One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (42 page)

I
t was just getting dark, a hush coming over the day. Aurora was hiccupping in the back seat.
The one who used to be hiccupping inside.
“It feels good to be home, just the three of us,” Lorene said as we walked up the garden path.

She froze in the kitchen doorway. “Oh. My. God.” I set my car-seat baby basket down and looked over her shoulder. The floor was covered in leftovers—some eaten, some licked, some regurgitated. “He didn’t close the refrigerator door,” we said in unison.

A trail led to the dogs, who were lying on the couch, too full or sick to feel remorse or any urge to get up. “WHAT’S THIS?” Lorene said in her very-bad-dog voice. Vita’s brow furrowed. Mister’s chin never left the armrest. “WHAT’S THIS?!” Aurora started to cry.

This?
This is our life.

Postpartum Impressions

Life was what happened while we were busy
coming up with our new routines. Balance was like a direction on a compass, a bearing we set ourselves on, not some specific place where we ever hoped to actually arrive.

Aurora’s birth certificate was recorded, registered, sealed, and delivered to our mailbox on December 3, 2004 —the same day she smiled for the first time. A couple months later, she rolled over. She was crawling by the end of the summer, speed-crawling during her first Ride FAR, and she had been walking for three months when we made our first family trip to Australia in February of 2006.

I streamlined my workload. I gave up environmental cartooning and focused on parenting, pet, and other cartoons and books, which I could draw from my day-to-day experience.

Lorene back-burnered her doula business. She didn’t want to be running out on our baby in the middle of the night to help someone else have hers. She sold her house. And she rented an office above her shop so she could take Aurora to “work.”

J
OURNAL
: J
ULY
10, 2006

The past nineteen months have gone by faster than any I can remember. I think time used to go by more slowly when it seemed like the Future (when I’d have everything I ever wanted) would never get here.

Now that I no longer felt the need to plan for a lifetime, I made a plan for one day.

M
y neighbor Margaret is at the door. She is returning some eggs she borrowed. Not the one egg she borrowed the afternoon of my first retrieval—that was five years earlier. Aurora is three. We’ve stopped counting her age in months. I’ve stopped feeling like an imposter; the words “my daughter” roll right off my tongue.

“God, it’s such a relief seeing your place looking like this. I can remember coming over here when my kids were young—I was so jealous. It looked like a museum!”

“Thanks, Margaret.”

I can remember caring what people thought about the way my house looked. Trying to ban the plastic items at first, then keeping them at bay, insisting on getting them back into the correct bins and boxes, then letting go. Not completely. I have to tell myself
The Velveteen House
story. Our house has been made Real.

There are so many things I didn’t know to factor into the baby decision back when I was making it, like this connection to neighbors, strangers, other mothers everywhere. The fear of other people’s disapproval has no basis in my reality. If anything, people have expressed a little envy of Lorene’s and my shared parenting. We each have a wife.

“MAMA!” Aurora is calling. I am everything except Ma, that’s Lorene. There has never been any confusion, save a few days when Bruce was Mommy Bruce and we had to clarify that “Mommy” is reserved for actual mothers, not just someone who does your bidding.

“Just a minute,” I call back.

“I’ll let you go,” Margaret says, and lets herself out.

“Mommy, can you tell me the Laya burp story?”

“Sweetie, I can’t tell you a Laya story while I’m cooking, I have to think.” I’ve told her the story a hundred times and you would think I wouldn’t have to think, but I have to tell it as if I’m Laya, the doll Daddy Steve gave her for her third birthday.

“Pinky Delicious!” Lorene bursts through the door and saves me.