Epilogue
Amy
Ten weeks later
I fall asleep on the toilet.
Not in a dramatic, call-the-doctor way. In a slow, melting, my-eyes-just-closed-and-my-chin-hit-my-chest way, sleep that ambushes you in the middle of peeing.
One second, I'm letting it flow. The next, I'm dreaming about spreadsheets.
The spreadsheets have columns for feeding times, diaper changes, and the number of hours since I last slept, and the totals at the bottom are all in red.
The columns become squiggly lines and little flowers start dancing in the corners.
A soft tap on the door.
"Amy? Ye all right in there?"
I jerk awake. My neck cricks. My underwear is around my ankles.
I am sitting on a toilet at—I check my phone—5:14 in the morning.
I have been asleep for an indeterminate amount of time, though time itself has no meaning anymore.
My husband is on the other side of the door asking if I'm okay, and the honest answer is: I don't know.
I just know I'm so, so tired.
"Fine," I call. "Just... finishing up."
I wipe and stand, reminding myself to pull up my underwear.
While I wash my hands, I look at myself in the mirror.
I shouldn't do that. The woman looking back at me has dark circles under her eyes the color of week-old bruises and hair that hasn't been properly washed in three days.
There are breast milk stains on both sides of her sleep shirt and she hasn't moisturized in weeks.
She looks like someone who has been dragged through sleep-deprivation hell backwards, every two hours around the clock, for ten weeks.
Because she has.
My boobs ache. Not the normal postpartum ache that comes and goes with feedings. This is deeper, heavier, a soreness in the tissue like a hum at the wrong frequency.
And the exhaustion. Fatigued, tired, weary—those words don't come close.
Callum is ten weeks old and wonderful and relentless, a five-pound-two-ounce tyrant who has grown into a nine-pound dictator with his father's lungs and his father's jaw and his father's absolute conviction that when he wants something, the universe should provide it immediately.
I'm used to being tired, but this is the kind of tired where I have to scrape myself off the floor.
Where gravity uses me as a vehicle for carrying out cruel experiments.
Where I fall asleep on toilets.
I'm trying to get Callum on a schedule. I have a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet has color coding and conditional formatting and a pivot table that tracks wake windows by time of day.
The baby has responded to my organizational efforts by doing whatever he wants whenever he wants, which Fiona says is the McCormick way and Mom says is karmic retribution for my own infancy.
Fiona, who is still in the rental down the street—"a month or as long as it takes" having become, predictably, more than a month—arrives every morning at 7 a.m. with a thermos of tea and opinions about everything from Callum's sleep posture to the thread count of his swaddles.
She and Mom have reached an uneasy alliance, a grandmaternal NATO in which they cooperate on childcare matters and wage cold war on everything else.
Last week, they got into an argument about whether Callum's first solid food should be porridge (Fiona) or rice cereal (Mom) and it escalated until Dad and Fergus quietly took the baby to the park and didn't come back for two hours.
The grands. Still grand. Still maddening. Still exactly what we need.
A crash from the living room. Then a wail. Not the baby—Hamish.
"Amy! AMY. I've done it again!"
I race out. Hamish is standing in the middle of the living room, Callum strapped to his chest in the baby wrap, except Callum is upside down.
Not dangerously upside down—Hamish has one enormous hand cradling his head and the other supporting his back—but the wrap is twisted around both of them in a configuration that defies the laws of physics.
"How," I say.
"I followed the video!"
"The baby is inverted, Hamish."
"The woman givin' the instructions was Aussie. Mebbe it's upside down from that?"
I unwind them. The wrap unwinds in layers, like a mummy, and Callum emerges red-faced and furious. The second he hits Hamish's shoulder, though, he stops crying. Hamish bounces him gently—the instinctive, rhythmic bounce of a natural father—and grins at me over our son's head.
The cursed six-foot plush cow-giraffe is propped beside them, and Callum's chubby fist is reaching for it, because of course the cursed plush is now his absolute favorite, the one object on earth that calms him when nothing else works.
Dr. Biswas thinks it's the texture. Shannon thinks it's the colors.
Carol says Callum has inherited my taste in men: large, strange-looking, and covered in mysterious stains.
Carol has been single since her divorce.
At Jeffrey's last soccer game, she happened to sit next to Declan's older brother, Terry.
They talked nonstop. Carol told me later that he smelled like sawdust, coffee, and lemon, they talked about rail trail expansion initiatives in Massachusetts, and that she felt nothing, absolutely nothing, it's just Terry for God's sake, and could I please stop looking at her like that.
She's texted me about him three times since. Each text begins with "This isn't about Terry, but..." and then is entirely about Terry.
I give it six months.
Hamish is dressed in running gear. Compression tights, trainers, a faded Celtic shirt that stretches across his shoulder muscles.
It's mid-September. The air coming through the cracked window is cool and clean and perfect for a run, and my legs ache for it.
The jogging stroller is right there, by the door, assembled and ready, and for one wild second I consider it.
Coffee first.
I pour a cup and look at the clock. 5:21 a.m. The coffee is hot and bitter and does absolutely nothing for my fatigue. It might as well be valerian tea. My boobs still ache. The caffeine hits my bloodstream and bounces off the exhaustion like a tennis ball on a brick wall.
This feeling is familiar.
I set the mug down.
This feeling is too familiar.
Sore boobs. Exhaustion beyond normal. Instinct. No period, but that can be explained by breastfeeding around the clock.
Instinct, though—that's not so easily explained away.
The last time I had this specific hum in my body, this particular frequency of tired-but-not-tired, this bone-deep awareness that something has shifted at the cellular level, I was standing in this same bathroom with a different test and a different life and no idea what was coming.
I go back to the bathroom and open the drawer—the one with the floss wands, the tampons I haven't needed in over a year, the hair ties, the miscellaneous debris of my sad attempts at a skincare regimen—and dig to the back.
Past the expired coupon for toothpaste Mom shoved in there.
Past the sample-size mouthwash from a dentist appointment I barely remember.
My hand closes around a box.
The last pregnancy test. The one left over from the pack I bought right after our honeymoon, when two pink lines rearranged our entire life.
In the living room, Hamish is laughing. I can hear him through the door, talking to Callum in the low, musical voice he uses when he thinks no one is listening, the mix of English and Scots that is his most natural register.
"Oooo," Hamish says.
"Oo," Callum replies.
"Ahhhhhh," Hamish responds.
"Ah," Callum sighs.
Hamish does this twenty times a day and never gets bored.
He's an incredible father. The man who couldn't fold a baby wrap to save his life can read Callum's cries the way he used to read a pitch—the hungry cry, the tired cry, the I-want-the-cursed-plush cry.
He changes diapers with the speed and precision of a man who once scored a hat trick against Sunderland on instinct alone.
He sings Callum to sleep in Gaelic, the same language he murmured against my hair during sex, and it sounds like a prayer then, too.
The mess with Str1kecast Sports is over.
His new contract is the biggest in network history, with a schedule that guarantees him home for every birth, every holiday, every moment that matters.
Malcolm Rees is gone, replaced by a producer named Lena who laughs at Hamish's jokes and whose first note in their initial meeting was "More banter. "
Hamish nearly wept.
The "Fatherhood on the Pitch" segment with Callum has its own fan account with 800,000 followers, and last week, Callum spit up on Hamish's lapel mic during a live broadcast, which generated more engagement than the actual match.
I'm drawing my full salary during maternity leave.
The VP title is waiting for me when I go back.
James, whose ego fought the promotion for exactly forty-eight hours before his PR team showed him the market research on "brands associated with viral moments of authentic family connection" and the revenue projections made him weep tears of capitalist joy, now refers to the whole broadcast incident as "my idea. "
Our life is chaotic and sleepless and loud and so full of love, it makes my teeth ache.
Or, maybe, my boobs.
I take the test. I set it on the counter and wash my hands. I count to sixty in my head, slowly, exactly the way I did last year in this same bathroom with this same brand of test while my hands shook and my heart hammered.
Oh, to be that na?ve again.
The woman who took that first test thought she could plan her way through pregnancy with spreadsheets and Asana and Kanban boards and a color-coded emergency binder.
That woman delivered her son on the living room floor while her husband commentated a football match from London and her mother-in-law blocked the bathroom door to prevent the baby from being born in a toilet.