Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 11
Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and I thought that would be the theme of my entry. I wasn’t actually planning on writing about my wife, though. I was planning on writing about her friends.
This isn’t my story to tell, but my wife has had a really difficult life. She’s had to overcome more than anyone I’ve ever known, and she’s had to work very hard to get where she is. Part of the reason she’s made it so far is that she has built an amazing collection of friends stretching all the way back to preschool. She is kind and outgoing and selfless. She is an incredibly supportive friend, and now that she could use some help herself, she’s got an army behind her. One friend was waiting at our apartment to help out when we got home from the hospital. One checked an enormous suitcase of hand-me-downs the last time she visited. One had a baby nine months before us, and when we visited her over the winter, she sent us home with a bag of clothes and a trunk full of fancy baby gadgets we never would have thought to get ourselves. Another made a mobile for Derek Jr. by hand and is scouring the Buy Nothing app for free diapers and baby supplies. Another is visiting town — from Europe — for two weeks and coming over most days to cook for us and do laundry. Those who can’t visit have sent gifts and FaceTimed the baby.
I have been really moved by the support I’ve gotten from my own friends, but this is something else entirely. My wife has put so much good into the world, and the world is taking this opportunity to show how much it is appreciated. It’s overwhelming evidence of a life lived right. Anyway, that’s what I thought I was going to write about. Or maybe this onesie that my wife has been saving for Mother’s Day. Instead we’re going to talk about the injured list.
I’ve been thinking a lot about bizarre baseball injuries lately. You know the ones I’m talking about: Wade Boggs bruises his ribs trying to take off his cowboy boots. Steve Sparks dislocates his shoulder trying to tear a phone book in half. Spencer Torkelson slices his finger opening a can of beans with a knife because, famously, “the boys were hungry.” I can’t shake these stories because I’m haunted by the ghost of Freddie Fitzsimmons. In 1927, Fitzsimmons fell asleep in a rocking chair during spring training. The fingers of his pitching hand found their way under the runners of the chair and, well, crunch. I now spend some very sleepy hours in a rocking chair every night, and I’ve been terrified of going out like Fitzsimmons. Instead, of course, I injure myself in an even dumber way.
Derek Jr. wakes up abruptly around 12:30 AM. She wakes up both hungry and communicative about that hunger. I am dead asleep until the moment she awakes, and the sudden screaming launches me into action at a lurch. We use this stupid app to track everything Derek Jr. does. Plenty of this information is useful, but it’s also onerous. It feels like a recipe for turning into a helicopter parent, and I dread what this company I’d never even heard of two months ago is doing with all this data about our baby.
Using the app also means that we’re tied to our phones at all times, so when I pick up Derek Jr., try to soothe her, and realize that the only thing that’s going to soothe her is food, I bring my phone with me to the kitchen. She’s crying and I’m rushing, still half-asleep. I’m not thinking clearly, or I would have put on the basketball shorts I keep next to the bed specifically so I can put my phone in my pocket when right I wake up. Instead, I try tucking the phone into the waistband of my boxers against my hip bone. When I bend over to grab the bottle from the fridge, the phone slips out and lands directly on my toes. I don’t see it happen because I’m focused on the milk and the crying baby on my shoulder, but I can picture it falling like the coffee mug at the end of The Usual Suspects, tumbling in slow motion, and landing at a one-in-a-million angle, exactly on the corner, dead center on the phalange of my left middle toe.
I’ve had multiple ACL replacements, so surgeons have done some truly heinous things to my femur and tibia with power tools, but I’ve never officially broken a bone in the traditional sense, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt a pain like this one. It’s disorienting. I’m instantly nauseated. The stress hormones that started pouring into my bloodstream when I woke up are now pumping at firehose levels. Also, I am still balancing the baby on my shoulder, still reassuring her that food is only the way (only now in a voice that won’t stop breaking), and I still have to get back to her room, collapse into the rocking chair, and feed her.
Because your toes share some nerve pathways, it feels like the phone landed on the middle three. I’m afraid I’ve broken all of them, and I am physically unable to refrain from moaning while I feed Derek Jr. I am in absolute shambles and it takes everything I have to stay upright and get the food in her. I’m also worried that all this will scare my baby, but I look down at her and it’s immediately clear that she has not noticed at all. Could not care less. She’s just a baby. She’s getting the food. She’s comfortable. Why should the fact that all that comfort is being provided by a wretched, shaking goblin concern her in the slightest?
I pray that the milk will make her sleepy and this will be an easy feed, because if it doesn’t go that way, I will need to get up and dance around the room with her on my ruined toes while singing along with the Mountain Goats — my most effective strategy for getting her sleepy. It’s too dark to see what my foot looks like, and I’m not at all sure that I’ll be able to manage it.
Derek Jr. doesn’t go down to sleep easily, because of course she doesn’t. It takes two hours, another trip to the fridge for half an ounce more formula, and an eternity of unsteady dancing. I do all this quietly because I want my wife to get her rest. But I’m still feeling sorry for myself. I could use some soothing too, so I cry out for help in the only way that comes to mind. I put a note in the stupid baby tracking app.
When Derek Jr. is finally asleep in the crib, I hobble to the bathroom and turn on the light. I see that the phone only landed on the middle toe just below the nail. A band exactly the width of a phone, in a purple so dark that it’s nearly black, stretches all the way around its circumference. I am a ring-tailed lemur. By morning, the blood will have spread out a centimeter in either direction and lightened to a heady claret with a paler streak in the middle, around the knuckle. It looks like my toe has been wrapped in raw bacon.
I tag my wife in when Derek Jr. wakes up at 6:30. She has seen my note, and even waking up from a sound sleep, she is instantly, genuinely sympathetic. I am grateful. It is very much what I need in that moment, but I need you to stop and notice that I said “sympathetic” and not “empathetic.” That’s because while I was busy injuring myself, my wife was busy doing the same. She has thrown her back out. It was only a matter of time, really. Both our backs are messed up to some degree, from the constant asymmetrical strain of holding and rocking and carrying and burping a baby all day, and from the fact that during my early shift and her late shift, we spend half the night sleeping on a futon bed from Wayfair that feels like it was made by a pile of pickaxes, for a pile of pickaxes, and out of a pile of pickaxes. And of course, on top of that, she’s still recovering from the whole having-a-baby business. We’re a mess, is what I’m trying to get across. Derek Jr. is the only member of the team who’s not on the IL.
It turns out that my wife’s injury is worse than mine. She’ll be struggling with serious pain for a few days, but I only have trouble walking for a day or so. I know that the general prescription for a broken toe is to rub some dirt on it, so I don’t even bother going to the doctor for a diagnosis. I have still never officially broken a bone. Adding insult to injury, a few days later, I accidentally smush my wife’s toe under the runner of the rocking chair, and it’s no big deal. The floor is carpeted. It barely hurts. I’ve been worrying about Freddie Fitzsimmons for nothing. I should have been worried about Spencer Torkelson. Twice in the next couple days, I slice my finger on the can of formula. I’m not trying to open it in some weird way or anything; the can just happens to be designed so that the inner lip is razor sharp. I very nearly bleed right into the powder. Anyway, I now sleep in my basketball shorts every night.
