Making The Cut Parents Agonize Over Their Son’s First Surgery

I was pregnant when my mother called to deliver the gory news.

“Marcia’s baby has to stay in the hospital. They botched the circumcision,” she said.

A doctor had strapped my friend’s newborn to a board and mistakenly lopped off the tip of his penis.

A week later, Marcia and her husband brought their baby home. They were instructed to insert a catheter into his penis three times a day to allow the baby to urinate. Each time the catheter went in, all three cried.

I resolved that my son would not be circumcised. “It’s barbaric and there’s no good medical reason for it,” I told my husband Brian.

“But he’ll feel different from other boys in the locker room and his own father. He’ll resent us,” Brian argued.

We retreated to our reference books. While the latest pronouncements favor circumcision, it’s still a close call. Avoiding surgery unless you have to have it is prudent advice, but removing the foreskin could reduce the risk of infection.

After weeks of jousting, we agreed to circumcise Matthew in the most humane way possible. We contacted a mohel, a Jewish rabbi who specializes in the procedure.

A mohel performs a ritual circumcision on the baby boy’s eighth day of life. For observant Jews, circumcision is a sign of their covenant with God. The ceremony takes place at the baby’s home in the company of family and friends.

“But you’re Catholic,” my mother protested.

“We’re not having a ceremony, ” I said.

“Well count me out I don’t want to watch,” she huffed.

“We’re not Jewish,” my husband told Rabbi Eliyahu Zimmerman over the phone.

“But you want the best,” the rabbi said. His price was $400, the going rate. “Of course I’ll throw in the blessing. A blessing is free.”

Matthew was 9 days old when Rabbi Zimmerman came to the door. Brian had gone to pick up his friend, Alex, who would hold the baby’s knees to the table during the procedure.

I was nursing Matthew in the bedroom under the watch of my baffled mother-in-law. “In my day we had it done right there in the hospital. I didn’t even have to know about it,” she said. She paused for my reaction to what had become her mantra.

The victim of bad timing, my mother-in-law had come to our house two days earlier to help out during the postpartum period. When the mohel knocked, she answered the door.

In a white business shirt and a yarmulke, Rabbi Zimmerman heaved a leather briefcase onto the kitchen table. Pressing the palms of his hand against the tiles of the table, he said, “Let’s set up here.”

I searched for the supplies he had requested earlier: rubbing alcohol, antibiotic ointment, sterile gauze pads, a bottle of sweet red wine.

When Brian arrived he was a tangle of nerves. He shifted his weight from his right leg to the left. I had seen this hip-rocking maneuver once before in an old home movie. Brian was a toddler clutching the side of his playpen, about to wail.

With my baby on the table, the rabbi dipped a scalpel and a clamp into a bath of sterilizing solution. When he slipped on rubber gloves I ducked into the bedroom, my mother-in-law at my heels.

She plopped on the bed and patted the space next to her. I sat. I heard the baby cry out then gasp. I clapped my hands to my ears. The bedroom door flung open. “We’re just changing his diaper,” Brian reported.

My mother-in-law and I exchanged smiles. Another cry shot through the room, leaving me awash in guilt. I felt like we were initiating our son to an unjust world. For the first eight days of life, Matthew knew only comfort. His grunts were answered before they became cries, his squirms were met by arms, his diapers were changed before the dampness reached him. Then on the ninth day, this trusting infant had a piece of his body cut away from him in what had to be excruciating pain.

Seconds after the screams began, my husband shouted, “It’s over. You can come out now.” Matthew was crying. The rabbi was cooing. He wrapped gauze around the baby’s bloody appendage, taped up the diaper and handed him to Brian.

Rabbi Zimmerman raised his hand and recited a Hebrew blessing. Alex who had a couple months of Hebrew school under his belt, repeated his words. The mohel soaked a gauze pad in sweet red wine and offered it to Matthew. The baby sucked the comfort from it and closed his eyes.

Brian put the sleeping baby in my arms and poured the rest of the wine. Brian offered his mother a glass. She had steadied herself against the refrigerator, arms folded.

The rabbi smiled and said, “Tell Grandma not to worry. Matthew’s going to make his wife very happy.”

MEMO: Laura D’Angelo is a free-lance writer who lives with her son and husband in New York City.