Chicken Soup for Every Mom's Soul (15 page)

He kisses my forehead.

My attention is once again directed solely to this miracle in my arms and the rest of the world disappears again. Her eyes are looking about now, and her tiny lips are slightly moving as if she is trying to tell me a secret. Her little nose is covered with tiny white bumps that look as if God carefully placed them there. A little hand emerges from the white blanket. It is a bit purple and oh so tiny. With my index finger, I stroke her palm. She grasps my finger and holds on tight. My heart melts. She looks at me again.

“Hi,” I say, with a big smile.

“Honey, we’ve got to run a few tests and give her a bath.

I’ll bring her right back,” a nurse says out of nowhere.

“Okay,” I say with a sigh.

I look back down at my daughter and say, “I love you, Summer.”

The nurse carefully takes her out of my arms. As she is leaving the room, I watch the blanket move from the wiggling of my baby’s feet.

Minutes later,my mother and I are alone in the room. She hugs me all at once, and I notice she has tears in her eyes.

“There is no love like the love you have for your child,” she says, looking into my eyes, replicas of her own.

“I know,” I say, and smile.

Melissa Arnold Hill

Pink and Blue Makes . . . Green?

It’s come to my attention that there are two types of pregnant people in this world: those who find out the gender of their child as soon as they can and go around calling their stomach “Tommy” or “Jennifer” for the next nine months; and those who refuse to find out the gender of their child one nanosecond before the actual birth, no matter what.

Let me just stop right here a minute and say that I, in no way, advocate one choice over the other. I firmly believe it’s a personal choice that should be left to the parents.

But, that said, what I don’t understand is why the very same people who refuse to look at the sonogram screen in the doctor’s office, are perfectly fine with relying on old wives’ tales to predict their baby’s gender.

Take, for instance, my friend Linda, who tried to find out what she was having by twirling a needle on a string over her stomach. “It’s a girl,” she announced gleefully over the phone. “The needle spun in circles.”

She was so sure, in fact, that she painted the nursery pink and stenciled ballerina bunnies on the walls. But, as luck would have it, when she tried it again two months later, the needle moved in a straight line, mostly between the refrigerator and television set. And everyone knows what
that
means.

But that’s not all. Once, when my friend Julie was pregnant with her second child, she heard she could tell what she was having if there was a white line above her top lip. “Can you come over,” she said frantically over the phone, “I think I have a lip line. But I can’t tell if it’s really a line-line or a pale wrinkle or a milk mustache left over from the bowl of cereal I ate for breakfast.”

The big drawback to this method was that, once we determined that it was, indeed, a bona fide line-line, we had absolutely no idea if that meant she was having a girl or a boy.

And, oh all right, then there was the time I tried the Chinese lunar calendar method. But just for the record I want you to know it’s a highly respected system based on a complicated numerical combination of the father’s birth year, lucky elements, planetary rotation and the number of his favorite local take-out place. (But I could be wrong about this last one.)

But what I didn’t see coming was that to get an accurate result you need to be fairly good at math. So, after spending hours adding and subtracting cycle scores and percentages and all that, I came out with a bizarre triple negative number that’s only been seen on university entrance exams and certain Wall Street corporate earning reports.

But, that’s just the kind of answer I usually get whenever I try to walk on the mystical side of life.

The other day my friend Linda, who’s now six months pregnant, said to me over coffee, “I’ve tried everything. According to the needle test I’m having a boy, the lunar calendar says I’m having a girl, the heartbeat test falls somewhere between a boy and a girl, and the Drano test doesn’t say anything at all, but it smells really, really bad,” she sighed. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Then why don’t you save yourself the trouble and just ask the doctor?” I asked.

“What?” she said. “And spoil the mystery? Every parent knows that the gender of your child is the one greatest mystery in the world. Why would I want to go and ruin it?”

Granted I could’ve mentioned that she was a person who had just mixed urine with Drano to see if it would make green.

But instead, I said simply, “You’re right.”

With pregnant women, sometimes that’s the best way.

Debbie Farmer

Outpouring of Love

It was 8 P.M. and cold. The rain, undecided whether to turn to snow, came down in sheets. It didn’t matter to us. Three cars filled with family found their way to the Denver airport to meet the plane that was bringing the most precious of all cargoes—a ten-month-old baby boy.

My daughter Katy and her husband, Don, were adopting this boy, who was coming almost ten thousand miles from his home in the little country of Latvia. The infant had lived every day of his young life on his back in a crib in an orphanage along with 199 other children. He had never even been outside.

The entire family stood at the end of the ramp leading from the plane to the airport, expectant, awed and barely breathing—waiting for a first glance of this child. As passengers began coming off the plane, a small crowd gathered around us. No one in the waiting group spoke. Every eye was damp. The emotion was almost visible. One of the flight attendants handed us a congratulatory bottle of wine. Even passersby, feeling the electricity, stopped, asked and then stayed to watch.

When finally (they were actually the last ones off the plane) the woman carrying our baby turned the corner and started up the ramp to us, Katy could not contain herself another instant. She started running toward them crying openly, her arms outstretched, aching to hold her baby boy for the first time. Cradling him, she started back up the ramp. Don, with their other adopted child, a two-year-old girl, started running to meet them; he too crying. And when the four of them stepped inside the airport where all of us were standing; it was as if they had stepped into a warm and soft cocoon filled and overflowing with emotion and love. Everyone was hugging them, and then each other. Overwhelmed by the power of the scene, no longer was anyone a stranger, but then, love is like that.

I stood slightly to one side of the hubbub, so I could really “see” it. This poor little boy, so far from home, was hearing no familiar words. Even his name had been changed. He saw no familiar faces. He had been traveling for over twenty-four hours straight and seemed completely dazed. He was being passed from person to person, each one needing to touch him to believe he was real.

I looked closely at him. He had skin the color of chalk, his every rib was showing, and his nose was running. I reached over and found his forehead was warm to the touch. Clearly, he was ill.

I also noticed he couldn’t hold his head up by himself or even sit alone, signs that his development was way behind. Plus, he did not respond to noise. Could he be deaf?

At that moment I knew we probably had saved his life. I also realized with a rush of feeling that I would guard him, nurture him and love him with every fiber of my being. Katy was a wonderful mother, and I would be right behind her all the way.

As we finally left the airport for home, I crawled into the backseat of the car and sat between the two car seats full of miracles. Now there were two lives dependent on this family for all things. All the way home I had one hand on him and the other hand on her. I think I was praying.

The next morning we took the baby, who had been named Zachary, to the doctor. She found that Zachary had serious infections in both ears, which had apparently never been treated. She told us that our baby would hear once the infections cleared. The doctor went on to talk about solid foods (Zachary had never had any) and his need for exercise. Sending us home with medicines to help him, she assured us he would “catch up,” with care.

And he did, as we watched in amazement! In one short week this child held his head erect, sat alone, then flipped over and crawled on hands and knees. A few weeks later, he reached the stairs, climbed up two of them, then grabbed the rail and, pulling himself to a standing position, just stood there looking at his new mom in triumph!

As the doctor predicted, Zachary’s hearing returned and rosy apple cheeks replaced his chalky color. But the most important change of all was that our Zachary began to laugh and cry.

This little boy had never cried. When crying hadn’t worked to draw the attention he so desperately needed, he quit early on. As for laughter, I doubt there was too much to laugh about.

Now when Zachary laughs, it is no infant giggle but rather a hearty guffaw right from his toes. When he laughs like that, anyone with him has to laugh too.

Once again, I have seen the tremendous power of love. No one can thrive without it. And with it, all things are possible.

Jean Brody

Love Can Build a Bridge

I
t’s the tiniest thing I ever decided to put my
whole life into.

Terri Guillemets

Christina Claire Ciminella entered this world screaming on key and searching for harmony. She was thrust into the eye of the Judd family hurricane on May 30, 1964, attended by the same nurse who had overseen my own birth in the very same room, only eighteen years before. Christina arrived at King’s Daughters Hospital, a block from our house, in sleepy Ashland, Kentucky, just as I had when my own eighteen-year-old mother had me. It was a quiet moment of personal joy for humble parents hardly prepared for the greatest job on earth. At Christina’s birth, I crossed the threshold to adulthood, ready or not, and took the first baby step on a giant adventure.

Christina and I plunged headlong into an epic, lifelong search for harmony that would alternately unite and divide us a thousand times. A journey that would see us grow up together, scale impossible heights as partners, and embrace the elusive rhythms of a unique mother-daughter relationship. Some say we helped to reshape the history of country music in the process, but for us the experience was deeply intimate and richly private—even though we lived it in the public eye. It’s been quite a modern fairy tale, what this infant brought into my life and the lives of millions of other people, but in 1964 there were other, more pressing matters on my mind.

All I knew right then was that I had given birth to a healthy, beautiful little girl. I had somehow known my child would be a girl; I had had a powerfully instinctive feeling months before and had already picked her name. She would be called Christina Claire, and it would fit her perfectly. Much later, of course, she would become “Wynonna,” and that too would fit her perfectly. We are not born with our destinies stamped on our foreheads.

When the nurse brought my baby in, I looked into her face and saw myself—her eyes, her skin, her expressions, her spirit. She looked up at me and smiled her first hello. A broad and mischievous grin lit up her face, a sign that told me in no uncertain terms that this was a child to be reckoned with, a child who would be worthy of great things. From that moment on my heart was all hers. I was terrified, elated, proud, and complete . . . all at once. We began our lifelong search for harmony with slow and halting steps, a teenage mother and an unplanned child on a journey that would lead to magic and milestones that neither of us dreamed possible. Wynonna and I were instantly one, a partnership, a team—just the two of us against a frightening and unknown world. On that spring day in 1964, we began our wonderful duet, a blend of heart, mind and soul that continues to this day.

Naomi Judd

Calling Mr. Clean

Maybe it was nesting on steroids. Possibly it was my less-than-neat twin toddlers. Or perhaps it was a compulsive desire to maintain the illusion of order in my life. Whatever the reason, during my last pregnancy I just could not stop thinking about cleaning things. I just couldn’t get enough of All Things Immaculate.

So when I saw the sponge, yellow, five inches thick and really squishy looking, I had to have it. Had to have it in a way only a pregnant woman has to have something. It’s bizarre, but I actually salivated when I saw it. Had I ever seen anything more useful, more amazing? And for a mere ninety-nine cents! Who could pass up such a bargain? Certainly not pregnant old Pavlovian me.

Myriad cleaning endeavors starring the sponge and myself tap-danced glitzily around in my head. I would try it out first as my own personal bath implement. Unfortunately, it made a squeaky noise as I pulled it across my skin, so I had to nix that idea. I used it to clean the bathtub instead. After that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d giddily daydream, planning our next encounter. Maybe tonight it would be the bathtub again. Or the kitchen floor. Or maybe even the car.

And it didn’t stop with the sponge. Other cleaning implements, things that I hadn’t glanced at in years, let alone used, became tantalizingly attractive to me. The white scouring brush under the sink. Brillo pads. Bottled cleaning products. I couldn’t keep my hands off them.