Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

WHEN OUR FIRST BABYarrived in December 1989, I was right there in the delivery room with the video camera.

“Hold it right there!”

“No, we have to pull the baby out.”

“No, no, wait. Just let me make sure I got the shot.” Those people in the delivery room probably have seen it all.

Maria and I had made all the preparations that first-time parents make. As her due date neared, we had a Lamaze teacher come to the house. Of course, I did all that; as the father, you have to. You have to show extraordinary interest in the pregnancy and the childbirth and the afterbirth and cutting the cord and all that, unlike in my father’s world, where the guy was totally out of the picture. (Somebody made a video of me imitating our Lamaze class, and seeing that helped convince Ivan Reitman to do the movie Junior, in which I play a scientist who becomes pregnant as part of a scientific experiment.)

The whole Lamaze thing was horrifying to both our mothers.

“You’re down there helping pull out the baby?” my mother asked. “You’re videotaping her vagina? I’m sorry, this is too much for me.”

Eunice’s reaction was more or less the same. “Good for you if it makes Maria happy. For myself, I wanted them to give me a shot and put me out. Sarge wasn’t allowed to come in for three days. And when he did come, I looked like a picture postcard, and the only thing different was the baby.”

Seeing Katherine’s birth, I felt the most unbelievable joy. I said to myself, “Fuck! This is my first baby!” That’s the interesting thing about the human mind, that you can be so overwhelmed by something that billions of people in history have done. Of course, I took charge of the situation right away: working with the nurse to clean up the baby, bringing her over to get weighed, putting the little hat on her so she didn’t get cold, and putting on the little outfit and the diaper—and, naturally, taking endless photos and videos. Maria was crying for joy, and I stayed with her while she rested, and after awhile the nurse came in and showed us how to breast-feed. Whenever I heard guys say that they cried after their baby was born, I always thought, “That is such bullshit.” But sure enough, when I went home and called my friends about Katherine’s birth, I cried.

Maria’s parents were in Washington, and my mom was in Austria. “We are not going to come until you invite us. This should be your moment together,” Sarge and Eunice had said. Maybe Maria told them to say that, I don’t know. But while childbirth was definitely not Eunice’s thing, Maria was her only daughter, and the next day, she was there. I didn’t mind; we’d had our private moment. Maria felt it was the first thing we’d done in a big way alone, without her mother interfering. She loved just the two of us going to the hospital.

A dozen paparazzi were shooting from across the parking lot when we left the hospital the next night, but we got Katherine home, and then the whole drama of the adjustment began. Because from that moment on, your life as a couple has changed. Even after your kids leave home, you will still feel responsible. I had others to look after now: Maria and me, my mom, Katherine, and more children would follow. Maria always wanted to have five kids because she came from a family of five, while I preferred two because I came from a family of two. I thought we would settle somewhere in the middle.

When Maria came home, and Sarge and Eunice arrived from Washington a day later, we tried to work out the rhythm of the breast-feeding and the diaper changing and the question of how the baby room should be decorated. Pretty quickly a nanny came into the picture, and I felt my importance kind of slipping away. Baby care became a dialogue between her and Maria. At first I didn’t pay much attention to this, but then I read something and also saw something on TV about “gatekeeping.” I said to myself, “Yes! That’s exactly what’s happening to me! I’m getting aced out, I can’t make a move that is right, everyone is always worried that I’m holding the baby the wrong way.” I decided I had to break through all that and have more fun with it.

It must have been in some magazine I picked up in a doctor’s office, because normally I wasn’t into reading about how to take care of the baby. I felt that there were no magazines or books around in the Stone Age, and yet every schmuck took care of babies back then, so how wrong could you go? As long as you love the baby, you figure it out, just like with everything you love doing. Caring for babies is hardwired into the brain. I’ve sat on an airplane many times and felt startled by even the tiniest peep from a baby twenty rows back.

In fact, I felt lucky, because Maria was a fabulous mother, which is not something you can necessarily tell about a person in advance. In spite of the gatekeeping, I admired how totally in control of the situation she was. I didn’t have to worry at all. She had the instincts, she had the knowledge, she’d studied enough books, and she worked closely with the nanny—there was no shortcoming there whatsoever, which I could see even as I was being pushed aside.

Even so, I was determined that gatekeeping would not happen again. So a couple of years later, in July 1991, when we had Christina, I put my foot down from Day One. Not that I said, “No, you can’t tell me to leave the room anymore.” Instead, at night when we went to bed and when Maria finished breast-feeding Christina, I would take the baby from her immediately and put her on my chest. Christina would be kind of spread-eagled, with her hands and feet hanging off the sides. I don’t know who’d told me to do this; it was some guy who said, “I always put my baby on my chest.”

“How can you sleep like that?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Somehow it works. I have no idea. Maybe I never slept that deeply, but it was okay because it was for the baby.”

I said to myself, “Yes! That’s what I’m going to do.” I found that with Christina on my chest, I would sleep, but not so soundly that I would turn and roll over on top of her. Nature had built in that safeguard. I’d be lying there asleep, and all of a sudden I’d hear the baby making little stirring noises. I’d look over at the clock and see that four hours had passed. It was just like the nurse in the hospital had said: “You’ll need to breast-feed every four or five hours.” So I’d hand the baby to Maria, she’d breast-feed her again, and I’d take the baby back for a couple more hours of sleep.

I was much more on top of the diaper situation too. I started changing them right away and said to the women, “Now, girls, I totally failed with the first baby because for every hundred diapers Maria did, I did maybe one. That’s not fair. Not fair to the baby, not fair to you, not fair to me. I want to participate more this time.” I would just close the door, and lock it if they tried to hover.

So I just moved right in there, boom, boom, boom, and did it. Within a week or two, I graduated to the level that when we heard the baby, I was allowed to go upstairs and change her diaper without anyone following me.

“This is an enormous breakthrough,” I said to myself. It felt like heaven, being in the room alone, just looking at this little girl, with no one hanging over my shoulder, and changing the diaper. It calmed down Christina, and all of sudden she went back to sleep, and I felt like, “I did that!” It was such a great sense of accomplishment and great joy of participating.

But then with our third baby, it was a battle again, because Patrick was the first boy. He had to be treated differently, “like a boy,” whatever that meant. We both were ecstatic, and I had not expected Maria to be that over-the-top ecstatic about the idea that it was a boy. She was really into being the force in his growing up. So, again, it was very hard at first to share parenting, but we did. And by the time Christopher, our second son, arrived in 1997, we were very good at the balancing act. When the boys come, instead of buying Barbie dolls, all of a sudden you’re into trucks and remote controls, cars and tanks. You buy building blocks and build castles and locomotives. You get into knives and later take them shooting with pistols, shotguns, and rifles. All of which made me very happy.