If you run into me in the next few weeks, you may get the urge to ask, cleverly, despite all evidence to the contrary: "Haven't you had that baby yet?"
Before you ask, please‹for your own safety‹consider what my night may have been like:
My son Arie is fussing at 2 a.m. It is an unspoken rule in our house that the person who is still able to move freely and does not have bouts of hormone-induced insomnia is the one to deal with this.
I elbow my husband Jan. "The baby is fussing," I whisper.
"Mmmhm," he says. If he were awake, he would add: "He's two-and-a-half. He's not a baby."
I elbow him again. "Jan." My voice has reached a stage whisper. "The baby. Is fussing."
"Yes," he says.
"Are you going to him?"
"Yes," he says cheerfully, lying perfectly still.
Arie ramps up the intensity of his anguish.
"Are you going to him or not?" I am no longer whispering.
"Yes," he says pleasantly, still fast asleep.
"Expletive," I don't say quite exactly, and thus begins the epic struggle that is Me Getting Out of Bed.
Perhaps you think "epic struggle" an exaggeration, especially for someone who does this several times a night to empty her pea-sized bladder. But a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy with a torn ligament struggling out of the tangled sheets, over her 90-pound German shepherd who insists on lying vigilantly next to her side of the bed, down some stairs and across the hall to her son's room, is most definitely an epic struggle. With multilimbed ocean beasts. And sacrifice, and honor. And heartbreak. And bad special effects. (Ultimately, though, it's about the triumph of the human spirit.)
After flailing like a bug stuck on its back until finally managing to get one leg out of the bed, I knock my glasses irretrievably under the bed. Shimmying my way down my dog Frodo's enormous furry bulk, I waddle around the foot of the bed. Nearly. First, though, I slam my thigh into the bedpost. Staggering into Arie's room as my newly re-adjusted bulk makes me suddenly aware of the urgency of Nature's call, I smash my right shoulder viciously into the doorjamb.
"Oh, god, Arie, what is it?" I ask him in a less than motherly manner, rubbing my shoulder. "It's the middle of the night."
"Sip water?" he asks plaintively.
I galumph back through his doorway, overcompensating in the blurry darkness and slamming my left shoulder into the frame. I manage to navigate the bathroom doorway without incident, and to pour him a glass of water, although the sound of water running into a cup makes me stop for my own needs. By the time I get back to Arie's room he is pretty upset again.
He drinks like a man who hasn't seen water for days.
"Okay, Arie," I say. "Good night. Do you want your music?" I reach blindly into the darkness above his crib for his musical mobile.
"Mo'?" he asks hopefully.
Again, I smash both shoulders on my way to the bathroom.
Again, he drinks: gasping, desperate.
After finally getting him settled and carefully, slooowwwly navigating various doorways, I step in something soggy on the floor. This explains the anguished cat howls I heard earlier in the night.
"Snickle snarkle farkling cat," I say viciously as one of them tries to trip me, and then to the baby-in-utero who has been awoken by all the commotion: "Ouch. Stop kicking me, dammit." And to Frodo: "So help me god if you stand up again when I'm climbing over you I will flooming breeming brap you. Twice."
By the time I struggle back into bed, knowing I will lie awake for hours running various distressing presidential campaign-related themes through my head, I have awoken Sleeping Beauty.
He rolls over. "Why are you so crabby?" he asks me.
It is a little known fact that someone who exhibits the restraint I did at that moment gets a karmic "get out of jail free" card. I will be carrying this card the next time you see me waddling down the street towards you. I suggest that you reflect on this before you demand an explanation for my continued rotundity.
Do yourself a favor. Let the next sucker take what's coming to her. Because after hearing my story, no jury in the land would convict me‹no matter what I do.
Haddayr Copley-Woods is a writer and graphic designer who lives and works in Minneapolis's Powderhorn Park neighborhood.
