Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [14]
The animal in question came from Indianapolis. Aunt Barbara drove down there and picked it up herself. Again, I am not joking, and may I remind you, the IRS is not lumbered with the standard statutes of limitations. The guinea pig is currently residing with Barbara and my brother John until we can arrange the handoff. They live in a small log cabin up north, sharing quarters with a small herd of gerbils and hamsters, a large fish named Oscar, and our guinea pig, to be named later.
We are on our way to see the midwife. This will be my first visit. I missed the first one because I was on the road. My mother—who once worked as an obstetrics nurse—went in my place. We are driving north to a small town where the clinic is situated. There has been little snow. The countryside is mostly brown, and my mood is perfectly suited. I am quiet and grumbly. Things always look fine on the calendar, but then when the time comes, invariably I have six other things I’d rather do. Considering the circumstances, this renders my grumpiness pure selfishness. I have no excuse, only self-awareness.
The midwife rents space from a chiropractic center. We enter through a back door facing a parking lot and pass down a hallway past plastic skeletons and posters of the nervous system before we reach the small room where the midwife is set up. “Welcome!” she says. “I’m Leah.” She greets me with a smile and a handshake, and hugs Anneliese. Leah looks athletic and earthy, and she smiles beautifully at Anneliese, oohing and remarking over her belly. When she shakes my hand her grip is strong and we both smile politely, but I see reservation in her eyes, and I know she sees the same in mine, because there are reservations in my heart. She knows from Anneliese that I am a skeptic. I am open to the idea of home birth because I love my wife and this is what she wants, but I am also bucky about the idea of delivering babies old-style if it is simply in service to some whole-grain earth mother sensibility picked up during a women’s studies course in Colorado. As a former fundamentalist gone agnostic, I tend to dig in my heels at the first whiff of evangelism, whether it be deployed in the service of salvation, Girl Power, or the curative wonders of organic yams. There is also the frank issue of testosterone—four years in nursing school and three Indigo Girls albums notwithstanding, I am not purged of all chauvinism and not interested in achieving complete anemia. In short, a man likes to drive. Even when he’s lost.
Leah asks if we would like tea. Amy chooses chamomile, and Anneliese chooses a prenatal brew combining herbs possibly capable of aligning the baby with the axis of the earth. I choose green tea, figuring its caffeine is the closest I can come to recalcitrance in this setting. Amy goes for a box of toys in the corner, and Anneliese and I sit beside each other on a small couch. On the low table before us I see a fanned set of pamphlets advertising a woman coming to town to speak on Bible prophecy, and right about then Leah produces a form and says she needs to update Anneliese’s health “herstory.” I can feel the voltage of my force-field cocoon ramping up.
While the kettle heats, Leah pulls her charts and papers and begins interviewing Anneliese. I am struck by how animated my wife has become. She pulls a list of written questions from her purse, and as she and Leah run through them one by one, I feel a twinge of something like jealousy wrapped in unease. She is gushing about the baby, about her body, about how the days and nights have been going. Even when she describes her problems with insomnia and lack of appetite, she seems palpably grateful for Leah’s attention. It’s bracing to see her come to life this way, to sit outside the circle of sisterhood