Separation Anxiety

Recently by Thomas Luongo: Surviving Contact with u2018The Plan'

When last we left off it was early 2005 and "The Plan" had been mostly a success. We were, though, approaching the next crisis in the story. The madness of the bubble economy had driven my boss slightly insane. Her research program, which I managed, was in the process of blowing apart at the seams. Government money, the only kind available, was now coming with a (to me, not her) deal-breaking string attached, NELAP Certification, that which drove me screaming from the private (sic) sector to the state in the first place. How's that for a perverse incentive? I refused to become a de-facto employee of the EPA. Doing research of marginal value was one thing. Doing that same research while submitting to government audits of unnecessary paper-work, which could land me in jail, was another. Some of the grants, as well, looked suspiciously like intellectual cover for the seizure of property being used in a politically unpopular way, read shooting ranges.

I had come to my ethical limits of being a tax-consumer.

Against this backdrop, Larry still hadn't bought his property, we were building an addition, hadn't rolled the various debts into a mortgage and Camille was stubbornly refusing to get pregnant. I tested my own hair for arsenic and lead poisoning one morning, just in case.

This situation went on like this until late June. While negotiating on a mortgage I insisted on borrowing no more than so much money as a fixed-rate, 20-year note. Well, they kept trying to get me to consider an ARM, more money and/or more term. Finally, the manager came in, younger than me, and tried pushing me to go up to six figures on the loan. I told him, "Thanks, but this whole market is going to crash and none of you will have jobs in 2 years. So just shut up and get out." I'm really not a very nice person. By 2008 they were gone.

In early July we finally went to see a fertility doctor, who told us our only option was adoption. Without paying attention to details; doing either blood work or a full medical history or asking about current life issues, he concluded my boys were too dysfunctional. He cut off Camille's protests with, "If you want to have kids, you're not having them with him," and "There's a lot of information on the Internet, most of it is wrong." Part of me was relieved, I'm ashamed to admit. The same traits that allowed me to see the events on the horizon were also the ones that made me fear bringing a child into the middle of it. Is it any wonder that birth rates in the West are dropping like mooks in a Jackie Chan flick? Stress-induced male infertility is real. I blame The Fed. It may not be true, but I don't care.

She immediately went home, put me on a vitamin regimen and swore me off my nightly whiskey or two. That weekend we went to visit a good friend in Miami very depressed. It turned out to be just another twist in the road; this one for the good. He introduced me to the man, again younger than me, who by year's end would be my boss from that point forward.

The problem was the job was in Stuart, which is south of Gainesville… oh, like, 250 miles south. It was a great opportunity to combine the two things I'm really good at, problem solving and generating data, all to bring a much-needed technology to maturity. This was a chance to put those free-market principles I was so good at espousing into action while getting off the government dole and possibly getting rich as a consequence. Camille just knew I would be happy doing research as opposed to baby-sitting academics. Still, she had to push me to accept the job. It wasn't a calling, but it was finally a career.

By they way, she was pregnant by mid-August.

We closed on Larry's property in November and I moved into an apartment in early December. The addition wasn't finished. I would travel home on the weekends. I still do. Camille tiled her tub surround seven months pregnant. The wood-burning stove was installed the day before the first overnight frost along with the front door, which I built that same day.

We had decided to have our child at home, as we knew the hospital, for us, would not be an optimal environment for Camille, which is paramount. The cesarean rates in Florida were over 25%, now over 28%. The fear of lawsuit has driven hospital assistance of the most basic of human functions irretrievably insane. Besides, if a couple we knew could deliver their two kids themselves without any help, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson, "How hard could it be?!" Then again, we said that about the house. Isn't it a system designed to succeed? We are all prima facia evidence of that. Having watched a film of a woman give birth to twins by herself (one of them a footling breach!) there was no way we couldn't handle this. Moreover, Camille was very worried about me turning the birthing into something reported on the evening news. "No. Mr. Luongo you can't bring a gun into the delivery room." Honestly, the only way someone was doing an episiotomy on her was if I got to do one on them first…Comma dammit! Camille found a mid-wife who handled all of the pre-natal care. She and her two students were fantastic.

We refused to find out the sex beforehand. For eight months everyone asked me, so what do you want, boy or girl. I would reply, "2, 10, 11… eyes, fingers, toes!" One Shatner-esque pause later… "Healthy. That's all I care about." I got a call from her around eleven O'clock one night saying she might be going into labor, but she wasn't sure. Then she had a contraction. "I'll be home by 2." I was. If my average speed was less than 100 miles per hour on that trip home, I'll have lost faith in both math and the space/time continuum. Born in our bedroom in April 2006, my lil girl is nothing more than what every father says she is, u2018The Most Beautiful Damn Thing in the Entire Universe."

It is one of the rare moments when I'm proud to be utterly conventional.

The story settles down as we figure out how to be parents/spouses who aren't together enough. Larry had done the unthinkable, acquired and maintained a girlfriend, and moved out just before the birth. Now that "The Plan" had been implemented, we could get on with the real preparations for whatever future awaited us as a family.

Ta,

August 19, 2010