
greeted his silence as a grand karmic gesture that we had, in fact, suffered
enough and were being rewarded with a quiet baby.
By the end of the day, Jack’s bruised vocal chords had
sufficiently healed and I was disabused of my obvious fantasies from earlier in
the day. Jack would go on to be the loudest, shriekiest, most demanding-est
baby our family – or any family – has ever known.
There was only one sure way to appease that child and that
was to hold him at all times, preferably, with his bald little noggin pressed
firmly between the bosoms of a woman. Which I totally understand, at a personal
level, but it is a pain in the ass when it’s not your head and you don’t have
bosoms.
The next morning, I awoke and realized that we had no
diapers, no onesies, and no formula. While I was at Walmart rounding these
things up – and wondering just how late we could pay rent – I recalled that
with previous pregnancies, we had not needed to get diapers and such right
away. And then I remembered it was because with previous pregnancies, our
friends and family had hosted baby showers. But not so much with this one. (I
refer you to the “Oh wait—you’re not joking are you?” passage above.)
No doubt, the year 2000 was a tough year, probably the hardest
year of our married lives – at least up to that point. But my grandmother was
right. That baby did, in fact, end up being a wonderful thing.
Happy Birthday, Jack!
© 2014 Lee B. Weaver
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