Oogy_ The Dog Only a Family Could Love - Larry Levin [16]
I was forty-four years old when we got our stork call. In retrospect, I am glad this part of my life came as a complete surprise. If somebody had said to me ahead of time, “You’re going to be the forty-four-year-old father of twins,” I would have said, “There’s no way that’s going to happen.” I was riddled with doubts as to my ability to be an effective father. I felt wholly inadequate and unprepared to be the father of one child, let alone two at the same time.
One Saturday morning, Jenny and I were sitting on the couch having coffee, reading the paper, and getting ready to go into center city and put in a few hours at our respective law firms. I had come to believe that some people consume themselves with their jobs and careers so that they do not have the time to examine the emptiness or unhappiness in their lives. I think we were like that. We were both under enormous pressure to perform, and neither of us had the confidence to feel that we were good enough, which kept us working harder, pushing a burden up-slope to a destination we could never reach. We had substituted work for a life of substantive content and meaning. We were simply going through the motions.
And then the telephone rang.
Jennifer and I looked at each other. Neither of us had any idea who might be at the other end of the line. It wasn’t the time of day that the phone rang in our house. My first reaction to phone calls at unexpected hours was that they bore bad news. I stood up, put the section of the newspaper I had been reading on the couch, the coffee cup on the end table. I walked to the bookcase and picked up the receiver.
“Good morning,” I said, trying to sound as positive as I could. I would defy the intruder on the other end of the line.
“Hello, Larry. It’s Susan from Golden Cradle. Guess what? This is your stork call.”
Susan was the social worker we had worked with since enrolling with Golden Cradle. My thoughts immediately went to the night before. Every Friday night for years, a bunch of us from the office had gone out to a bar. I sensed in that moment that I would never again go out drinking with the folks I worked with. I never did.
I felt as if I had been hit in the back of the head with a two-by-four, except that it didn’t hurt. Everything had been knocked out of me. It was our social worker, Susan, telling me that we were parents. What did that mean?
Rather stunned, I said the first thing that came into my head: “Really? That’s amazing.” I was buying time, trying to internalize what Susan had just told me.
Susan said, “Congratulations. You and Jen are parents. Would you like to know what you have?”
“Of course,” I said.
“You’ve got a boy,” Susan said. “He’s three days old and he’s absolutely beautiful.”
“No kidding!” I exclaimed. I had the strangest feeling, as though I were speaking under water. “I guess this means,” I said, “that we don’t get to go to the movies tonight, right?”
By now, Jennifer had put down her newspaper and was looking at me, trying to figure out what was going on.
“Wait,” Susan said. “There’s more.”
“There’s more?” I asked. I was in a complete state of shock as it was. “What do you mean, there’s more?”
And Susan said, “Your son has a brother. You’ve got twins!”
“Here,” I said, suddenly overwhelmed by this news, and held out the receiver to Jennifer. I realized that everything in my life had abruptly been reprioritized. Concerns I could never have been able to imagine would from now on take precedence and control my days. I recalled, in some remote part of my brain, a conversation I had had with my