Leary - An Innocent, a Broad

an Innocent, a Broad

A NN L EARY

Authors Note

The events described in this book took place over thirteen years ago. In writing the book I relied solely upon my memory and the letters I wrote home to a few friends. I did not seek professional support from medical staff at University College Hospital. Any technical explanations (or technical errors) are mine.

The names of many of the people in this book have been changed to protect their privacy. Some characters are not based on any one person but are composite characters.

D URING MY PREGNANCY with Jack, my first child, I worked in my stepfathers Boston law office and spent most of the day fantasizing about my baby and about its birth. I read someplace that one should keep a journal during pregnancy, and while Ive always been too lazy for journal keeping, I thought I might chronicle the labor and birth, and perhaps even send in the result to one of the maternity publications that I had recently begun to read. These magazines printed real, first-person accounts of childbirth, and I was especially fascinated by the home-birthing stories.

Who are these women? I wondered as I read one enthralling birth story after another. They scrubbed their kitchen floors and home-schooled their older children while they labored, then, when it was time to push, they pulled a plastic tub out of a closet, squatted over it, and blithely expelled a baby into the hands of an astoundingly capable husband. The children would help stitch up Mom, and the placenta would be stored in a lunch box in the freezer, presumably to be displayed annually on the childs birthday.

I admired the women in these stories for their stoicism and almost mystical strength, and I often imagined my own home birth. In my daydreams the home birth was never planned but happened almost against my will. I imagined that when I recognized the first pangs of labor, I would take a leisurely bath. Then, packing my pajamas into an overnight bag, I would realize that there was no time to make it to the hospital, and I would inform my husband in hot, gasping breaths that we would be having the baby at home. We would then spend the rest of the evening on our bed, laboring and breathing and ultimately producing a beautiful, plump baby that my husband would triumphantly slide onto my bare belly. (This fantasy would also, on occasion, include a handsome fireman who was called upon in a moment of panic.) Although I had never been able to endure a menstrual period without pain medication, I thought that with each dizzying contraction, a preternatural strength and instinctive wisdom would permeate my consciousness, and I would produce my baby with the calm efficiency of a mother cat. I also assumed that the entire birth story could be told on a single typed page.

I was wrong.

Jacks due date was July 3, 1990, but his birth story began almost four months earlier on March 23, when my husband, Denis Leary, and I arrived in London for what was supposed to be a long weekend. Denis was scheduled to appear the following night on Live from Paramount City, a BBC television show that featured unknown American and British comedy acts each week. We were young and broke, and producers were not yet in the habit of flying us anywhere, but the night before we had entered the first-class lounge at the Virgin terminal as if we flew first-class all the time, and during the flight I drank eight glasses of water, just as Id been instructed to do in What to Expect When Youre Expecting. Our first child was due in another fourteen weeks, and I spent the entire flight basking in the knowledge that this squirming, curving, rapturous movement inside me was from our baby. (Even in my thoughts, the word was italicized.)

For some reason Id always had an uneasy suspicion that I would not be able to conceive a child, and when I did, I viewed it as nothing short of a miracle. Certainly I was aware that it didnt require a lot of intellect or talent to procreate and that most people could do it. But Ive always known that I desperately wanted to be a mother, and I suspected that I might be punished for some premarital sexual high jinks by having my tubes sealed shut or my womb rendered useless by some invisible disease. Its a Catholic thing. The year before, after having lived together since college, Denis and I had decided to get married, and I wanted to immediately try to have a baby. Fortunately, Denis isnt one of those bothersome types who worry about actually being able to clothe and feed the child once its born, and he was only too happy to participate in the baby-producing scheme. We stopped using the birth control that I had always feared was pathetically uncalled for, and miraculously, after one night of trying, I became pregnant. Now my neurotic mental flight patterns were rerouted, and I was overwhelmed with fear about the well-being of my unborn baby.

I had a recurring dream as a child. My mother leaves my brother and me in the car to run into a store, and while shes gone, the car starts driving by itself. I have to jump into the front seat and steer, but my feet cant reach the brakes, and the steering wheel keeps coming off its column, so we go careening through town, barely missing fatal collisions. We keep going. We want to stop, but we cant, and then I awaken. From the moment I learned I was pregnant, I felt as if I were in that car again, being taken for a ride I couldnt control.

A near miss occurred during my first trimester, when I began spotting, a term I had never heard before but one thats relatively self-explanatory. In a panic I left work and started driving to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Id been assigned by my HMO to have my prenatal care. I drove through Charlestown and on toward Cambridge on what was then known as the Prison Point Bridge. I was trying to prevent the heaving sobs in my gut from working their way to the surface.

I knew it, I thought, and as I sat in traffic, I was almost completely engulfed in self-pity when I noticed a man in a pickup truck in the next lane waving frantically at me. I stared at him, uncomprehending. He was gesturing violently at me to leave my lane and pull into the lane in front of him. I shot him an evil look and was about to proceed when at last his words sunk in.

Youre in a funeral line! he was shouting. Youre in a friggin funeral procession!

I looked, and as far as I could see in front of and behind me, there were cars with their lights on and funeral-parlor flags on their antennae. I didnt remember pulling into a funeral procession. I hadnt noticed the other cars at all. Charlestown is an Irish-American neighborhood, and I realized later that the man had been admiring the funeral procession, as only the Irish can do, when he saw me brazenly penetrate its ranks.

My baby, my perceived misfortune, my swelling griefall were completely erased from my mind in that instant, as I tried to process my newfound shame. I moved a lot as a child and was always the new student, always the out-of-sync, unwanted interloper in a group. As a result, to this day I would almost rather be flogged than find myself in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. I sheepishly smiled and waved at the man for allowing me to pull in front of him. Then I pulled out of the death lane. I drove to the hospital, where my belly was lubed and the doctor rolled the sonogram wand up and down and across my skin. I looked frantically at the monitor and saw black, white, and gray swirling lines that swelled and crashed like waves.