When the Miracle Is Still Raw and Pure

A miracle happened to 26-year-old Julie Visner this week.

She named him Scott.

On Tuesday, March 25, Visner gave birth to an 8-pound, 2-ounce boy in Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys.

Visner’s 50-year-old husband, Jim, has a grown daughter and adored adopted children by a previous marriage. This new child is an unplanned, unanticipated wonder, as far as he’s concerned.

But Scott is Julie Visner’s first child, and, for her, he is not just a miracle but 10-fingered, fully-toed evidence of the very possibility of miracles.

Only hours old, Scott has already given his mother an education.

Visner didn’t know before that it is possible to live happily in a universe centered not on yourself, but on a capon-sized person with no more speech than a toaster whose paper diapers softly crunch and crinkle, much to his grandparents’ chagrin.

She hadn’t realize how lovely small, new heads smell or how much she had wanted to see the coy, mobile creature who has kicked her in the bladder for months but who had never shown himself before.

Until this week, Visner had never strained in the dark to hear another person breathe.

“Each day I grow more and more attached,” Visner says, not yet aware that the cost of her new-found joy is any future certainty of ease.

Scott would unquestionably be worth it, even if Visner already knew how you feel when your child comes in with wounded eyes from what you thought were fun and games.

A family counselor by profession, Visner can’t wait to take her wonder home, to the couple’s--to the family’s--one-acre ranch in Newhall.

By schoolyard standards, young Scott may be the luckiest neonate in the history of Greater Los Angeles. His birthright includes 11 horses, 2 goats, 2 sheep, 2 ducks, 2 geese, 2 dogs, 2 finches and a rabbit.

He is also heir to five felines, including a black cat that came to dinner, indefinitely, which the Visners named Stray.

“We also have 75 chickens,” she says, laughing. “Some of them lay green eggs.”

Visner may be new at this mothering business, but she already knows a juicy show-and-tell item when she sees one.

Visner is in that first, raw stage of motherhood when the present looms very large. Scott roots like a pro but is he getting enough to eat? Is that the way his navel is supposed to look? If he gets heat rash, will he have to wear a bell and be shunned by his peers?

Young Visner so thoroughly fills his mother’s days that she doesn’t realize his childhood will be over in what seems, in retrospect, like a single, rather busy week.

I share my hard-won wisdom on the matter. “Take lots of pictures,” I advise.

I don’t tell her everything I now know. In the months ahead, she’ll have to figure out for herself that there is no tiny-T-shirt-eating gremlin in her washing machine growing fat on Scott’s doll-sized undershirts. Eventually, she’ll solve the mystery and look in the corners of her fitted sheets.

On their own, the Visners got past the first hurdle of parenting. They named their son Scott Daniel instead of something dumb.

Naming a child is a far trickier business than assuaging his colic or teaching him to walk with his toes pointed straight ahead. Names are forever--ask anybody named Fred. Even people who legally change their names to Fawn still answer to Bertha in their hearts.

The Visners obeyed all the rules nobody tells you in this regard. (It frankly puzzles me that begonias come with better care instructions than first children do.)

Scott’s name is neither bland (John) nor so weird the bearer must battle his way through preschool (Dweezil). It doesn’t mean “cheese for brains” or “molester of small animals” in Walloon or any other known language. It doesn’t instantly label him as the child of parents with particular political views (amerika) or other sectarian enthusiasms (Luther). And, should the worst happen, and some villain or fool come along who ruins the name Scott, much as a former paperhanger spoiled Adolf, young Visner has a middle name to whip out.

His mother thought of all those things and more. “We didn’t want him to have a namesake he felt he had to live up to,” she explains. “We wanted him to have his own identity. But, mostly, we just liked the sound of it.”

It’s hard not to envy Visner as she burbles on about this newly delivered consequence of last summer’s pleasure. “He scored a 9 on the Apgar scale,” she says. “Do I sound like a proud Mom?”

Scott’s vigor at birth, measured on pediatricians’ Apgar scale from tragic 1 to lusty 10, is not strictly a personal accomplishment in the dean’s list sense, but does his delighted mother really care?

Visner is thrilled to bits that her life has changed forever.

“He was born at 2 o’clock in the afternoon,” she says. “Actually, it was 1:58.”