How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane Read online

  PRAISE FOR JOHANNA STEIN

  “Johanna Stein is lovely, insightful, and a big bowl of funny.”

  —JEFF GARLIN, comedian/writer/producer, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Goldbergs

  “Johanna Stein has a way of taking the good, the bad, and the ugly and turning it into a delicious piece of candy. (‘Mind candy’ of course, as real candy is ‘bad’ for you as any good mother knows). Simply put: I love her writing. I love the way she lays it all out there with such honesty and candor and tremendous relatability.”

  —MO COLLINS, actress and comedian, MADtv, Parks and Recreation

  “Johanna Stein’s wit, humor, compassion, and quirky underdog view on life make her stories a pure joy to read. I just cannot get enough of her writing.”

  —TRACY VILAR, actress, House M.D.

  “Since her days as a comic with a guitar, writer/comedienne Johanna Stein has never failed to surprise, delight, and blow audiences away with her fearless storytelling. And when I say fearless, I don’t mean the, ‘Gee, sometimes my kids make me so mad I want to have two glasses of chardonnay!’ kind. No, I mean fearless in the making you gasp, ‘Oh sh*t she did not do that!’ way. Stein is the kind of writer we all aspire to be, the fab girl next door who lures you in with unadorned honesty and witty prose and then slams you in to the messy truth in such a viscerally compelling way that you cannot not be moved to laughter, to tears, and most of all to appreciating the great joy of what it means to be human.”

  —DANI KLEIN MODISETT, writer/producer/editor, Afterbirth, Huffington Post contributor

  How Not to

  Calm a Child

  on a Plane

  Copyright © 2014 by Johanna Stein

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210

  Designed by Linda Mark

  Set in 11.5 point ITC Esprit Std by the Perseus Books Group

  Some of the essays in this book have appeared previously in slightly different forms and/or with different titles in the following publications: The New York Times Motherlode column: “How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane” and “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”; Parents magazine: “A Pregnant Pause” and “One Is Enough”; Afterbirth: Stories You Won’t Read in a Parenting Magazine (St. Martin’s Press): “Spoiled Milk.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stein, Johanna.

  How not to calm a child on a plane : and other lessons in parenting from a highly questionable source / Johanna Stein.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-7382-1734-5 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-7382-1735-2 (e-book) 1. Parenting—Humor.

  2. Child rearing—Humor. I. Title.

  HQ755.8.S7224 2014

  649'.1—dc23

  2013048709

  First Da Capo Press edition 2014

  ISBN: 978-0-7382-1374-5 (hardback)

  ISBN: 978-0-7382-1375-2 (e-book)

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

  Note: The names and identifying details of people associated with events described in this book have been changed. Any similarity to actual persons is coincidental.

  Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA, 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For David and Sadie,

  without whom my life would be empty

  and so would this book

  CONTENTS

  chapter 1A PREGNANT PAUSE

  chapter 2LIGHTS, CAMERA, PUSH!

  chapter 3SPOILED MILK

  chapter 4SEXUAL DISINTERCOURSE

  chapter 5HUSSSSH

  chapter 6HOW NOT TO CALM A CHILD ON A PLANE

  chapter 7PLAYDATE IN THE PARK: AN ODE

  chapter 8OH, YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE

  chapter 9FIGHT THE PINK

  chapter 10MY BODIES, MYSELF

  chapter 11TWENTY-NINE THINGS I HAVE LOST SINCE BECOMING A PARENT

  chapter 12ALL THE BOYS I’VE LOVED BEFORE (YOUR DAD)

  chapter 13THE MARRIAGE QUOTIENT

  chapter 14THE BINKY WAR DIARIES

  chapter 15THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR

  chapter 16THE VERY BAD HAIR DAY

  chapter 17WAYS IN WHICH MY PRESCHOOLER HAS INSULTED ME

  chapter 18MY VERY AMERICAN GIRL

  chapter 19THE FIRST BABY

  chapter 20ONE IS ENOUGH

  chapter 21PRIVATE TIME

  chapter 22THE FIRST EMERGENCY ROOM VISIT

  chapter 23LIES I HAVE TOLD MY DAUGHTER

  chapter 24THE UNDYING TRUTH

  chapter 25THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  APPENDIX A:I AM MY FATHER’S SON

  APPENDIX B:AN UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATION THAT MY DAUGHTER WILL HAVE WITH HER TEENAGE DAUGHTER SOMETIME IN THE FUTURISTIC FUTURE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  one

  A PREGNANT PAUSE

  It’s a gorgeous August day in Southern California, the kind that makes you think you’ve just stepped into a 1980s music video by the Go-Go’s. I am at a beach barbecue, surrounded by people in skimpy swimsuits. This being Manhattan Beach, we’re not talking Average Joes here; we’re talking the most perfect human specimens ever to have evolved from an amoeba with six-pack abs. My usual response to finding myself in a place like this would be to pluck my eye out with a spoon and/or cut off my dangly bits with a steak knife. But not today, because today I am CWC: Chubby With Cause. Today I am six months pregnant.

  Six months: the sweet spot. Big enough to show, but not so engorged that I feel like a billboard for Alien 5: This Time It’s Serious. The second trimester has been kind to me, and I am feeling all of the things the books say I should feel: powerful, feminine, and intuitive, if maybe a little gassy. But most of all, I am in a state of perpetual emotional ecstasy. I spend the majority of my waking moments thinking about, talking about, and fantasizing about my future perfect motherhood with my future perfect baby, and when I do it’s always in soft-focus, with lots of drapey material, dappled sunlight, and James Taylor music. I feel so happy, I could puke a friggin rainbow.

  I’m sitting at a picnic table with some friends—some single, non-incubating friends—when a woman in a bikini walks over and asks if she can borrow a bottle opener. She is friendly, attractive, and very fit, except for her very exposed tummy, which is taut yet full; there’s no mistaking it, this is a belly full of arms and legs. Sizing up the bulge, I take her to be four, maybe five, months along. Then again, she’s in such great shape, she may be deep into her third trimester. For all I know, she’s fixing to squirt that kid out in the next ten minutes.

  I smile and give her a knowing wink; she smiles and gives me a knowing wink back. You know that wink, the wink that is shared between Mac owners, Volkswagen drivers, Canadian tourists, and closeted gay rugby players. That wink that says, “Hey, you. . . . It’s me! We’re members of the same tribe! . . .” (in our case the pregnant-sister-goddess-life-givers tribe). “. . . And aren’t we fan-friggin-precious-tastic?”

  So we’re smiling and winking and squinching and basking in our perfect pregnant goddess-ness, when finally I touch her hand and lean in to speak, bu
t this time with actual words.

  “How far along are you?” I ask.

  She tilts her head, blinks, and says, “I’m not pregnant.”

  You might think that the force of my sphincter rising up into my throat would have rendered me speechless, but no, not so. In fact, before I can stop and take a moment to either (a) slam my head into the lifeguard stand or (b) throw myself into a smoldering barbecue pit, my mouth opens to let yet another ingenious question flop out:

  “Oh!” I say. “So, did you just have a baby?”

  Exactly like that.

  “Did you just have a baby?”

  With added guttural emphasis on the word “have.”

  “Did you just HAVE a baby??”

  Bikini Lady looks so intensely into my eyes, so deeply into my being, that she makes contact with my dead ancestors and shames them for having contributed to my gene pool.

  “No,” she says. “I did not. Just. HAVE. A baby.”

  “Oh,” I say and then feel a sharp pinch on my leg. It is one of my friends, who, in addition to having just welted me, is mentally recording this moment so that she can remind me of it on a monthly basis, apparently until the day that one of us dies. Her talonlike grip inflicts a bolt of pain that wakes me from my moron trance, at which point the verbal tripping begins: “I’m sorry, it’s just that . . . you’re so fit . . . and gorgeous . . . I just thought . . . you’re so fit, except for the . . . you’re just so gorgeous and fit!”

  Bikini Lady says nothing. So in order to fill the awkward silence, I reach into myself and pull out the last tool left in my useless, rusting tool box: “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m drunk.”

  Bikini Lady looks at me like I have just sprouted a testicle on my face. She uses the bottle opener to crack the beer that was in her left hand all along,* then walks away, kicking up sand with her perfectly pedicured, unpregnant feet.

  Now, I’ve done stupid things in my life, but nothing in recent memory that compares to the blatant douchebaggery of this moment. And, while I do believe that Bikini Lady led me on during our “we-are-the-pregnant-world” wink-a-thon, even a brainless jellyfish knows you never ask a lady if she is “with child,” even if said child is bungee jumping on the end of an umbilical cord that’s dangling from said lady’s lady bits. But no, I couldn’t even stop there; I had to travel the extra creepy mile of accusing her of having just birthed a baby, as if that were the only reasonable explanation for the remarkable potbelly on her otherwise perfect bod. For all I know, she has a tumor the size of a volleyball growing in there . . . Then again, maybe she just has weak abs; maybe she’s eight weeks into a twelve-week workout regimen, and next week she’s going to start working on her core. Or even worse, what if she is/was/is trying to get pregnant? Oh, God, I can’t even go there . . . And then to try to skate out of it with the old “I’m a pregnant alcoholic” excuse? Wow. Now I’m embarrassed for my ancestors.

  As I sit in the suddenly way-too-hot California sun, I take a moment to contemplate my grand mal faux pas. Just moments ago, I was basking in the glow-y image of myself as an intuitive, benevolent, patchouli-scented earth mother. And now—approximately eight minutes and one throbbing leg later—I’m a jackass who makes bad decisions, speaks without thinking, and has an annoying need to be right all the time.

  In other words, I am still me, only fatter.

  Now, several years later, I have grown strangely grateful for my beach-blanket blooper, and even though it causes me to sweat profusely just thinking about it, I am compelled to tell the story again and again to anyone who will listen. I think it’s because that was the moment I realized that nothing about parenthood would conform to my expectations. Sure, pregnancy and parenthood may have changed me, but not in the hippiefied, wind-chimey ways I’d expected. I was no more intuitive, serene, or feminine as a pregnant person than I was before I reproduced. Other than being a few sizes larger, in the most essential “me” ways, I was still the same dopey “me” I’d always been. And most days, that’s an oddly comforting thought—though probably not to a certain bikini-wearing lady with weak abs and bad posture, who just wanted to enjoy a cold beer on a hot day.

  *Because apparently, I’m not only insensitive but legally blind as well.

  two

  LIGHTS, CAMERA, PUSH!

  It starts with the money shot.

  No preamble, no intro, no warning. Just a high-res, point-blank shot of a pair of legs stretched to maximum capacity. Smack-dab in the middle of them, at the point of juncture, is the bulbous, misshapen knot of flesh that is responsible for the presence of every single person in this delivery room right now.

  Yes, there is a birth video.

  I recently had the opportunity to view said video,* the one that the husband made five years ago to commemorate the birth of our child.

  It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at—we’d never actually watched it, and when I finally did comprehend what it was, I called for my husband with the manly bellow that I reserve for occasions of such magnitude. He rushed into the room, because (a) he’s a caring and responsive spouse and (b) he enjoys the sound of panic in my voice.

  When he saw what was on my computer screen (and therefore on our afternoon agenda), he took a deep breath, looked down at the floor, and said, “Wow. Okay then. Let’s do this.”

  We’re not “those kinds” of people. We don’t take romantic photos, gaze into each other’s eyes, or leave loving notes around the house for the other to find. Not that we don’t have those feelings—it’s just that we’re incapable of expressing them like most normal human beings.

  We are, what you might call, “unemotional anti-romantics.” Once, before we were married, the then boyfriend was freelancing in an ad agency office alongside a litter of hipster frat-boy types, and I refused to end a phone conversation with him until he told me that he loved me. After several minutes of cajoling, he gave in and whispered a sweet “I love you” into the phone, at which point I yelled, “YOU SAPPY BASTARD!” then hung up on him and cackled myself into a lengthy coughing fit. You may find this distasteful, and honestly I can’t disagree. My behavior was deplorable—yet he would be the first to tell you it was the moment he realized that one day he would make me his bride. Such is the effed-uppitiness of our relationship.

  And so this videotape—I’m not sure what made us think that filming the birth of our child was a good idea. In the first place, I can’t stand having my photo taken, and that’s at the best-haired-and-complexioned of times; I have one barely tolerable camera angle (15 degrees to the right of center, chin tucked, half-open-mouthed smile) that has taken me years to perfect, the result being that in most photos, I tend to look like a brain-injured wax version of myself. So why I thought that having a video camera trained on me, during a wildly uncontrollable medical procedure, from what is a terrible angle for anyone not starring in a porno flick . . . well, I really can’t say. Another thing I really can’t say is that there was an ulterior goal in the making of this birth video—i.e., that we hoped to show it to the child’s first boyfriend on her prom night . . . or that we were planning to upload it to YouTube in hopes of my junk becoming the next v(ag)iral sensation. There was virtually no good reason to film it.

  And still we filmed it.

  And now, God help us, we are going to watch it.

  “Using your mind it is possible to enter into a state of relaxation so complete that your delivery can not only be easy and enjoyable, it may even be a pleasurable experience.”

  That was what the hypnobirthing brochure promised.

  Now, I am generally pretty suspicious of anything that smells even vaguely New Agey; I am so anti–New Age that just the sight of a man’s naked feet in sandals makes me nauseous.

  And then there was the obvious question: did we need a birthing class? Does anyone, really, considering that birth is the single most common act of the mammalian species, next to dying, taxes, and seeing the musical Jersey Boys? It was goi
ng to happen whether or not we attended a five-week, $250 hippie fest fifteen miles from our home, right?

  On the other hand, I am a big believer in formal education; I’d take a workshop in armpit farting if I thought it would improve my technique enough to include it on a résumé.

  But the real reason I signed us up is that when it comes to hypnosis, I am, what you might call, the ideal candidate.

  When I was in junior high, our school was visited by a mentalist-hypnotist known as “Reveen!” who performed his entire routine for three hundred seventh and eighth graders just before lunch. Although it didn’t carry the titillating potential of a Friday-night dance-and-heavy-pet-athon, the event was exciting enough to draw a full-house crowd (if you don’t count the twenty or so kids who sneaked out to the basketball court to get high).

  When Reveen! took the stage and asked for volunteers, I threw my hand into the air and stormed the stage. That’s how I became a featured player in Reveen!’s “stage hypnosis act.” I was later told that during the forty-five- minute presentation, I shouted “BOCK BOCK!” and laid a nestful of (mime) eggs, I played a (mime) drum solo during the biggest rock show in history, I (mime) canoed across a gator-filled river, and when Reveen! directed me to leap into the (actual) arms of the nearest male teacher and hug him as though he was my long-lost love, that’s what I did.

  I don’t know exactly how or why his techniques worked, but the fact is that I was clearly “suggestive” to this portly, jet-black-toupeed man, on what amounts to pretty thin grounds (i.e., my desire to help him entertain a mob of prepubescent teens in a gymnasium that smelled like feet).*

  Now that I actually have a good reason for undergoing hypnosis—i.e., I am preparing to pass a pumpkin through the eye of a needle (and a flappy one at that)—I believe that my suggestibility will be stronger than ever.

  With six weeks to go until D(ue) Day, the husband and I took our spots on a carpeted classroom floor with five other couples in various stages along the pregnancy continuum. We went around the room introducing ourselves, and it didn’t take long for the husband and me to realize that we were surrounded on all sides by people who use words like Empowerment, Nurturing, and Sacred Space, and say them frequently and often with closed eyes and weird, serene smiles.