Read An Excerpt From Pregmancy

Now Featured in the Patheos Book Club PregMANcy: A Dad, a Little Dude, and a Due Date By Christian Piatt My First Trimester CHAPTER 1 two fateful words Mattias: Daddy, you suck. Amy: Mattias, tell your daddy you're sorry. Mattias: OK. Daddy, I'm sorry you suck. —Mattias, 3 years, 3 months "Screw it." These two words are what started the baby ball rolling in the Piatt household back in January. After months of counseling, discernment, weepy nights, and sleepless mornings, I submitted, succumbed, and caved in like the roof of a Geo convertible. I know "screw it" is an ironic choice of words, considering the circumstances. I also think it's sadistically ironic that we men are biologically tuned to love sex so much, yet we're usually the ones who freak out the most about the by-product. I'm a typical male, visually aroused by anything vaguely resembling a boob or a booty. Also, working from home and sharing responsibility with my wife for the daily development of our four-year-old son, Mattias, makes me somewhat abnormal. And it's this shared responsibility, I think, that makes having another kid such a big deal for me. "I think you take it more seriously than some dads," said a shrink friend of mine who counseled me through some of my initial anxiety when my wife and I first started talking about having more children several months ago. "You know that half of the responsibility of another baby will fall on you, whereas some guys are happy to have more children since they aren't really around that much anyway." Doc, as I call him, has been both a friend and a physician—and, in many ways, a surrogate father to me—when I've needed him the most. A father of three boys himself, he knows a thing or two about family, and if he's as emotionally and physically available to the rest of his former clients as he is to me, his extended family tree looks like a freaking Chia Pet. The thing is, even though I love Doc as much as I do anyone else on the planet, he can be kind of a schmuck too. On the one hand, he'll offer up these insightful little gems like this that help validate why I'm so freaked out about expanding our family, and then he'll smile and tell me to stop being such a pansy and just man up. My wife, Amy, who is nearing her thirty- fourth birthday, is a minister by profession. She's not exactly your typical minister, which should be pretty self-evident, given that she's a woman. We started a church together eight years ago in southern Colorado right after she finished seminary in Texas, just as Mattias turned six months old. We've joked ever since that raising a toddler and starting a church is a whole lot like having twins, but I guess God didn't see that as enough of a challenge for us. I have my own life outside of the church, which is good since I have yet to receive a paycheck from the church. I help out with everything from music and leadership to outreach, toilet unclogging, landscaping, and whatever else is left unattended to at the end of the day. In some ways I like being a volunteer because it allows me to say "no" more often than if I was paid, though I rarely say "no." It's just nice to know I could if I wanted to. I actually make a living as a writer, which explains how it is that I can at least pretend to have a career, volunteer fifteen or so hours a week at church, and still pitch in my 50 percent toward parenting. It just seems to me that a full life is a blessing, but only to a point. After that, anything else you pile on just makes you a moron or a masochist, or both. So what I'm left with is a lingering question about why the hell I agreed to this and if it's something I want, or if I'm doing it more or less to keep my wife happy. And at what cost to me? My wife came down the stairs last Saturday morning with the little pee stick that showed two little red lines indicating that her ticket had been punched. I had no idea that this was coming since I didn't even know she had a secret stash of preggo tests upstairs in the bathroom. The first thing my son wanted to know, of course, was what the pee stick was. "It's a thermometer," my wife lied, not too eager at that specific moment to explain the implications of what she had only just told me by sticking the pee stick under my nose. "I wanna try it," he said, pulling it toward his mouth. "Here, take my temperature." "Not a good idea, monkey," I said, snatching the still- moist stick from Amy's shaky hand. "This one goes in your butt, anyway." That took care of his interest in the pee stick. She had presented it to me only a few minutes before we took Mattias to play his first soccer game at the YMCA. But the fact that this particular Saturday morning was the day before Mother's Day, and given the fact that, only a few days before, we had talked tentatively about going back on birth control at the end of the month, makes the pee stick incident more than ironic. So there I sat on the couch, pregnancy test in one hand and coffee cup in the other, pretty much wanting to vomit but trying to smile instead. "Well," I said in a carefully measured tone, giving away nothing, "I guess that means pressure-free sex for the next nine months." "And my boobs will get huge," said my wife. "Yeah, there is that, I guess." Now I was giving my feelings away. "It's kind of like cheating," she said after a pause, "but with me, attached to someone else's boobs." "Thanks," I sighed, "but you don't have to sell me." There was a long, pregnant silence. "Guess we ought to get ready to go to the soccer game," she said, holding herself up along the back of the couch. "Guess so." I rolled off the edge of the couch and to my feet. "The Mighty Giraffes won't wait forever." As I helped Mattias get his shin guards on and double-knot his soccer shoes, I felt for Amy, knowing she was hoping for more excitement from me, but I couldn't help but imagine trying to do it with a little slobbering machine under one arm. There are plenty of things that stress me out about the idea of having another baby, but the messiness of it all is right up there. I'm not exactly a neat freak, but I do like things a certain way. Amy can tell you that surprises and I are not good friends, which will give you some idea about how I felt toward the telltale pee stick. My Blackberry and I are good friends because it's the informational equivalent of heroin in my pocket at all times, but also because it reminds me of everything in my life that is going to happen, fifteen minutes before it does. Babies, on the other hand, are unpredictable. I'll talk about this more later, but I'm not the greatest at handling this. I have gotten better about managing chaos in the last few years. Family, after all, is a choice I have made. It hasn't been forced upon me, and I wouldn't give it up for anything else in the world. But it's messy, unpredictable, and stressful as hell. It doesn't help that my son—though brilliant, funny, and infinitely charming—has a wild and independent streak a mile long. One of the reassurances that some advisors and friends have offered is that the odds of having another child as strong-willed as Mattias is statistically improbable, but my thinking is that Mattias plus anything else—even a slightly animated sack of sweet potatoes—may be more than I can handle. As we headed out the door to the soccer field, I was already telling myself that worrying about it wasn't going to get me anywhere. It's coming whether I'm ready or not. At least I have about eight more months to get used to the idea, I thought. Maybe I'll pour my thoughts out onto the page, administer some self- service therapy. But right now, I'm pretty much back to where I started: Screw it. CHAPTER 2 Anticontraception It smells like daddy in here. It smells like poop. —Mattias, 2 years, 11 months This time around, I have learned two things for sure about the babymaking process: 1. The rhythm method is a joke. 2. Wine is the ultimate anticontraceptive. I know the day, if not the minute, when this little experiment was kicked off. Amy and I had committed to trying to have a date night once a week after realizing we had failed to spend any real, quality adult time together in about a month and a half. This may seem hard to imagine given that we both work from home, but I've come to believe that even though I imagined we would spend more time together, in some ways we end up with less. Now if you want to be a nerd about it and actually calculate the hours in a day when we're within eyeshot of each other, yeah, we see each other plenty. And it's not that we live into the old cliché about familiarity breeding contempt; although it certainly breeds something, doesn't it, class? Anyway, the point is that sometimes being around each other so much makes you almost invisible to one another. It's kind of like the way you look at your favorite sofa, although Amy will probably kill me for comparing her to a piece of furniture. You sit on the thing every single day, but how often do you really take time to notice it? Of course, I don't spend a lot of time sitting on Amy, but there are days when we'll be around each other pretty much every single hour, day and night, awake and asleep. We get teased down at our local coffee shop, where we like to work a couple of days a week, because we've been known to set up our laptops back- to- back so they're just barely touching but also so we can hardly see each other. "Aww, isn't that cute," someone will quip. "It's almost like they're holding hands." Truth is, we may share a file now and then, make a comment about something we're reading, or check our calendars for conflicting events, but we can also just as easily sit at the same table for hours and not say a damn thing to each other. I won't say that I'd have our lives set up any other way if I had the choice. It's not as if I'd wish I had a cubicle to stuff myself into every day so I'd really know what I was missing. On the contrary, there are those mornings when the temperature is just right and neither of us is too buried with work and we'll pack up the computers and go for a walk or hit the thrift stores. There are the afternoons spent at the park with Mattias, chasing ducks and filling our shoes with sand, but I guess when I imagined working from home, I expected to end up doing a lot more of that than I actually do. The reality is that we don't work any less because we are on our own schedules. In some ways, we end up doing more because there is no one there to tell us to go home, unplug, and get a real life. My laptop stays running about three feet from my spot on the couch most every minute of every day I'm awake. Amy has joked about being jealous of the time I spend with my Toshiba, but she's only halfway kidding. As for Amy, a minister never really takes off from work. The next phone call might be a life-or-death crisis, and people aren't really forward- thinking enough about when they die to plan around your date nights. A church member is just as likely to have a stroke at 3 a.m. on Friday as they are to call with news of a new job right in the middle of lunch. Your availability is part of what people are paying for in giving a minister a full-time salary. Just what is meant by "full time" isn't always exactly clear, but it has something to do with being available when people need you, which is anytime, anywhere. So we both have careers that allow us, in some ways, to be more present to one another and, in other ways, to always have one half of our brain committed to something else. Back to date night. This particular Friday night, we had arranged for a babysitter to come take care of Mattias and made plans to visit our favorite restaurant in town. In Pueblo, Colorado, where we live, you basically have two choices when it comes to dining anywhere other than in a chain restaurant, so you'd better like Mexican or Italian food. Turns out, fortunately for us, that we like both. On the rare occasions when we have the chance to share a whole night with each other, it's also a special treat to share a bottle of our favorite Chianti. The only thing I love more than homemade Italian food with a glass of Chianti is sharing the two with a hot chick. As a man who has been married nearly eight years—and who would like to shoot for many more to come—I would never suggest that there's a single minute of any day when my wife is not attractive, but this night was one of those nights that provided extra opportunity for me to reflect on my spouse's natural beauty. It doesn't take a genius to see where this night ended up, but I should back up and address the first point about how much the rhythm method sucks. This so-called contraception method involves mapping out your partner's menstrual cycles so you know which days of the month are safer than others to have sex without protection. And though we're Protestants, we knew it was the favored strategy for horny Catholics and Mormons who, by mandate of their faith, are not allowed to use condoms or other birth control, but who still like to doink as much as others. Amy had stopped taking her pill back in January following the "screw it" conversation. For a few months, I wavered between moderate acceptance and near impotence- inducing anxiety about the realization that any amorous encounter could have a much bigger payoff than the average romp. In fact, my own discomfort with the pressure got to be so bad that we had just had a conversation a couple of weeks prior about exploring other methods of birth control, since it's not a good idea for a woman to go on and off the pill very often. In an effort to help me feel better, Amy had discreetly printed out a calendar of her projected ovulation times, complete with the most fertile days highlighted in yellow so you knew either to target them or avoid them, depending on your intentions. I guess the combination of knowing, based on this piece of paper, that she should not have been ovulating, combined with the emboldening effect of a half a bottle of wine, made me feel like kicking things up a notch once we got home. Sounded like a great idea to me. "You know what?" I said, as we lay together on the couch after the babysitter drove herself home, "We really should have sex, don't you think?" Another thing I truly love about my wife is that she never takes a roundabout invitation to sex as a rhetorical question. She was practically undressed before I got "don't you think" out of my mouth. And don't get me wrong, it was the perfect end to our first date night in more than a month. Do I think Amy manipulated her ovulation calendar on purpose in order to lull me into sleeping with her? Of course not. That's just not the kind of relationship we have. Sure, go ahead and be cynical if you want, but as stressed out as I may be about having another baby, there's not a single part of me that thinks Amy did this to me. I have control over my own body parts, where they go and what they do. Now I may have a little worse judgment after three glasses of Chianti, but I still can't blame that on anyone but myself. Still, once this pregnancy and delivery is all over, someone in the Piatt household is getting snipped. I've happily offered my little fellas up for a vasectomy, but if things go the way they did with Mattias, Amy may end up in the operating room. If they have to open her up to get this one out, they might as well take care of the plumbing in a two- for- one deal. It's not like I'm excited about anyone having a scalpel that close to my balls anyway, but since she has to go through the agony of childbirth, I figure this is my opportunity to "pitch in." Luckily, I have a little while before I have to make my contribution to our family planning. But while she's basking in the warm glow of imminent motherhood for the second time, I intend to use my sacrifice of remaining a fully functioning procreator for whatever points that may earn me. And no matter what happens, this is the last time a bottle of wine and some stupid calendar we get off the Internet will be the cornerstones of our family planning. Copyright © 2012 by Christian Piatt. Reprinted with permission from Chalice Press, www.chalicepress.com. Visit the Patheos Book Club for more on PregMANcy , including an interview with the author.

Read an Excerpt from PregMANcy