It is October, the month in which both my daughters were born. I guess back in March of the year in which each was conceived, I thought that to have an autumn birthday in Maryland would be to celebrate the rest of your life in the prettiest month of the year, and somehow that worked out not once, but twice.
We lived in a neighborhood that had long been a working-class fishing community but as waterfront property became coveted by Washington professionals willing to commute, the peninsula was becoming slowly gentrified. At the time we brought our firstborn home, however, it still possessed an eclectic diversity we were drawn to as young adults, but worried about now that we were parents. There were sirens at night, and once, gunfire right down the street.
We pulled up in front of our white stucco Victorian with the picket fence I’d painted in the last days of my pregnancy, and I lifted my two-day-old daughter from her car seat for the first time. This was to be a private homecoming, with my mother arriving after we got settled to make us her Hawaiian chicken for dinner. Unfortunately, I hadn’t anticipated Mrs. Rosman next door. She was old and eccentric, unkempt in an unpleasant way, and her silent, staring husband was very strange. I was young and superficially friendly but kept my distance.
What I didn’t know was that she had been waiting for this moment since seeing me lowered gingerly into the passenger seat of the car and an overnight bag stowed in the back. She emerged from her house with the sagging sofa on the porch, and hobbled out onto the sidewalk, her thin hair lifting in the breeze.
“Let me see the baby,” she demanded. She stared critically at the little face. “Well, what is it?”
“It’s a girl,” I said, leaving the blanket partially covering the baby’s mouth like a miniature surgeon’s mask. I smiled and tried to turn away, to get to the safety of my own front door, when Mrs. Hosfeld’s claw-like hand grabbed my arm and twisted the baby towards her. She lowered her face and planted a big, wet, germ-laden kiss right on my new baby’s face. Hormones surging, ready to cry at everything, and completely irrational, I was horrified. “Oh my God,” I thought, with all the sense of the sleep-deprived, “She just ruined my baby!”
Once in the house, I needed to take a shower. Should I bring the baby into the bathroom with me? The idea of not being in the same room seemed intolerable, like breaking the law. I think I thought I had to carry her around in her carrier like a purse.
Over the next few weeks, I realized protecting my daughter was more immediate, more irrational, and more primal than love. The need to keep her safe, encountered for the first time there on the sidewalk, was the first fierce attachment I had felt as an adult. It was in the following days of feeding, rocking, diapering, and bathing that protection took on its true identity, which was, of course, profound and abiding love. I have thought about this often since then, having learned that love can be inspired by service, not the other way around. But there was another lesson here.
Sometimes we are the recipients of miracles and too distracted or oblivious to notice. It is only years afterward that it dawns on us that, but for an alert stranger on the beach, we might have drowned, or two seconds later into that intersection, we might have crashed.
So, it was years later that I realized I had not thanked God for the biggest miracle in my life.
The night this child was born, I’d been in prodromal labor for the preceding 24 hours, where you suffer contractions hour after hour that do not move the baby down. Eventually hospitalized, with some intervention, labor finally became productive, but she was a very large baby and had been unceasingly active in the womb most of those nine months.
By 3 am, I’d been pushing for two hours, and my doctor wanted to leave for a hunting trip on the Eastern Shore in the morning. The decision was made to use forceps for the last couple of pushes to get this show (and him) on the road. It worked. But until that moment, no one realized that the umbilical cord had been wrapped tightly around the baby’s neck throughout the entire ordeal. Not wrapped around once. Not twice. But cinched around her tiny neck three times like a belt, strangling her through all those crushing contractions and hours of pushing.
“Jesus!” the nurse exclaimed as the doctor uncoiled loop after loop after loop.
They put her in my arms, and all I saw was a perfect baby. It didn’t occur to me then or for years how easily we could have lost her. And it makes me want to heap retroactive gratitude upon the universe for sparing me that near-miss tragedy and for giving me that joy.
How many miracles have gone unheralded? Having missed this one, I’m assuming on principle that my life and yours have been flooded with them.
Like having been lucky enough to live next door to an elderly lady who had waited all night and all day to welcome home the new little life next door. Who gave the only thing she had to give: a kiss.
And just like learning that service generates love, retroactive gratitude is now a continuous wave, a spiritual practice, especially in October, when I find myself saying thank you for the gifts I recognize, like you, beloveds, and for all those I will become aware of in the fullness of time.
Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.
