2/52

I named my second son before the new baby smell had even worn off the first one. True story.

We weren’t getting any sleep. Our baby was nightmarishly colicky. I still wasn’t wearing pants with buttons and zippers. Nevertheless, I found myself dreaming about how our family photo would eventually unfold. And besides, it wasn’t long before people started asking us, “So... when are you going to have another?” usually with a certain sadistic twinkle in their eyes.

As a mother, you are lucky if you make it a full six months postpartum before people, often strangers at the grocery store deli counter, start assuming your uterus is an acceptable topic of conversation again.

Some time passed, the baby started sleeping less like a bat and more like a human being. He walked, he did cute things, and had two sets of grandparents begging us to go out every weekend so they could babysit. We were lulled into the false confidence that comes from only having one child. By the time he was nearing two years old, my husband and I considered ourselves certified baby pros, qualified to enter the major leagues of child rearing by upping our parental game to two on two.

As it turned out, what had come so effortlessly the first time around, proved to be more of a challenge the second time. Getting pregnant was not the issue, as that happened twice in the span of five months. It was staying pregnant that became the hurdle. It was heartbreaking and frustrating. Also, it was getting dangerously close to messing with my so carefully thought out child spacing plan. Oh and one more thing? I was spending a very large portion of my husband’s paycheck on pregnancy tests.

Weary of obsessing over bloodwork results, analyzing every twinge, and facing the cashier at Target with yet another basketful of First Response tests so I could test “FIVE DAYS SOONER!”, I decided we needed to take a break from it all.

The ending to that story is a predictable one, of course, and I really should not have been surprised when, five weeks later, for the third time in six months, the test was positive... again.

I stared at the lab form every morning for two weeks before I worked up the nerve to go have blood drawn. When the phone rang two days later and it was the doctor’s office, I immediately sat down on the floor of my son’s room, taking a deep breath before I answered it. My hands trembled as I braced myself for another round bad news. I picked up a crayon and started doodling to calm my nerves.

“Hi Erin, it’s Colleen...” said my doctor on the other end.

Under normal circumstances, I am fairly fluent in subtext, but I could pick up absolutely no hint of anything in her greeting.

“Well?” was my cautious reply, as I feverishly doodled purple tornadoes and spirals, waiting for the answer.

“The numbers look great!” she said with what I could now discern was genuine excitement in her voice. I think she was relieved to finally *not* be calling me with bad news. I took notes as she gave me the results of the bloodwork. After I hung up, I stared for the longest time at what I had written: 4,600 and 36.2 -- two numbers that meant nothing to anyone else. To me however, they were a priceless gift -- they meant I could finally exhale.

I did have to find myself a new obstetrician, because my other one no longer delivered babies. I tried proposing that she could maybe pretty please deliver just this one baby and I would promise not to sue her for anything. No dice. Somewhat begrudgingly, I did finally find a wonderful new doctor whom I trusted just as much as the other one. She was an older, soft-spoken grandmotherly type who had been delivering babies almost longer than I had been alive. I instantly loved her. It was a good fit.

The pregnancy was uneventful, a near carbon copy of my previous one. Nine months of hanging my head over a toilet several times a day, every day. Eating my weight in fruit-flavored Tums. Sleepless nights. The works. Only this time? I really wasn’t complaining. The months of wondering if I would ever reach this point again had resulted in an unforeseen blessing -- the ability to be grateful for the reassuring and very temporary discomforts of pregnancy.

I knew I was having a boy. Interestingly, everyone else was sure I was having a girl. After my ultrasound, I called my mother from the hospital parking lot.

“It’s another boy!” I yelled into the phone, laughing.

“It is NOT!” was her reply. It took showing her the ultrasound photo to convince her I was telling the truth. My own mother thought I was lying.

I had oodles of false labor, which was new for me. The most memorable bout of it was during an episode of Season 3 of Lost. I was timing contractions during commercials and was determined not to go anywhere until the show was over. Only after the credits rolled did we head to the hospital. It wouldn't matter anyway, we were sent home three hours later.

Three hours after that, we went back and they kicked us out again, telling me my contractions weren’t good enough and also that I was smiling too much for it to be labor. I thought, "Sheesh. Can't a girl just be HAPPY?" My contractions were quickly getting an inferiority complex, I was starting to think I was crazy (and apparently too happy). My mother was REALLY getting tired of sleeping on our couch.

The real thing finally began later that same day in the lobby of a nearby church while I waited for my three-year-old to finish up his gymnastics class. This is a fitting beginning to the life of a second child, I think, his mother distracted with his older sibling while he prepares to enter the world.

I ignored those contractions because there was absolutely zero chance I was going to face those triage nurses again only to be sent home. They came and went the rest of the day and throughout the night. Around 4:30 in the morning I woke up out of a sound sleep and found I was finally able to check off the “can no longer talk through contractions” box on the “Is it Real Labor?” website.

Back to the hospital.

They *actually* tried to send me home again. Thankfully, my doctor showed up, passing through en route to a conference at another hospital. As far as I was concerned she may as well have been wearing a superhero cape and riding a white horse. She said I was making a little progress and gave me the option to stay there on monitors for a couple hours until she got back.

When she left, I looked the nurse in the eye and said with very uncharacteristic attitude, “I’m NOT going back home for a third time.”

Her reply? “Wanna bet?”

There are very few people I meet who I REALLY dislike, she instantly became one of them.

Thankfully, shifts changed shortly after that and an angel sent from heaven appeared. Actually, I think she just came from the parking lot... but at any rate, her name was Lindsay, and she holds the distinction of being the only nurse from any of my labors whose name I still remember. She believed me when I said the contractions hurt a whole lot more than the monitor was reflecting. She stood next to me, cheering us on when my doctor came back to check on me. When the exam was over, the doctor looked at her, then back at me and said, “You’re in labor! We’re admitting you!” and my new-best-friend-for-the day, Lindsay, walked me across the hall to a labor and delivery room.

I was in a labor room by 9a.m. and the rest of the morning moved like a fast-forwarded, Tivoed version of my previous labor where we all just got the interesting highlights minus having to sit through all the boring filler. Epidural at 10:30. Contractions two minutes apart by 1:00. I was eight centimeters by 1:45 and, interestingly, I never felt any pain the entire day once the epidural was in.

That’s where my memory gets hazy. I remember the baby’s heartbeat had slowed down a couple times and all the nurses and the doctor decided he needed to come out as quickly as possible. My husband was sent out to quickly fetch my entourage of spectators (modesty had left the building after the first baby) because they were going to miss it. I pushed through five contractions over fifteen minutes and, at 2:15 on May 11, 2007, our second son rocketed into the world with his umbilical cord wrapped twice around his neck, his face purple, and his body completely covered in his own poo.

Just-born babies are not all that cute anyway and they are especially not cute when they come out like THAT. I am thankful to have been blissfully unaware until much later that apparently all of these surprises constituted a bit of an emergency situation until the pediatricians were sure everything was suctioned out of him.

Eventually though, they handed him to me in that perfect baby hospital burrito package I’ve never been able to successfully recreate on my own. The tears came as I looked down at him. It's true, what they say, you know. You really can love another baby just as much as your first. While I was pregnant, I wondered how this was possible. In that moment though, his blue eyes wide open and studying my face in that soul-searching way new babies do, I wondered how I ever thought it WASN'T possible.

Ben, my then three-year-old, came in to meet him. He was proudly wearing his “I’m the Big Brother” t-shirt and I remember thinking how all of a sudden, he looked like such a little boy, the baby no longer. He was silent as he gently touched his new baby brother’s hands and fingers. He asked to see his feet, so I unwrapped the blanket, and promptly got in trouble with the nurses. We wrapped him back up again and Ben kissed the baby’s forehead. Cameras flashed from all corners of the room. After some quiet thinking, he finally declared to everyone “It’s May! The baby’s not in the belly anymore!” We all laughed.

“What’s his name?” he asked.

“His name is Simon”, I told him.

“Simon...” he said, as if practicing it.

Simon Davis Graff. The name I had held onto for three years and two months finally had a face to go with it. He's the one who made us parents for a second time, transformed our first baby forever into the big brother, and made our family photo a little more complete.

And, as I should have probably trusted it would be all along, his timing was better than anything I could have planned.