Lullabies and Whoopie Cushions

A love story about kind-of/ sort-of opposites

Our first date was a drive. I had to pick up my sister from college to bring her home for the weekend. It was an hour-and-a-half away, so I asked him if he wanted to come along.

“Sure!” he said, and my heart soared.

“Okay, cool! I’ll pick you up at four.” 

Matt was already standing outside when I made an awkward U-turn in the street, pulling up a little too far on the sidewalk. He very kindly refrained from saying anything about it, though, as he climbed into the passenger seat. We said hi, and my heart thumped wildly; I still couldn’t believe this was actually happening. Sure, he kind of asked me out a few months earlier. “Maybe we could go out sometime,” were his exact words, and I took this noncommittal suggestion to mean he knew about my gigantic crush and was just humoring me. So I replied, as casually as I could, “Yeah, maybe sometime. Coffee or something like that.” Then he took my cool response to be a shove directly into The Friend Zone. So our relationship consisted of phone calls every now and then for several months until this time, when I actually asked him out.

But now here he was, and it was going to be just the two of us for the first time ever for at least an hour-and-a-half. Our phone calls could last for hours until my mom picked up another phone (we didn’t have call-waiting) and said, “Bapribap!” a Bengali exclamation that covers a lot of sentiments, but clearly let me know it was time to hang up. Still, what if it turned out that when we were actually alone with each other, we had nothing to say? 

My favorite alternative radio station was playing on the speakers of my parents’ car as I tapped my toe, clad in Doc Marten knock-offs from Payless Shoes (I couldn’t afford the real ones), to the rhythm.

“You can change the station if you want,” I said as I eased the car into the traffic of Pacific Avenue, heading for the freeway. I didn’t think he actually would, but he reached for the dial and turned it to a country station. Country?! Country!!! While stopped at a light, I looked over and studied his face, trying to decide if I should kick him out of the car, maybe feign that I didn’t feel well. Gosh, he was cute, and until that moment, he had seemed so… well, normal…even cool. But he listened to country music.

I decided to give him a chance anyway. A couple months later, he told me he loved me for the first time by singing “Forever and Ever Amen,” and suddenly I liked country music too.

// 

A few years later, we sat on the floor of the bathroom with a pregnancy test in my shaking hands. I was sobbing, sure that it had to be wrong. We were married, but I was a twenty-year-old, starting my last year of college, and he was a mostly unemployed grad student. I was terrified.

“It’s okay,” he kept saying. “This is going to be amazing. We’re going to have a baby. It’ll be so much fun.” 

I didn’t believe him yet. I didn’t believe any of it. I drank three glasses of water and took another test. We’d bought a double pack. It was positive again.

In a state of disbelief, I called the toll-free number on the box. 

“My period is a week late,” I told the customer service representative, “and two of your tests were positive. What are the chances they’re wrong?”

“Sweetie,” the woman on the other end said, “if your period’s a week late, and you have two positive tests, you’re pregnant. Congratulations!” 

“Thank you,” I heard myself say before I hung up. I was going to be a mom. And Matt was going to be a dad. 

He came up behind me, as I sat, still shocked at the news, and wrapped his arms around me. “It’s going to be great.” 

//

Another morning, some years later, we had two little girls. We had taken them to Disneyland, and now it was time to leave for our then-home in Monterey. The Disneyland hangover as kids leave The Happiest Place on Earth is a real and terrifying thing, and to top it all off, my period had started. I had a migraine and cramps, but I was trying – so, so hard – to be a decent person. And to be honest, I thought I was doing a darn good job of it, too, until Matt pulled into a gas station with a mini-mart attached.

“You just bought gas…” I said, but my voice trailed off as, instead of driving to a pump, he pulled into a parking space and took his wallet out. Then he shoved a twenty dollar bill into my hand and looked imploringly into my eyes.

“Please,” he said, not angry but emphatic. “Go in there”--he jabbed his forefinger toward the door of the mini-mart–- “and get coffee. Get chocolate. Get Advil. Get ice. Get whatever it’s going to take for you to become a decent human being again.”

He knew I had my wallet with my own cash and credit or debit cards, but the twenty dollar bill he put in my hand underlined every word he said.

I half-laughed and half-cried. “I love you,” I said.

//

“Dad, sing ‘The Whoopie Cushion Song’ again!” 

I was in the middle of wrangling my kids to bed one night when Skyler, my second-born, made this request. Lilly, then five, chimed in with, “Yeah, ‘The Whoopie Cushion Song!’” and even Jayna, who was old enough not to be part of the bedtime shenanigans laughed and looked at Matt expectantly.

I raised an eyebrow. “‘The Whoopie Cushion Song’?” I repeated. Virtually every night for over thirteen years by then, I sang lullabies to my kids. It was our sacred, calming ritual. Then after a girls’ night out with Matt left in charge, they were suddenly asking–no, demanding–a song that, if I had to guess, involved a whoopie cushion. 

“It’s just a little something I made up last night,” he said, shrugging and spreading his palms, an innocent expression on his face. 

“Please, Mom?” Skyler asked. 

“Please?” Lilly echoed. 

I consented.

“Just a minute, I have to get my instrument,” Matt said. He jogged down the stairs and returned shortly with a pink whoopie cushion in his hands. He blew it up, and the song began. 

It was, I guess you could say, a ballad: the tale of several people and their unfortunate and ill-timed moments of flatulence, each verse punctuated with raucous explosions from (fingers crossed) the whoopie cushion. The kids alternately howled and silently shook with laughter, completely breathless, tears streaming down their faces. No one was going to sleep any time soon, and I’d be tired in the morning. But since I appreciate art in its many varied forms, I was laughing too. 

//

“You’re not pushing are you?!” A nurse came running into the triage room, where I was sat in an uncomfortably narrow bed with monitors strapped to my huge belly as Matt and our two oldest daughters stood around. 

“No, sorry, I was just laughing at something my husband said.” 

“Ah, that explains it,” the nurse said, looking over the printed paper that tracked my contractions. “But you’re not supposed to be laughing right now!” she said in a teasing tone. “You’re here to have a baby.” 

We’d heard variations of this line four other times by then, always something like, “You’re having too much fun to be in labor!” I was there for the serious and painful business of bringing a human being into the world, and he was making me laugh about it.

//

I glanced over at his profile, his blue eyes hidden behind his sunglasses as he maneuvered our minivan through the soul-sucking Seoul traffic. Cars were everywhere, cutting in front of us while scooters zipped up between them, as if materializing from thin air. Even sitting beside him, I felt stressed. If I were driving, though, I’d have knots in my shoulders and a tension headache barreling down like a freight train. He asked earlier if I wanted to drive, and I told him, “No way!” I knew it was stressful for him, too, but he didn’t complain. If we needed to parallel park, I’d gladly jump into the driver’s seat, but the driving was specialty.

I recalled how many people have told me that they trust Matt to handle whatever might come up. Throw him into a giant mess, and he’ll figure it out. When everyone else panics, he knows exactly what needs to be done and how to do it. It’s his super power.

//

Last fall, the night before we left for Paris, I asked what time he was setting his alarm for.

“3:45.”

“3:45?! Are you insane?! Could we at least wait till 4?” Yes, we were arguing about fifteen minutes of sleep. “The flight doesn’t leave till 9:30.”

This is a conversation we’ve been having for twenty-five years. The particulars of it may change, but we always know our lines perfectly. He considers himself late if he isn’t there half an hour early. I hate to sit around, to be the first person at an event, to have to smile awkwardly and not fidget as I wait 

“Yeah, but it’s an international flight, so we need to be there three hours early.” 

As he said this, I recalled the summer I flew from Busan to California through Shanghai and waited over an hour in the middle of the night, with two-year-old Annalee and five-year-old Wyatt (plus the other kids, who were much better behaved), for the United desk to open so that I could check in. It was painful beyond description. Even five years later, the memory still made me shudder.

I did the math. “Yeah, so we need to get there by 6:30. Which means we need to leave here by five, and it’s not going to take more than an hour to get ready. I’m already packed.” 

Matt shrugged. “Do you want to risk missing the flight to Paris?” 

“Of course not! I just don’t want to sit around the airport any extra before such a long flight.” 

He sighed and picked up his phone, and I watched the numbers he set for the alarm–3:58. “Fine,” he said. “But have you seen Home Alone?”

At the base of the Eiffel Tower, I turned to him with tears in my eyes and told him, “Thank you. Thank you for all of this.”

//

Sometimes we finish each other’s sentences. Sometimes we sigh at the exact same moment and in the exact same tone and then joke about how we’re basically the same person now. Sometimes we avoid eye contact because we know the other thinks something is hilarious, but it’s an inappropriate moment for a snort laugh. Sometimes he asks why I’m sad when I thought I was fooling everyone, even him. Sometimes I scratch his back and tell him to relax just because he sighed a certain way.

Other times, though. 

Other times it feels like we wave all our differences like signs above our heads. Other times it feels like we are fighting over the helm, each wanting to go in opposite directions. Other times, we can’t understand why the other doesn’t know what we’re thinking, or why we’re upset right now.

But somehow, hopefully, we’re creating a fugue of sorts, entwining melodies that meet and stretch and lift. We play calming strains of lullabies with the percussion of whoopie cushions. We meet in discordance and resolve. We pray that, in the end, ours will be a love song whose notes hang in the air long after the musicians are gone.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Love After Babies".