Short Story: Just the Beginning

by Sheri Langer

“It’s a boy! Ten pounds, six ounces.”

A brief pause before the cry that would punctuate the beginning of their life as a family.

Ah, there it was. Strong, insistent, and seemingly incessant.

Relief. Applause. Tears. The whole clan was in attendance to ooooh and aaaah over this overgrown newcomer.

Dylan, exhausted, clutched the newborn to her chest. He had her nose, too big for his small face, but he’d grow into it. Her eyes, maybe. It was hard to tell. Her lips, thin and tense. So far so good. All ten fingers and toes were just where they were supposed to be. Thank goodness because she was worried. She had reason to be.

So this was motherhood. Everything hurt. She swallowed hard ,wondering if her vagina would ever conceive of welcoming pleasure again. Her breasts felt heavy, like two prized watermelons she would have been elated to bring to a barbecue to get raves from the hosts.  Another erogenous zone shot to hell. She wondered if the baby had somehow managed to eradicate the sweet spot at the arch of her right foot too. It would be at least six weeks before she would even consider finding out. And since he was twice the size of a normal infant, maybe twelve weeks.

Before Dylan had the chance to brace herself, the baby instinctively latched on to her nipple. Holy Christ! No one had mentioned breastfeeding was the antithesis of foreplay. She couldn’t help but let out a wild shriek seeing more stars than any galaxy could offer. Her initial impulse was to fling the little brute off of her, but she couldn’t. She had been given options and this was the one she had chosen. Everyone gasped as if she had done something wrong. Maybe she had. Maybe mothers were obligated to forget their pain. Oh, if only she could.

It wasn’t her fault. She had been confused. In school, Bob had been omnipresent, watching her every move much like he was now watching this baby. Dylan tried to imagine what it would be like to be so basic, so invested in the beauty of the expected. For Bob, surprises were the enemy. He liked to have his socks in a sock drawer, his dinner at seven, his shower-water a notch above tepid, and his Netflix account ready to show the next episode of whatever. Routine and order were his friends, a far cry from the treatise she’d read on musicians. It made sense that he was happily imbued in new dad syndrome, snapping pictures every time the baby moved. She wasn’t sure what he thought he was going to miss in each nanosecond, but whatever it was, there were going to be pictures of it.

Dylan scanned the birthing room. Her mother was calling half the world to tell them she was the youngest grandmother of her high school class. Her father was inspecting Bob’s father’s recent crown for evidence that someone had failed to do the one thing that made him better than all other dentists in the country. Bob’s mother was off in the corner with her mother explaining that she shouldn’t feel like an intruder, that nowadays a family was encouraged to participate in the birth of a new member. She assured the old woman that Dylan wasn’t embarrassed; she was grateful to have everyone there. Guess again, Lorraine. Your mom’s concern – on point.

The baby was still sucking away. If it was even possible, Dylan was getting used to the discomfort. This was her new normal: a husband, a baby, a family that seemed to have no use for boundaries, and a nagging suspicion that her son’s father was in Boston, studying film at Harvard.