When our baby was born we had not a diaper. Not a wipe, bassinet, car seat, not even one onesie. Not a clue.
I was returning home from a friend’s dinner party. Baby was sharing room with lots of jerk chicken and ginger beer, so when I felt a little something um, escape, as I walked up the subway steps, I thought, Eh, well, of course I’m losing control of my bladder.
But let’s just say when I got home and used the bathroom, I thought a call to the OB might be in order.
The OB said, calmly, that I should go to the hospital, just to get it checked out. I called my husband, Tom, who was out with work friends, celebrating some advertising coup. I could see just how much they were celebrating when I arrived at the hospital to find Tom on a bench outside wolfing down a pint of Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk.
Great. The father of my child is ... a child.
Once we got in, there was a lot of shoving of hands up me to check around. They decided that I’d probably have to stay in the hospital a while. So I lay there and tried not to worry, as Tom slept undisturbed.
But then my baby’s heartbeat slowed down. And a team rushed in to investigate. And when it happened again, my OB said she would like me to have the baby now.
“You mean, now now?” I said.
It was seven weeks until this baby was due. The contractor was coming to our apartment in three days. The baby didn’t have a room.
But apparently he didn’t want to room with me any more.
So I had an emergency C-section and out came the baby. Three hours later I still couldn’t feel my legs, so I worried that I was paralyzed. The doctor yelled at me to move my foot. I yelled back, “I’m paralyzed! I can’t move m...” I looked down where he’d pulled back the blanket to find my foot moving. That was weird.
And it was really weird when they brought me this little baby. I think I’d never really wrapped my head around someone growing within me. I’d look at the pictures — this is what he looks like at this stage or that — but I never really fully believed that something as complicated as an ear could be forming inside me.
“Look at his ears!” we marveled.
To prevent possible infection and to treat his jaundice, he stayed in the NICU for a week. Thoughtful of him and the hospital staff, really, since that gave us time to run around and get all the stuff you need for a baby. And, it turned out, we needed that time to decide on his name.
My husband favored names you might find on a dockworker in the ’50s: Eddie, Frank, Mack; I went the direct opposite, WASPy route: Evan, Graham, Campbell.
Finally, with his discharge imminent, we went with Luke.
Today, like that one almost four years ago, he’s go-go-go. And he’s got a real fondness for jerk chicken.