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Here's a peek at what you'll find in the Fall 2006
issue, due out in September.
From Gary Greenberg’s “Gravity Sucks”
No wonder Drs. Sears and Spock and Rosemond and Ferber and all the rest of the purveyors of advice
are so successful. It’s not just that you’ve never been the parent for this child before, it’s that
your cluelessness is dangerous, potentially soul-murdering. You hold their moral lives in your hands,
you can’t afford not to know what you are doing. But here’s a secret—all those doctors don’t know any
better than you do how to be a parent for this child. In fact, they know exactly what you do: what kind
of people they think we all ought to be, and how they think we can get there: nurtured in a family bed
into a loving liberal, say, or forced to sleep in a private bed as preparation for a life of
entrepreneurial selfhood. They think what you think: that there are no accidents of history, that the
chains of causation proceed intelligibly across time, that the son is the father of the man. I was playing a board game with my kids on a quiet Friday night when there was an insistent
knock at the door and then a long stuttering ring of the bell. Our cul-de-sac is more like a
commune than a collection of single-resident houses, with kids flowing freely through open
doors in summer and pounding on doors and bells in winter. But this time it was Darcy, the mom next door. “You haven’t seen three little kids, have you? A third grader—Elizabeth?—and two younger brothers,
maybe four and five years old? They went out to the mailbox and never came back. When their mom went to
check, they were just . . . gone,” she ended lamely. And then she threw her arm out like an amateur actor,
pointing to the top of our cul-de-sac ‘T’.” I ran out to the sidewalk and saw two police cars, the offending mailbox, and a woman sitting
on the curb, head in her hands while she rocked back and forth. One of the police officers walked
over to peer in the mailbox, as if one or all of the kids might be hiding in there. I didn’t really
know the family, who were new to the neighborhood; I could have been watching the Amber Alert play
out on the 10:00 News. But here was Darcy, whom I knew too well to ignore, asking me to help her stop the lava-like dread
that threatened to wash away our world. Our fingers in the dike, we stood silent, trying to disown the
same thought: our own children safe and sound, we’d gotten lucky. This time. I'm not ignorant, at least not in matters of conception. I know how babies are made. But this one
caught me by surprise. I went to my ob/gyn's office for my yearly checkup and told her something
strange was going on with my period. I'd gotten it as usual on my twins' first birthday. The next
month had brought cramps and a single morning of spotting. I might have wondered about that longer
if it hadn't occurred on Christmas Eve, while my attention was caught up in our family celebration.
The following month had come and gone without any blood at all. I'd been wondering, I told my doctor,
if my body were undergoing some kind of post-breastfeeding hormone fluctuations. The doctor snickered. A few minutes later, with one hand inside me and the other pressed flat
against my stomach, she said, "I think you're pregnant, and I think you're twelve weeks pregnant."
A few minutes after that she performed an impromptu sonogram and confirmed her diagnosis: sometime
in early September, probably, I would give birth to my third baby and thereby become the mother of
three children under the age of two. I liked this doctor. When I laughed, she laughed with me.
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