September, 1996

Hannah Riley Rubicon was born September 19, 1996 by Caesarian section. It was really gross. I saw my wife's intestines. Her intestines, people! I had always said that Samantha was beautiful inside and out, but that wasn't true at all. Out, yes, she was a vision of loveliness, but inside? That was a God damn horror show.

Hannah was pretty gross, too, honestly, covered in blood and vernix and mewling with a caprine vibrato. The medical staff meticulously examined her on a stainless steel table under bright lights which seemed to magnify her already disproportionately huge head. The net effect was not so much miracle of life as alien autopsy.

"She's gorgeous," a nurse assured me from behind her pale blue surgical mask.

"If you say so," I replied from behind my own surgical mask, which hopefully concealed my revulsion.

"Would you like to do the honors?" She handed me a pair of scissors with flat, curved blades.

Hannah twitched and flinched as I cut what remained of the umbilical cord. It felt like I was slicing raw sausage. Then they cleaned her up and swaddled her tightly in a pastel-striped blanket. To my eye, the constricting fabric looked like a tiny straitjacket, as if the three minutes she had spent in our world had already driven her insane.

The nurse handed Hannah to Samantha, who was still on the operating table, being sewn back together. Mother looked at daughter and daughter blinked back at her, while I somehow managed to capture the whole thing on video and still pictures at the exact same time, a skill that is bestowed on new fathers.

"What do you think of your new daughter?" I asked Samantha, hoping to capture this seminal moment for posterity.

"I think," she said groggily, "that I'm going to throw up." It wasn't a rejection of Hannah, it was a reaction to the anesthesia. In one smooth motion, the nurse whisked Hannah away, and just in time, because Samantha barfed all over the floor.

I edited that part out of the video.

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Visiting hours began at 11:00 a.m. My in-laws showed up in our room at 11:01 with an armful of stuffed animals and sublime grandparental smiles, which revealed a kind of joy for which the English language currently has no word, so I'm inventing one: Grandhappy. And I'm trademarking that bitch, so do not even think of using that word without my permission. Believe me, my lawyer will be more than grandhappy™ to sue you.

I had already gotten a glimpse of grandhappiness™ the previous night, when I called my own parents to inform them of their granddaughter's arrival. After I delivered the news, there was a silence on the line, which I thought was a lost connection, but discovered it was the two of them hugging and crying.

They then asked to speak to Hannah so I held up the receiver to her ear while my parents introduced themselves, told her they loved her, and said that they'd be flying out in a couple of weeks to meet her. It reminded me of when I was a kid and would call home from sleep-away camp asking to talk to our dog. The main difference being that Starr actually understood a few words. She was also able to catch squirrels, something which Hannah was never able to manage at any age.

Now, I watched Carol and Vic gasp with delight at Hannah's every movement, gesture and noise. When she yawned, they both totally lost their shit. Carol pressed her palms to her cheeks in wonderment while Vic nearly fell off his chair, he was laughing so hard. This didn't turn out to be a one-time thing, either. Once a week, Samantha would drive out to Vic and Carol's house, where she would put Hannah on a blanket on the floor and they would all just... watch her.

It's no wonder she wanted to be an actress.

Much of the day was a haze of exhaustion and elation and visitors. Ivan and Sophia brought a onesie embroidered with the words 100% Kosher (which Hannah wasn't). Ivan sang a Hebrew lullaby while Sophia helpfully pointed out all the parenting mistakes Samantha had already made; a very long list, considering she had only been a mother for eighteen hours.

Tricia came by and won the award for Most Enthusiastic Squeal and, also, Stupidest Baby Gift: A pair of sparkly baby dance shoes that Hannah would outgrow long before she learned to walk, much less dance. According to the price tag Tricia forgot to remove they cost seventy-five bucks.

My parents called every few hours for updates. ("Still alive," I would tell them.) My paternal grandmother, Yetta, called, too. She was the only one on either side of the family who made it to great-grand-parenthood. I spent most of the call loudly repeating things.

And weirdly my Cousin Joe called from Florida State Prison where he was once again a guest — check fraud this time, which I guess was a step in the right direction — presumably to congratulate us, but his frequent references to his depleted commissary account hinted at an ulterior motive.

In the evening, Tom and The Destroyer showed up with a Mrs. Fields gift basket the size of a life raft. It was a big hit with the nurses and orderlies, who kept finding excuses to come into our room, so they could grab another cookie or two on the way out.

Tom and The Destroyer peered at a blissfully sleeping Hannah in her clear plastic bassinet, her dark hair now neatly combed and parted by a maternity nurse. "Yup," said Tom. "That's a baby all right." Which, in my opinion, is the most honest reaction you can have to a newborn. Because, objectively, there is nothing interesting you can say about them — they mostly eat, sleep, cry and excrete — which is why baby announcements typically consist of the same bland facts: Weight, length name and gender. It's never: Baby Steven, seven pounds, five ounces, twenty-two inches, a gifted oboist with some surprisingly insightful opinions about the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Samantha and I were in this camp, too. We didn't particularly like babies as a genre, but we took it on faith that when the time came, we'd like our baby. Which we very much did. Most of the time.

If you'll excuse the digression, I'm going to let all of you non-parents in on a secret that nobody but me will tell you. And it's this: No matter how much you want your baby, no matter how many prayers of gratitude you utter at the news of its conception, no matter how many grateful tears you weep when this small miracle emerges from nowhere and fills you with a love you never knew existed... the day will most assuredly come when you will want to beat your baby to death with a shovel.

Or a rock. Maybe a hammer. Everybody's different.

The point is that while you definitely shouldn't — I repeat, shouldn't — do it, thinking it is perfectly natural. A baby's cry is evolutionarily designed to affect an adult's central nervous system. And in the dead of night, when you are sleep-deprived and your baby is shrieking nonstop, of course you will have infanticidal thoughts. It does not make you a bad person.

You will thank me for this. You'll see.

Anyway.

"Can I hold her?" Whitney asked. Samantha and I exchanged a look. "Don't worry," she reassured us, "I won't drop her."

That wasn't actually our concern. One of the most frequent jokes I made at Whitney's expense was that she feasted on the souls of the living, something Samantha and I both recalled as we gave her permission to touch our newborn.

"Awww," The Destroyer said as she gently rocked Hannah in her arms, a seemingly normal human response. "Hello, lovely," she cooed. "Hello, gorgeous." Then she turned to Tom. "Now I want a baby."

Tom's eyes went wide. "Ummm," he said, stalling for time as he tried to figure out if she was serious or not.

Samantha rode to the rescue. "You should make sure you do everything you want to as a married couple first, because once you have a kid everything changes."

It was solid advice, something we invariably passed along to any prospective parents willing to listen, along with my signature "you'll-want-to-kill-your-baby-with-a-shovel" speech. We were only a day into being parents and our perspective had already changed. Almost instantly, it reoriented our understanding of our own place in the universe. Samantha and I were no longer the most important people in each others' lives. Hannah was more important than both of us. Even though, frankly, she had done absolutely nothing to deserve it. Nature's version of a participation trophy.

Also — and this certainly wasn't the most important issue — it changed my perspective on my wife's breasts. I had always found them tremendously entertaining, but now I saw them being used for the very important, very serious purpose for which they were actually intended. It was like discovering that your Slinky wasn't actually a toy; that it was really designed to do your tax returns. It was weird. And Samantha made it even weirder. "Moo!" she would say when Hannah latched on. "Moooooooo!"

"I don't want a baby yet," The Destroyer said, chuckling. Tom's relief was palpable as, I'm sure, was mine. "It's just something that's fun to think about." She handed Hannah to me, her soul, as best I could determine, still intact.

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Taking baby Hannah home was surreal. It was one thing when our newborn was in the protective bubble of a modern hospital, with its army of infant care specialists and cutting edge medical technology, but now they were casting us out to fend for ourselves.

We were required by law to strap our child into a car seat before we left the hospital. But we were not, it turned out, required to do it correctly. I'm not sure what we did wrong, exactly, but we couldn't seem to get her to sit up in her car seat; instead, she was slumped forward, her face in her own lap. After twenty minutes, we decided to go anyway. Samantha got into the back seat to manually prop up Hannah with her hand. It was very Weekend At Bernie's.

When I started the car — a Volvo sedan, an automotive symbol of domesticity — we looked around nervously, absolutely convinced that someone would notice our reckless incompetence, declare us unfit parents and give Hannah away to a more deserving couple.

But nobody even glanced in our direction. They just let us drive away. Which was incredibly irresponsible of them.

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After a week, it was time to go back to work.

For two liberal feminists in the late 1990's, Samantha and I settled on an oddly 1950's division of labor. Samantha had decided to be a full-time stay-at-home mother. Part of this was preference. She was incredibly close to her own stay-at-home mother and wanted to give Hannah the same experience. But part of it was capitulation. She had hoped to forge a career in entertainment, but after seeing the brutal blows that Tom and I had to absorb, she concluded that she didn't have the stomach for it. It was a decision that would be vindicated by time — she would raise two truly wonderful children — but it would always nag at her a little. The what-if.

I would be the provider, the breadwinner, Dad Classic. I would leave in the morning and return at night, exhausted. I would wake up in the in the early hours, terrified that everything would come crashing down, that I would fail my family, that I would have to someday face their disappointment, their scorn.

What upset me more, though, was this: I knew full well how absent I would be from large swaths of Hannah's life. Sitcom hours are sitcom sitcom hours. The work is all-encompassing; it consumes you. I didn't want to be the kind of father who missed important milestones, who heard about them second-hand. But kids ain't cheap and mortgages don't pay themselves. So I did what I had to do.

When I drove away on that Monday morning, my two ladies were in the kitchen doorway, all smiles. Well, Samantha was smiling; Hannah was just emitting a stream of milky drool. Supportive drool, I decided. Drool that said, Go get 'em, Dad!

In that moment, I made a decision. If I had to be spending long hours at work away from Hannah — and I did — I was going to make damned sure that Hannah's Dad kicked some ass.