It's just me

Honestly, for many reasons, I don’t know whether to share this memory or take it to my grave. Twenty-two years ago about this very moment, as Linda and I were driving home from Gulf Coast Medical Center, it hit me with “Oh my God, ...” -- an overwhelmingly intense, even obsessive emotion of love, bonding with a child, and realizing what had just happened to me. Kristen had just been born to our daughter Malinda.

A few weeks before the birth, we had been told the baby is a girl, and a protective and possessive feeling had set in on me. The baby’s mother and her husband the baby’s father had been divorced some six months earlier, and the child’s father was gone -- in South Florida, actually, working on reconstruction after Hurricane Andrew. A few minutes after the birth, our niece Joy came and got us in the waiting room and led us into the -- I guess it was the birthing room, where Malinda was lying in the bed holding the baby. Joy picked her up and asked, “Does anybody want to hold her?”

"Does anybody want to hold her?" This had never happened to me before. With my own three children, the medics had kept me strictly at arms length until a couple days later when they had wheeled mother and infant to the car and sent us home. Now, for the first time ever, I was asked if I wanted to hold a newborn baby. Without thinking I replied to Joy, “Yes, me, I do,” and to Linda, “Get away, woman, you can hold her later.” I washed, donned the gown, sat down in a chair, and Joy put her in my arms, this tiny new being, swaddled in a white wrap. I held her a good thirty minutes or longer, and whispering to her, “Papa loves you. You’re Papa’s girl.” When Joy finally took her from me, I think Linda probably held her that predawn while we were in the birthing room, but I don’t remember.

On the way home a few minutes later, it hit: the realization what bond means. It was a new term to me that I had first heard on television a few weeks before, in a program about newborn animals imprinting on the first living thing they see after birth, usually the mother. I had bonded with each of my three children without knowing the word, and in the drive home along 19th Street it hit me what the overwhelming feeling actually is that I had last felt twenty years earlier when Tass was born.

The next morning we returned to the hospital, taking Ray, who was five, to see his mother and new baby sister. I recall three things about that morning's visit. First, under hospital procedures that were new to me, two people, and two only, were allowed to have an ID bracelet permitting them to enter the nursery and take their baby out. As mother, Malinda had one. I had the other, and used it. A second thing is that in Malinda’s hospital room that next morning, as I held the baby for the second time, I said aloud, “Hello, Papa’s girl” to which Ray corrected me, “Papa, she’s not yours, she’s ours,” and I thought, “We’ll see about that.”

The other thing is that again I held her quite a long time. Finally, Malinda said, “I'll take her back when you get tired of holding her,” and I said, “Let me tell you something: that’s not going to happen.”

A generation has happened since that day, that morning, but that’s as far as I’m going. This is my most private and personal story. I don’t know whether to tell it or delete, I honestly don't.

Today is Kristen’s birthday. She’s twenty-two, just about this very moment. I legally adopted her when she was little. Yesterday after the four of us had a spectacular lunch at Chez Amavida, she left at exactly 1:58 PM to drive back to college after Christmas vacation. Last evening at 7:08 I received her text, “I’m here” as she arrived to start the second semester of her senior year.