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Find out that Mindy is pregnant on a Tuesday, because Tuesday is not Monday, which she tells you is no time to receive news of any kind, and because you’re still a little flummoxed by the entirety of the notion that you’ve created another human life, you choose to believe her. You don’t deliver news on Mondays. Got it. And besides that, she’s pregnant?
Allow yourself about eighteen Tuesdays to adjust to the idea, which is pretty much par for the course. Last year at this time, you broke the land speed record for premature evacuation with the exact same woman who is bearing your child and no one is batting an eye. No one is questioning why you would be the clear choice to father her child, because you’re in a long-term relationship now, but you really think that people might need to reassess their own perspectives on the situation. What they don’t know, and if they did, you’d deny it, is what you think the moment that she tells you about this baby.
You have to ignore your basest instincts. In that moment, her brown eyes shimmering with unshed tears, your immediate reaction is to change your name and slip out into the night, hat pulled low over your eyes, suitcase in hand. You can move to Greece, you think, and change your name to Mordecai, and become a cobbler or a deli owner. You’ll vanish, and become a mostly happy, though tragic memory. But Mordecai is too hard to spell, and you don’t speak Greek. You promise that the urge only lasts milliseconds. Only until Mindy pats your hand, and you remember where you are, and who she is to you, and you place your hand on her stomach, and you forget about Greece. Greece can wait, that is a baby in there, and it belongs to you. (And of course, Mindy. We are not pregnant. She is.)
It belongs to you, a man who prefers to have one life change per millennia, and you’ve already had about ten in the past five years, so you’re loathe to make another. But sometimes you don’t make life changes, life changes you, and suddenly, you’re less likely to stow away on a fishing boat to the Mediterranean.
Find out, on a wintery wisp of a Tuesday, in a roundabout, non-direct way, because your entire relationship language is based in smoke signals and morse code and Esperanto, outdated and imprecise methods of communication that have seemed to vanish from disuse. Your relationship history consists primarily of talking around each other, having conversations with passersby and symbolic pigeons and strange men on subway platforms because talking to co-workers, and strangers, and the avian species, comes easily. Talking to each other is hard.
Start cataloging your shortcomings. Mindy pushes you so far out of your comfort zone that your heart rate regularly vacillates somewhere between death-defying high wire walk across a large canyon and/or skyscraper (without a net) and head in lion’s mouth. It’s exhilarating, but also exhausting, and no crowd cheers for you when you end up on the other side.
Dream wildly, and classify them as more nightmarish than anything else. Your father, who walked out when you were twelve, appears to you as an apparition, which is odd because he’s alive, no matter how many times you wished the opposite was true. He doesn’t impart any wisdom, but he does glower at you, and you’re fairly certain that his standing there silently judging you is over the limit on what you’re willing to accept from him. What gives you the right? When you tell Mindy about the nightmares, she will collect you into her arms, and pull you into her still available lap, as if you aren't a grown forty year old man who owns a portion of a medical practice. She will rub your back and tell you, "That's not who you are, Danny." You wish you can believe her. (It's early yet, there's still time.)
You’ve only spent your entire childhood, and most of your twenties, and who are you kidding, a good portion of your thirties making a mental list of all the things you would never do if you were someone’s father, with Alan Castellano as the prime example. And now you are someone’s father, even if that someone is the size of a kumquat, and you are terrified that you're going to mix up your lists and somehow wrongly repeat all of his transgressions.
You measure the fetus' size in fruits and vegetables, because that is always how you always explain it to patients, and there comes a point when you begin wondering why American society isn’t more comfortable with standard units of measurement when it comes to fetal development. Do not, however, get you started on the metric system. And anyway, you can’t stop picturing the baby with the body of a plum and Mindy’s face, but her grown, adult face, the one you look at every night before you go to sleep. On her, it’s beautiful. On a plum baby, it’s disconcerting.
Stop smoking. Stop smoking a lot, and start smoking a little. Douse yourself in cologne and gargle mouthwash and chew all the gum you can buy at the bodega and deny deny deny. Get caught smoking. Get a lecture. Stop smoking again. Cold turkey. You will feel like all your nerve endings are on fire, and worry that you might spontaneously combust at a staff meeting. Jeremy will try in his sad, awkward British way to offer solutions to your lack of nicotine, but you've lost the ability to properly form words and can't seem to stop clenching your fist. You can hear him say something about chocolate digestives and what definitely sounds exactly like collywobbles as he walks away, and it does nothing to eradicate your need for sweet sweet tar and stimulants.
Force Mindy to cease counting pizza as both a fruit and a vegetable. Find yourself making unreasonable demands about her diet, mostly because you would really like to smoke a cigarette, and you're already pretty anxious as it is. Insist to friends and family that your interest in your girlfriend's pregnancy food consumption is out of care and concern for Mindy and your unborn child, and not retribution for the whole you are killing yourself with those stupid cancer sticks and if you don't stop, I will stop for you situation. Find Mindy sleep-eating Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby in the middle of the night, peanut butter and fudge swirled in her hair. Feel guilty. Later, you will text Morgan at 4 a.m. to ask him to buy as many sour straws, licorice, and potato chips as he can locate in the Tri-State area and bring them into work to leave anonymously in Mindy's office.
You will hear the heartbeat for the first time. You'll feel strange and disconnected from the pregnancy at times, and you sometimes wonder if you would feel more connected if you had been the first person to find out the news, and not the third (or maybe fourth, you have your suspicions, and Morgan looks pretty guilty when you pass him in the hallway.) You know it's ridiculous, that Mindy finding out from Peter, who is alternately her best friend and gynecologist, would somehow lessen your own connection to your child. But you're not done wondering if Peter is committing some kind of ethical and professional violation, and if you should report him, when Mindy finds your sweaty hand in the brightly lit exam room. "Danny, Danny, can you hear it?" Of course you can hear it, you hear baby's heartbeats for pay but this is not a baby's heartbeat. This is your baby's heartbeat. You feel your own heart swell in a way that you thought was only possible through good, clean American hard work and realize that you are an idiot. Babble incoherently and try to repress the memory of almost giving this moment up at least one hundred times in the past twelve weeks. Kiss Mindy. Tell her that you love her through fresh tears and an even fresher desire to get this right. Whatever that means. (Find your lists again. Consult them.)
Refuse to attend birthing class because you deliver babies for a living.
You will see your child for the first time in an ultrasound, on a flat screen television, in a darkened room at Shulman and Associates. Mindy will tell you that your daughter has your nose, and her chin, and all you can see is the endless possibilities. Pretend that your co-workers did not have to peel you off the floor when you saw your baby's profile filling the plasma surface, turning somersaults and performing acrobatic feats in her mother's uterus. You will be hard pressed to live this down, probably not until she is in college. Morgan will refer to you as "The Incredible Melting Dr. C" for at least six months after she is born, and you will only do the "pull his scrubs shirt up over his face" trick four times in the interim. It isn't even half as humiliating.
You will look longingly at the headboard you once repaired due to too much good sex, an idea that suddenly seems very, very foreign. She's swollen, and tired, and you will use the same pillows where the hot lava loving occurred to prop Mindy up like you're beaching her on San Juan for study by the industry's leading marine biologists. She can't get comfortable, which means you can't get comfortable, and if Mama ain't happy is a phrase a little to oft repeated in your household, just all at once.
Tell her she's beautiful, even when she's sobbing in the middle of the unpainted nursery that Gwen sent the wrong Diaper Genie, and her mother is stuck at a conference the week of her due date, and she thinks she's wearing two different shoes (she is). You will gather Mindy into your arms, into your lap (with its standard amount of space, unlike hers, currently), and tell her, "She'll be here soon."
Dance like Gaga is watching. No, no, no. That is a pillow that Mindy had embroidered for the baby's room. Don't do that. You will learn how to let things slide. A little. Not too much, because order is, well, orderly. Just because you made another human being doesn't mean you lose all sense of yourself. Mindy goes through phases where she wants to name the baby Fox, and you tell her, very calmly, surprising even yourself, that you will never be able to explain to your mother how either of you arrived at that decision, so could she please consider names of people instead of animals? You will never listen to Harry Chapin's Cat'sIn the Cradle because what are you, a masochist?
Find yourself wishing that you had attended that birthing class, because you've been on the wrong end of this baby factory for a lot of years, and you are not prepared for what comes next. You will get it together, though, because Mindy is in pain, and now you are in pain, and if you thought you felt helpless before...
Everyone will cry.
You will not remember any of this, not the life before your daughter was born, or any of the things that you thought you knew. You remember all the days that the Yankees won the World Series in your lifetime precisely, where you were and what you were wearing, and none of those compare to this. You will only know that you could have missed all of it, but you didn't. And now maybe it's all you need, and the life you had before is just the life you had before, and now you're finally living.