As the title says, outtakes from “The Dog That Ate Your Birthday Cake”
I love them both very much and would not change anything. Except the nature of time and causation so they could both be here—in the normal sense a parent would typically hope for. But without one, there wouldn’t be the other.
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My wife already wrote about Henry in great detail. Nothing to add, really. She wrote about him perfectly. Like only his mother could. Sometimes I re-read it and feel love. We love him and we are so lucky we got to meet him.
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I will say that I write to him, little notes, almost every day. The goal is to write to him every day. Sometimes days slip by and I don’t write to him. But I’ve learned to not feel guilty when I don’t because I think about him and talk to him all the time.
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And that made me cry. That makes me cry thinking about it while typing it out. And again re-reading this and editing it.
It’s like that sweet type of thing: when a bell rings and an angel gets its wings. It’s a Wonderful Life.
And it really, really is.
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So S laughs in his sleep.
He grunts in his sleep too. When he’s stretching, or trying to pass gas, or when he’s waking up. Sometimes it’s like he’s responding to something someone’s saying. Funny sounds of effort of some kind when he’s in his crib.
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There’s a beautiful few pages in a novel called A Trail of Hearts Blood Wherever We Go where the infant Little Eddie is talking with God in his sleep. It’s the only extended first person POV in the novel. Little Eddie’s dream-talking with God:
“His little-boy brain thrums inside his head, caught in the thrall of test-driving future thoughts, trying them on for size.
God comes to me at night. He tells me of my fate and then he makes me forget. That’s why sometimes I cry out in the night. He says he does it for all sentient beings. Or did he say penitent? Screw that. He does it for geese, bears, rabbits, chipmunks, bobwhites, walleyes and possum. He does it for all his critters here and abroad. It’s a service he provides so the moment the need comes to get off the dime, you’ll know what to do. You won’t have to think about it.
And when the big moment comes, you’ll remember what he told you and it won’t be such a kick in the teeth. It’s why the monarchs migrate to the Transvaal volcanic range and why it takes an armadillo a half hour to die.
I tell him, Thanks, and then he hangs out awhile. He talks about life, mostly his own, but he also tells me things. He tells me all that I will learn and all that I won’t learn. He tells me I’ll learn to walk and to not shit my pants, which, to be honest, I’ll miss doing. Besides fitting everything into my mouth, shitting my pants is the next best pleasure. It’s my way of giving a little back for all that I take.
He tells me I’ll learn to ride a trike, a tyke on a trike, and throw a ball, both of which I’ll be very good at. [My sister] will teach me to play crazy eights, go fish and slapjack. Then a day will come when I try to get in the tub with her and she won’t go for it and that will be the last time for a long while I ever see a woman without a stitch of clothes on. He sighed and shook his head when he told me that one. It was as if he carried all the weight of heaven on his shoulders, full of its losers, believers, victims, children, grandparents, roadkills and stillborns. All of this, bearing down around his white august head.
So I ask him what’s up and he says I’ll know how to change a tire, run power tools, snap on jumper cables. I’ll shoot rats at the dump and drive like hell in a pickup truck over dirt roads on summer nights. He says I’ll learn that hell is just an expression some people use.
Then he tells me I’ll never know the love of a woman as good as my mother.”
And it goes on for a few more pages. But I think about this when I hear S grunting, squawking, and baby talking in his sleep.
Later in the novel, Little Eddie’s dad Eddie says, “I was a son and now I’m a father.”
To rip off Townes Van Zandt, I want to respond: “There’s nothing that’s as real as the love that’s in my mind.”
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It traveled back and forth, too. We brought a painting of dogs in Salem from Salem, to Virginia, and back to Salem.
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I don’t know why I like it right now. I didn’t when I was younger.
And the end of this one episode I’d just watched was bizarrely too real to me. It’s hard to contextualize without getting into the whole mythology of the show and the layers of its conspiracies. I haven’t watched closely enough to explain it well. But this should be enough. There’s a little girl who is more or less Scully’s daughter. The circumstances are totally of the show’s oeuvre with the government/alien threads. Scully didn’t even know the little girl existed, didn’t know she had a daughter. The girl’s six years old maybe. And somehow she’s half alien and because of this, something happens to her health, she gets sick. She dies in a medical setting. It breaks Scully’s heart. She wanted to save her, take care of her. But the end-end of the episode takes place in a church after funeral services. Scully’s brother just had a baby and the baby’s there and Skully kisses the baby on the head bye. Then Scully stands over her little girl’s casket, the church is empty, and Mulder comes in with flowers. They start to talk. And Mulder says, “But you found her and you had a chance to love her, maybe she was meant for that too.”
Having a chance to love your child.
And I did.
And I was now holding his brother whom I love very much and who I’m grateful to Henry for. It’s an odd superimposition.
Like the places, the same drives, anxieties, offices, types of appointments. All the ultrasounds to keep checking on S growing in his mom’s belly. The way these things are the same, the way they morph at the same time.
And after S was born, after a few weeks, an echocardiogram. Henry’s echos happened before he was born, so we could meet him and hope.
When we took S to his, I knew we were in the same place Henry got his. But nothing seemed the same. The whole context of the experience made the place seem entirely different, but it was the same—the cardiology wing. Five floors up from where S had his echo, Henry had stayed in the CICU almost 19 months ago.
We were sitting in a waiting room in the cardiology wing again. But now with S—healthy, happy, and napping in his carrier.
S did great during his scan. He mostly chilled out. How could he not? He got fussy for a sec, so they gave him a pacifier with a drop of sugar water. He fell asleep with a little TV, after staring at the blank wall behind it.
After, a great doctor Henry had had got to tell us—an amazing combination of words in a medical setting—unremarkable, normal findings.
Later we read his visit notes: It was lovely seeing S and S’s family again.