Do Not Disturb

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, married and childless, some of my friends had already started their families. When I met their babies for the first time, I didn’t know how to react. Other women would coo and say how cute the baby was, even if the baby looked like Winston Churchill (so many do). Inevitably, a blanketed bundle would be thrust at me, and I would hold it like a log that I was bringing in from the woodpile to the fireplace, and not just any log, but a log with sharp, pointy twigs sticking out of it and ants or beetles crawling along its bark.  

Yet, mysteriously, sometime around my 30th birthday, I noticed the
first signs of baby lust. I found myself agreeing with other women that,
yes, the Michelin Man rolls of fat on the baby’s arms and legs are in fact
cute and, yes, the baby’s head does give off a kind of pleasant, powdery smell that reminds me of fresh laundry. I was able to stand in a room with a screaming child and not want to pound a railroad spike into my head. This was new. My husband noticed it and was relieved he no longer needed to prepare cold compresses for my migraines after we visited a friend with children.  

I don’t know what caused my change in attitude, though quite possibly my menacing biological clock had something to do with it. Nonetheless, the
decision to have children did not come overnight. It crept up slowly, on cat feet, and stayed long enough that I simply had to stop ignoring it. Imagine my surprise then when, after more than 10 years of trying not to get pregnant, we realized that it just wasn’t going to happen on our own. After my regular ob-gyn did all she could, she turned us over to a fertility specialist, who just happened to love the Greek goddesses.

The first thing we noticed when we entered his office was that the names of these goddesses were printed on the doors to the exam rooms. For example, there was Athena and Demeter, Hera and Hestia. The doctor is Greek so I had to assume his decorating choice was a nod to his heritage. It’s been a while since I’ve read much on Greek mythology, probably since freshman English class, so I did a little research. 

Some of the names made sense. For example, Hera is the goddess of
marriage and childbirth; Hestia is the goddess of the home. Athena, however, is the goddess of arts, crafts and war. An odd mix. Perhaps she decoupaged the armor?
There was only one room named after a God and that God, of course, was Zeus, ruler of all the Gods. I have never seen this room. I heard about it from my husband, as in:

“Guess what the jack-off room is called?”  

“Hmmm, Zeus?”  

“Bingo!”  The jack-off room, as he lovingly referred to it, is where the men went to produce their “specimen.” When I came out of one of the other rooms on our first visit and didn’t know where my husband was, the staff informed me that he was in another room “producing his specimen.” Then, everyone looked sheepish as if they were trying very hard not to picture the act.

In my research, I rediscovered the checkered past of mighty Zeus. After his mother hid him away to be raised by nymphs in order to avoid the fate of his siblings (his father devoured them), he returned to make dear old dad upchuck his brothers and sisters. It gets even weirder.  Zeus married his sister, Hera, then proceeded to become an old lech, sleeping with countless goddesses and mortal women, often without their consent (he once disguised himself as a bull and carted Europa away to the sea to rape her). He’s not exactly a role model.

But most people don’t know the mythology. They just know that Zeus is some kind of superpower. If pressed, they may be able to recall an image of him angrily sneering down from the clouds wielding a thunderbolt in a heavily muscled arm.  

I wondered, does the doctor think he’s Zeus? My first reaction was of course he does; he’s a conceited doctor making scads of money and handing out promises like Pez candy. I figured all doctors had a God complex, but then, I considered his tasks for the day. He was giving a woman a shot to force her to ovulate. He was hand picking the healthiest sperm from some guy’s specimen and weeding out the slackers. He was actually combining egg and sperm in the lab. He was creating life! So maybe he had a right to stand a little straighter, to exude an aura of confidence. And if it helped us get pregnant, all the better.

I wondered, do the men who go into the jack-off room think they’re Zeus? Probably not. I assumed it was a bit humbling to enter a room with a plastic cup while everyone on the other side of the door is waiting for you to do the deed.  I can’t imagine how any man is able to produce a single little swimmer under that kind of pressure.

My husband reported that the magazines in the room were no help.  

“It was all Playboys from the 70s,” he said. Naked hippie chicks in kittenish poses. “Worse,” he said, “when the magazines are that old, you know they’ve been used. Well used.”  

Despite that, he managed to perform as required, with help from a certain
brunette named Patti whose turn-ons are motorcycles and sunny days. I couldn’t help but wonder what Aphrodite would think. 

Marcy Campbell lives in Ohio, where she is the editor of the literary journal, Artful Dodge, and teaches writing at the College of Wooster. 

~Marcy Campbell