John Jodzio - Knockout

“The sun does not keep your baby safe,” I yell at him this morning after he won’t stop grousing. “The night sky does not help raise your child. Clean, crisp air does nothing for your baby’s well-being. Wide-open spaces do not thrust your kid on a path to become a productive member of society. You do not plant a seed in the ground and a little baby sprouts up. Your baby came from the womb — and as you know from previous chapters — the womb is the most indoorsy organ of all.”

Tonight I feed Swayze in the rocking chair by his crib. He’s a good eater. I put him up to my nipple and he goes to town. The doctor called him a miracle baby and I couldn’t agree more. He shouldn’t be here, but here he is.

It certainly wasn’t easy. Mitch and I tried forever to have him. We emptied out our savings accounts to see the best specialists. I took Clomid after Clomid. Our sex life turned perfunctory, timed by tiny shifts in my body temperature and punctuated by me hurriedly pressing my thighs tight into my chest.

One day I had enough. I tossed the pills into the trash and shoved my basal thermometer into the junk drawer. I crumpled up the cocktail napkin on my nightstand where I’d charted when my eggs were going to drop. On my to-do list under “Clean window blinds!” I wrote the words “Adopt a cute child!” Mitch and I never actually got around to discussing adoption because shortly after I wrote this phrase down, his reserve unit was called up into action.

“You knew this could happen,” he told me as he pulled his duffel bag from the crawl space and shook out the sand.

I touched the gray patch of hair on the side of Mitch’s head that was shaped like a maple leaf. He pressed his lips against my neck. He slowly ground himself into my hips and I dug my fingernails into his shoulder blades and pulled him down onto our bed. For the first time in a long time I didn’t care what my body temperature was or if my cervix was going to be receptive. For the first time in a long time it was unplanned and desperate. When we were finished we were lying on the floor of Mitch’s closet near his clothes hamper. Somehow one of my hoop earrings had fallen out of my ear and clamped itself around his ankle.

“You’ve done your part for God and country,” I told him as I untwisted my legs from his ass. “Can’t it be someone else’s turn?”

Mitch stood up and grabbed all of his underwear from his underwear drawer and dumped them into his suitcase. I’d fallen in love with Mitch because he had thoughtful eyes and a strong chin and because I fit into his chest when we danced, but I’d also fallen in love with him because he was a man who never shirked his duty. Now I realized that I was willing to love him a little less in one way to love him a little more in another.

“Honey,” he told me. “It’s everyone’s turn. It’s everybody’s turn always.”

When Mitch left, I missed hearing his gentle snoring fill our bedroom. I missed how his long fingers could always fix that crick in my neck. I missed the good chicken chili he made on Sunday nights.

A few weeks after he was gone, I went to the doctor to get a mole on my leg checked out. The mole had looked like a skinny Ohio for my entire life but had suddenly morphed into a fatter Tennessee.

“That mole is nothing to worry about,” the doctor told me, “but you’re pregnant.”

I was shocked. I called Mitch from the parking lot of the clinic, heard the clicking of phone interchanges from country to country as my call snaked its way to him over land and sea.

“You need to come home now,” I told him. “There’s no way in hell I can do this alone.”

“You know I can’t come home yet,” he said.

“Maybe you could shoot off something nonessential from your body, like your pinkie, and they’d fly you back home for a few months to recuperate?” I asked. “Or maybe they would they send you home if you accidentally lopped off a decent-sized part of your ear?”

For my first trimester, there was no one to hold my long hair when I puked from morning sickness. There was no one to scare away the deer that kept traipsing through our backyard and eating our flowers and shrubs. There was no one to talk me out of going on the Internet and reading all the things that could go wrong with a baby inside the womb and everything that could go wrong with a baby when it was out in the real world.

Afew months later I drove to the clinic and my ultrasound tech pressed a paddle against my belly. She said there was a boy swimming around in the sluice. Instead of giving my husband a hug, I had to give her one. Yes, Mitch continued to call me and yes, he reassured me things would be fine, but his phone calls were usually full of static or full of background explosions.

“Put the phone up to your stomach,” he told me. “So I can talk to my boy.”

I did this for Mitch during the second trimester, rested the receiver on my belly for Mitch to talk directly to our son. At the beginning of my third trimester, the baby began to kick the crap out of me whenever he heard Mitch’s voice and instead of placing the phone on my stomach, I started to set it against my palm.

“Can you just come home for a couple of days when he’s born?” I asked.

“I just told him I’d do my best to make that happen,” Mitch said.

I wiped the phone sweat from my palm onto my pants.

“Of course you did,” I told him.

My mother came to stay with me a few weeks before my due date. She’d just turned sixty-five, was fresh off her third divorce. Her latest marriage ended when she walked in on her husband, Dan, sucking on the back of her dog walker’s knee. She thought her Pomeranian, Snowball, was partially responsible for Dan’s infidelity and so she’d given Snowball to me.

“He could’ve alerted me to what was going on,” my mother said. “It’s as much that fluffy bastard’s fault as anyone’s.”

I quickly tired of my mom’s constant chatter about Dan and the dog walker and I certainly got sick of seeing her standing in her panties in front of my bedroom mirror, wondering if her knee joints still looked hot.

“Even if Mitch comes home in one piece,” she told me, “he’ll probably leave you in a few months because your hamstrings have gone all saggy.”

My mother drove me to the hospital when my water broke. She held my hand and fed me ice chips during labor. We tried to update Mitch on my dilation, centimeter by centimeter, but his staff sergeant could not reach him. My mother called every half hour, but everyone told us he was unreachable.

“What does ‘unreachable’ mean?” she asked.

“It means that he’s out on a mission,” they said.

We called and called after Swayze was born, but Mitch was still on that mission. I knew there was something horribly wrong, but I tried to stay positive because I knew that staying positive would keep my breast milk positive and positive breast milk would give my baby a wonderful outlook on life instead of a dire one. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that my milk was betraying me subconsciously, that it knew it was sad and worried milk coming from sad and worried tits and that it was probably poisoning my baby against the entire damn world.

After the second day without any word from Mitch, my mother and I began to escalate things, calling our senators and representatives, wading through governmental phone trees and their patriotic hold music and being stiff-armed by their secretaries and schedulers. Finally Mitch’s colonel called back.

“I’m truly sorry,” he told us, “but there’s been an accident.”

Each morning when I wake up, I like to read a random passage from Nurture Against Nature . Today I open to page forty-three and read this: