How To Make A Baby

Author: Robert Levin

I was, I suppose you could say, in a PREpartum depression.

It started when my wife, Connie, decided it was time to have a

baby. I was thirty-one and she was twenty-eight, a circumstance

which I reminded her in my argument against the idea was no

cause for alarm. But after she'd voiced her ambition-and thereby

made it real to herself-the achievement of motherhood became an

obsession for her and she would not leave me alone about it.

Finally, after several months, my reluctance to enlist in her

project compelled her to resort to a not so veiled threat:

"Steven," she said. "Either we have a baby now or I'm going to

leave you."

All right, I told her, get off the fucking Ovril then.

Now it wasn't that I never wanted a baby, and not that when I

had one I didn't want it to be with Connie. Strong of character

and will, nurturing, quick-witted and sometimes astonishingly

perceptive (not to mention pretty), Connie was a terrific wife

and more than qualified to be an exceptional mother. The notion

of one day having a family with her was hardly repugnant to me.

No. What troubled me when the prospect became imminent-what

troubled me immensely-was a consequence inherent in the making

of a baby, a consequence that I could not stop recognizing.

Fathering a child would tie me into the hideous plan that

Creation has devised for everything corporeal. I would be, and

by my own hand, replacing myself. Once the deed was done, once I

had accomplished the only thing we know with any certainty

Creation wants of us, I would be, in Creation's estimation,

expendable.

If Connie, born Catholic but now earnestly New Age in her

faiths and sentiments, soothed her fear of death by believing in

reincarnation, I was a secular Jew and so had only the void to

anticipate. And if I'd always been keenly tuned to the price of

existence, and lived in a perpetual state of medium-grade

anxiety as a result, my heightened appreciation of my mortality

destroyed any semblance of internal equilibrium I could claim.

With Connie's demand the sinister underside of nature had turned

itself toward me and it wouldn't turn away. Indeed, my now

hyper-consciousness of what it ultimately meant to be alive made

any vista of extravagant pullulation, albeit as manicured as

Central Park, grotesque to me. On the most festive of occasions

I would see what William James saw-"the skull grinning in at the

banquet." And I understood as well what Burroughs meant by Naked

Lunch. When I ate I saw exactly what it was-the flesh-on the end

of my fork.

I was also, much of the time, in a small rage about the new

burden I'd be taking on. I'm referring not to the responsibility

of child raising per se, but to the fact that no matter how

large was the contempt I'd developed for humanity over the

years, having a child would force me to care about what the

world might be like after I died.

Thoroughly upended, I even began to think about homosexuality;

about, that is, the solution it afforded to the problem of

getting your rocks off without spinning what Kerouac called the

"wheel of the quivering meat conception." Though a less than

appealing option for me, there were hours when, oddly and

perversely, I could not help but feel...well...TITTILATED by the

concept of having sex that was unencumbered by procreative

implications. In the petrifying absence of contraception I found

myself avoiding sex with Connie. And when I could not avoid it

my performance was impeded by occlusions in my circuits that

would leave the both of us in a condition of considerable

frustration. Worse, my very biology joined in the protest

forcing me to suffer the embarrassment of a sperm count that a

lab I visited at Connie's insistence twice reported was

"virtually negligible."

Compounding these miseries, locking me deeper into paralysis as

it increased my sense of urgency, was Connie's evident

disappointment in me; a disappointment that was evolving into

disdain. Terms of endearment like "honey" and "sugar," for

example, were routinely being replaced by "washout" and "loser."

In my timorousness I'd become, in her eyes, something less than

a man. Recalling her admission to me once that she'd believed

that all Jewish men were extraordinary providers and natural

born fathers-and having long before disabused her of the former

assumption-I knew that I had no choice now but to keep the

latter one alive.

Then, reasoning that a change of scene might turn the trick,

Connie came up with the idea of spending a few days in the

country together. When I agreed, she arranged for us to stay

with our friend Betsy who ran a little print shop out of her

ramshackle house in a Catskill town not far from Kingston.

With Connie's patience rapidly disintegrating it was, I knew,

something like now or never for me and I geared myself as best I

could. Scrupulously adhering to a plan we devised-a month of

wholesome foods and regimented exercise; no masturbation for a

fortnight-I made ready to win a war with myself.

But arriving upstate, I felt like a German soldier must have

felt upon arriving at the Russian front. It was the middle of

winter, the sky was low and gray, the snowdrifts were thigh-high

and the temperature was near to zero. This was not exactly an

atmosphere conducive to a successful completion of the

undertaking at hand-especially not when in the back bedroom to

which Betsy assigned us (and which she used to store old

printing equipment and bound stacks of yellowing posters and

flyers), you could see your breath and needed to wear a coat.

But as inopportune and unlikely as the setting may have been, it

was on our second afternoon there that a child was conceived.

I should say, first of all, that I was feeling not a little

physically ill-and it wasn't only that I was on the edge of a

cold. A city apartment dweller, I've noticed that country people

who pay for their own heating oil tend to be flinty about using

it, and Betsy was no exception. On this day, however, in a

generous but woefully misguided demonstration of support, she

had pumped the thermostat up to steam bath levels. The

oppressive heat, coupled with an effluvium of musty furniture

and nasty chemical compounds, threatened my ability to both keep

my lunch and remain conscious.

In any case, with Betsy at work out front, Connie, after giving

me a thumbs up sign, took off her clothes and arranged them

carefully over a chair. Deliberately presenting her bottom to me

as she bent to the bed to pull away the quilts, she followed

this maneuver by abruptly turning around and flopping onto the

bed on her back. Then, reaching for a pillow, she propped it

under her buttocks and spread her legs.

"Stevie, do you feel it too? It's as though there's a spirit

hovering near us waiting to be born again."

"Great," I said, removing my pants. "I hope it's the spirit of a

heavy-duty bond trader who happened to have a coronary while he

was up here for a weekend. Please don't let it be one of the

local yahoos who ran his pickup into a tree."

I entered her immediately-it had, after all, been two weeks. But

just as quickly I knew I was going to wither. My deprived

penis's rote reaction to a welcoming vagina notwithstanding, the

gravity of the occasion continued to undermine me. Still, I'd

made a compact which I had to honor and I began to leaf through

bodies, shuffle through poses, postures and configurations in my

personal mental Kama Sutra file-then, starting to panic and

sweating obnoxiously-to ransack my memory and imagination. But

no one and no thing I could remember or think to want would keep

me up, let alone elicit he participation of my gonads. I tried,

with my hand, to stuff it in. I would happily have settled for a

premature orgasm.

"Stop." Connie said. She squeezed out from under me and, her

hair trailing along my chest and stomach, ran her tongue down

the length of my torso to the numb thing between my legs.

A determined virgin into her early twenties-she had not

permitted a man inside her until she was twenty-three-Connie'd

had more than a little experience keeping boyfriends with her

mouth. In seconds, my mental state notwithstanding, she got it

half way up and we tried again. But once more I evacuated her

ignominiously and she was obliged to root in me again. Ten

minutes must have passed before she raised her head. I was

expecting an expression of scorn. Look, I was prepared to say,

I'm sorry. This is really out of my hands. But Connie was

grinning at me. Crawling backwards a little, she reached her arm

under my legs and lifted them until they were almost

perpendicular to the bed. Then, holding my haunches up and

steady with both of her hands, she lowered her head to my

starkly exposed ass and drove her tongue as deep as she could

into my rectum. Lingering there for a while, she finally came

out from under me and, brushing it against my nostrils en route,

brought her mouth to my ear.

"You little Jew bastard," she whispered. "I wish you'd be the

lesbian you are right now because what I really want to do is

eat your pussy."

Score one for Connie's acumen and her resourcefulness in an

emergency. "Harder," she was instructing me after no more than a

minute had elapsed. "Go deeper. Yeah! Oh! Splash."

Cody was born nine months later, almost to the day. Nature being

oblivious to human expectations of justice and symmetry, he had,

contrary to the circumstances of his conception, both a proper

allotment of toes and fingers and a countenance that was

amazingly genuine in its sweetness and innocence. I mean there

was nothing unhealthy or freakish about him, nothing that was

even remotely Damien-ish. By every measure he was a wonderful

specimen.

And me? Well, I was worn by then to a physical as well as

emotional nub-I lost fifteen pounds during Connie's pregnancy

that I didn't need to lose. But not dropping dead with Cody's

arrival had a salutary effect on my nerves that was almost

immediate. I was still filled with trepidation, of course,

but-my panic significantly less clamorous and debilitating, my

not so quiet desperation much quieter-it was, relatively

speaking, a manageable trepidation.

Just days after his birth I was, in fact, as close as I get to

all right again.

About the author:

Former contributor to The Village Voice and Rolling Stone.

Coauthor and coeditor, respectively, of two collections of

essays about rock and jazz in the '60s: " Music & Politics" and

"Giants of Black Music." Fiction and essays on a number of

websites.

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How To Make A Baby

Article : How To Make A Baby