The husband planned to fight the billing practices from the unplanned hospital. He planned to fight the red-light camera ticket from the city. According to his wealth magazines, which he was thinking of canceling, there were new futures available to a person like him. But the husband was no longer so much \u201cthe person like him\u201d that he once thought he was. Money was still on his mind, but there was less of it to think about. Which meant he thought about money in the middle of the night. And it was always the middle of the night now.<\/p>\n
He whispered in the infant\u2019s ear: 30 days past due.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Distant family sent the wife a diary. She wrote down the son\u2019s name, the unplanned date, time, and place of birth, Hope\u2019s weight in pounds and ounces, the length of his body, the squishiness of his nose, and the elevated bilirubin levels from the head bruise he received coming through her womb.<\/p>\n
What is the womb? she wrote, and then she sneezed, which she\u2019d lately observed herself doing, every time she cried.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The couple said, \u201cit will get better.\u201d They said, \u201clet\u2019s do that tomorrow.\u201d They said, \u201cwe got through today and it could\u2019ve been worse.\u201d They said, \u201cGod willing,\u201d and they said, \u201cfrom your mouth to God\u2019s ears.\u201d The husband said, \u201cthat\u2019s like robbing Peter to pay Paul,\u201d and death rattled inside him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One weekday afternoon, the family spent three hours in an Old Navy. They saw more adults at Old Navy than they\u2019d seen in a month. One adult shopper noted the son\u2019s cuteness. A mother herself, she called the couple\u2019s son \u201cone of the cutest little ones,\u201d and told the husband the baby looked \u201cjust like him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSay thank you to the lady,\u201d the husband told his napping son. Hope didn\u2019t respond.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou both look so tired,\u201d the woman said. \u201cYou,\u201d she pointed to the wife, \u201clook more tired than him. But don\u2019t worry. These are the 99 days of hell. It will get better.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGod willing,\u201d the husband said. \u201cBecause right now, parenthood feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 99 days of hell,\u201d the wife said. \u201cThat\u2019s beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the late hours, the only hours now, the husband pushed his laptop off to the side. He took his pen to a four-quadrant notebook. In each quadrant he\u2019d record what the son did that day, what the father did that day, what the mother did that day, what the world did that day.<\/p>\n
The son didn\u2019t do much. Not anything the husband could engineer into a description. The world also did very little. The world outside the home seemed staged, like the world inside the laptop.<\/p>\n
In the quadrant \u201cwhat the world did that day,\u201d the husband wrote: the world outside our home is not our world. The world did nothing today. Tomorrow, there may be different world.<\/p>\n
The wife did even less. She told the husband she didn\u2019t want to continue breastfeeding. It hurt. It was boring. In \u201cwhat the mother did that day,\u201d the husband wrote: this is our 55th day of hell. We\u2019re switching to formula. Breastfeeding is matriarchal bullshit. The busy work women create for other women. Neoliberal, because the privately-owned son grows and the publicly-owned wife decays.<\/p>\n
They researched options, even stopped recycling the flyers from U.S. formula companies that had appeared in their postal mail. German-made formula sounded best. The Germans had a stricter definition of \u2018organic\u2019 than the U.S. The husband\u2019s cultural magazines, which he was thinking of canceling, wondered if Germany\u2019s cows were feeding on soil enriched by his exterminated ancestors. In a way, that future could be beautiful.<\/p>\n
The German powder arrived in tightly wrapped boxes, like kilos of movie cocaine. It wasn\u2019t cheap, and Hope needed more. Shipping never became free. The family robbed Peter to pay Paul, charging the cost to a credit card they had long kept behind the passports.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The couple were minor intellectuals who owned a duplex down off a busy main road. In the evenings they sat on the great green couch, rewatching episodes.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you hear something?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, I do. The baby\u2019s crying.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he wants his mother.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I think that\u2019s the dada cry.\u201d<\/p>\n
60 days past due.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The wife\u2019s father kept calling. She wouldn\u2019t speak to him. In the quadrant, \u201cwhat the husband did that day,\u201d the husband wrote: Talked to Abe again. Told him again there would be no bris. I used empathetic reasoning and acknowledged Abe\u2019s position that his beautiful, intelligent, stubborn daughter is being unreasonable. I heard Abe say he didn\u2019t know why she had so much on her mind, why a woman like her couldn\u2019t just cheer up, why a woman like her needed to think so much, why she just couldn\u2019t be happy. I told him he could send gifts. Trusts. Cash is best.<\/p>\n
In the early hours, and now they were all early hours, the couple danced with the infant. These were moments of indescribable happiness. They didn\u2019t know they could smile this wide. They held each other, held their son, danced as one, they shared the same soul.<\/p>\n
In the quadrant \u201cwhat the son did that day,\u201d the husband wrote: a boy must embody hope. A boy. A boy must have a bright spirit. Without hope a boy is not a boy. A boy\u2019s work is to give hope to other boys. Hope the unraveling of form, form, the acknowledgment of hope\u2019s delay. Hope the leaping feat, spring.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Late at night, a time now hourly, the father relayed his son works of economic literature, the overwritten, never-read language of businesspersons. Language should be dry, like wine, flattening the tongue. It\u2019s a college mistake to introduce an infant to lyricism.<\/p>\n
EMEA stakeholders, he\u2019s hungry for German formula.<\/p>\n
Based on our experience, he\u2019s feverish.<\/p>\n
Trailing twelve months, he\u2019s teething.<\/p>\n
Stricter regulation around carried interest, he\u2019s anxious.<\/p>\n
90 days past due.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Distant family sent the wife a book of poetry. It was mass market, millionaire, the kind of volume the undergraduate wife mocked. But now, reading those sparse words, the wife realized her tastes had moved, which made her cry, which made her sneeze. She realized, as this poet knew, that she was just one of those women who had to wait to be a mother.<\/p>\n
Her son cried himself to sleep, woke with tears. He can\u2019t self-soothe, she thought, but I can soothe him. All her love poured easily into him. Her entire soul, her blood, her energy, poured easily into him, without wanting anything in return, without knowing what that would even be. She would be his first kiss, but not his last, his first love, but not his last. She was the body of his beginning, but she prayed she would be there only in spirit at his end. The knife lodged in her could never be the knife lodged in him.<\/p>\n
One morning she awoke to something other than her son crying. She opened her diary and saw the 99 days were ending. She wrote, bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang, feeling at first those words were her own, but then she knew they were poem-words of Shakespeare. She pressed the words down anyway. Great feeling had preceded them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
With Hope strapped to the wife\u2019s chest, the family strolled to the riverwalk. More people were out than usual. It was a time for noticing. But the couple weren\u2019t quite sure how to process the noticing. This was the first time, other than trips to the doctor, and the Old Navy, that they had been out of the house, together, in 100 days.<\/p>\n
The family looked to the ground. They saw a boy, barely old enough to grow a beard,\u00a0 sleeping in a blue plastic bag. A flower drooped from a souvenir vase. Another\u2019s noodles congealed in an aluminum tray. The piece of cardboard read:<\/p>\n
I AM YOUR FUTURE<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d the wife said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean,\u201d the husband said sadly, \u201cwe understand what he means.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to kick him!\u201d The wife said. But then she opened her bag, placed a small bill in the boy\u2019s vase.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really shouldn\u2019t.\u201d The husband edged down to replace the bill with an even smaller one. \u201cCan\u2019t kick the future,\u201d he said, glancing down at the lost money. \u201cHardest habit to break.\u201d<\/p>\n
The family walked just past the boy. They stood at the railing and watched, across the river, the cranes build the luxury towers.<\/p>\n
\u201cBare ruined choirs,\u201d the wife said, \u201cwhere late the sweet birds sang.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d<\/p>\n
The wife sneezed, pushing Hope, strapped to her chest, almost over the railing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you sneeze that hard again,\u201d the husband smiled, \u201cHope might fall into the river. Or should we just throw him in the river?\u201d<\/p>\n
If they threw Hope in the river, he would surely die. The son would fall, the wife would fall in after the husband fell in and they would all fall toward the dying son and die themselves. If only, when it went that way, it could have. Hope counted on that mystery. Hope would come to know everything the parents thought before they thought it, and Hope would understand whatever the parents could never say. Hope had their time. Hope was in no hurry. Hope had the rest of their lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The couple said, \u201cit will get better.\u201d They said, \u201clet\u2019s do that tomorrow.\u201d They said, \u201cwe got through today and it could\u2019ve been worse.\u201d They said, \u201cGod willing,\u201d and they said, \u201cfrom your mouth to God\u2019s ears.\u201d The husband said, \u201cthat\u2019s like robbing Peter to pay Paul,\u201d and death rattled inside him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":20417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[713,118,2079,3541,1218,1627],"class_list":["post-19938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fatherhood","tag-money","tag-motherhood","tag-old-navy","tag-parenthood","tag-shakespeare","writer-stuart-m-ross"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19938"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20418,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19938\/revisions\/20418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}