Shared Wonder Over a New Baby
If all goes well, and we pray that it does, my wife and I will have another grandchild in about two weeks.
I’ve written of my wife’s son, Sanford Smith, more than once in this space, of how I’ve hauled him up the Herald Bird’s mast to sand and varnish it, of his uncanny underwater skills at taking abalone in Catalina coves, of his marriage to Linda Hall in the Sherman Gardens, and now there’s their baby in the offing. It will be Sandy and Linda’s first child and our ninth grandchild between my wife and me.
With that marriage, I virtually lost my mast varnisher. Besides, sometime before that Sandy had grown too large and heavy to be of much use to me as a mast varnisher. I’m not saying he lost his skills with sandpaper and brush. What I am saying is that sending him aloft in the boatswain’s chair, even though the tackle was double sheaved, was for me courting both a hernia and a heart attack from hauling on the line with big Sandy at the other end of it.
He was much too much a grown man. Also, he had found his workaday place in life as an architect in planning for the Irvine Co. Alas, full-time work, a wife and a nearly newborn child have spoiled the usefulness of many a son to his family, but this, I hasten to add, is compensated for in other thoughtful ways.
There was a time when we bought Sandy’s dinners at restaurants. Now, less than a month ago, to celebrate my birthday, he paid for the dinners, for my wife and me and for Linda’s parents, the John Halls. And gentleman that he is, Sandy displayed no signs of major shock, as I would have done, when the waiter brought him the hefty bill.
Linda is a nurse and manages a home nursing care service. She seems to have taken her pregnancy in easy, graceful style, as I would think a proper nurse would do, being one who has more intimate knowledge of such matters than most of us about to enter mother-or-fatherhood would manage.
The other evening, in some kind of dress (for the life of me I cannot remember what women wear unless it’s dreadfully bizarre) that complemented her auburn hair, she looked lovelier than I’ve ever seen her look. It is said that motherhood enhances a woman’s beauty with benignity. It is so with Linda.
And now, what they used to call “the blessed event” in my more sentimental era is about to befall Sandy and Linda.
I used “befall” on purpose because of its connotation that something portentous is about to happen. And so it is. My wife and I were comparing notes about our first infants over lunch the other day. We decided that no mother and father, even though they may have taken classes in natural birthing and baby care (a class for everything, it seems), is really quite prepared for that first child.
“Now begins night after night of interrupted sleep,” she said.
“And the endless diaper changing. How I hated it on my ‘duty’ nights,” I said.
“And the crying you can’t figure out.”
“And the deep dismay over the first sniffles.”
“And when they’re quiet you worry because you think they might have smothered in a blanket.”
“Or a cat sat on their chest. My mother was a great believer that cats did that sort of thing out of maliciousness.”
“And how you long to have dinner out, enjoying the freedom you once had. But there’s the baby sitter problem. And you’re loath to trust just anybody, not even that nice girl from your church.”
And yet, we agreed, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing in the world, quite so marvelous as a new baby. And we recalled the times when we’d use long moments examining with wonder those exquisitely formed hands and feet. Those precious little ears. The indescribable softness of the skin. And when it smiled at us, we nearly melted with love and joy.
They can’t possibly teach those kinds of things in the classes either.
