Wonder of wonders -- that’s life
OVER THE last couple of weeks, whenever I am spotted lying on a heating pad or a bag of ice, or gulping ibuprofen, my almost-2-year-old daughter, Joanna, will point to me and exclaim, “Daddy’s back hurts!” It’s a useful reminder, just in case the searing pain inside my right shoulder blade slips to the back of my mind for a moment.
Joanna says this without a trace of guilt, as she is blissfully unaware of her role in the back injury. It happened two weeks ago at the zoo, when we visited the Amazonia exhibit. Joanna wanted to watch the tank filled with enormous fish, but she also found them scary and insisted that I hold her the entire time. When my back started to hurt, she resisted any suggestion that Mommy hold her a while.
Joanna is no dummy. She could see that she was a hors d’oeuvre-sized morsel for the giant fish, and she could see as well that I have a distinct size advantage over Mommy. If it came down to a hand-to-hand -- man versus 500-pound Brazilian fish -- struggle, she wanted me there to protect her.
Luckily for my back, our 5-month-old son, Benjamin, who graciously accompanied us to the zoo, evinced no fear whatsoever of the giant fish. In fact, nothing at all seems to scare him, with the exception of his older sister. From the moment we brought him home from the hospital, Joanna viewed Benjy as her favorite toy. When he doesn’t have a pacifier in his mouth, she will find one and plug it in. If he does have a pacifier, she will pull it out of his mouth so that she can put it back in again. Benjy weathers this treatment stoically.
I attribute Benjy’s forbearance to the circumstances of his birth. One afternoon in July, some 5 1/2 weeks before his due date, my wife, Robin, called me at work and asked me to come home. She was having back pain and needed help watching Joanna. I sped home and arrived at 5:45. I urged her to call a doctor in case it was pregnancy related. (Robin had experienced back pain a week before Joanna’s birth.) The doctor thought it probably wasn’t but told her to come in anyway. By this point, Robin was in great pain and went upstairs to our bedroom.
We called a friend who agreed to come over and watch Joanna while we went to the hospital. Then I scooped up Joanna, ran next door and asked our neighbor to watch her until the friend arrived. Neighbor in tow, I ran upstairs to the bedroom and told Robin we could go to the hospital. Robin informed me that she couldn’t make it.
I ran downstairs and asked our neighbor to call for an ambulance, then turned around and bounded back up the stairs to the bedroom. It was about 6:15 now. There was Robin, lying on the floor, with Benjy between her knees. He had on his face a look of mild disappointment, as if he was thinking, “I was under the impression that there would be doctors and nurses, not just a bedroom floor.” But, on the whole, he seemed remarkably unperturbed.
I sprinted down the stairs and told the neighbor, who was calling 911, to inform them that we had a live baby. I ran across the street to get another neighbor, who is a nurse. She wasn’t home, but her husband and teenage son came running back over with me.
One of them told me I needed to find a shoelace to tie the umbilical cord. I grabbed my basketball high-top and started to unlace it, but Robin, who like Benjy was remarkably calm, protested that it was too dirty and suggested that I use one of her shoelaces. I dutifully opened her closet and rummaged frantically through her shoe collection. None of them had laces. I was grabbing shoes and tossing them over my shoulder, shouting, “Somebody get me a shoelace!” A shoelace was produced, and I tied off the cord.
Then the ambulance arrived, and the EMTs carried Robin and the baby down the steps and outside. Our whole block was gathered on the front lawn, offering help. The sight of a whole community spontaneously coming to the aid of a neighbor immediately struck me as something out of the last scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It also struck me, even in my panicked state, that it really is a wonderful life.