Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [10]
As much as I complained at the time, I was happy to be there with Liz, especially learning things about her that I didn’t yet know. For example, I never knew that her lucky number was seven, or that she considered herself Catholic even though she wasn’t religious. In retrospect, it feels strange that we had never discussed these things before, but in the hospital we had nothing to do but talk. When we were apart, we hadn’t had the luxury of discussing mundane details, as we were in different parts of the world, where conversations were either expensive or difficult to conduct due to the constraints posed by different time zones. And these simple conversations were not urgent; we were looking forward to a long life together during which such details would eventually emerge.
During our waking hours, when Liz was most worried, I put on a smile, used a confident tone, and assured her that everything would be okay as I sat next to her in her hospital bed, softly stroking her IV-free arm. “Our baby will be perfect…she has you as a mother.” That always brought a smile to her face. When she’d finally fall asleep, I’d sit on that back-ruining foldout chair and worry about how things would turn out. Yeah, she was going to have Liz as a mother, but she was going to have me as a father, and that couldn’t be good. I’d felt fairly sure of myself over the last seven months, but now that our child was closer to being born, I was far less certain that I’d be a good parent. More worrisome for our baby in the short term, however, was the unknown: her health. We had no idea what was really going on inside Liz’s womb, and this early in the pregnancy we didn’t want to know—really knowing could only come after delivery and it was too early.
Liz had seemed so confident of the health of our child, but after she entered the hospital her entire outlook changed. She was visibly worried, looking ashen and sad when we were alone. It was quite a reversal of roles for us. I had always been the pessimist in our relationship while Liz was the optimist. But a lot of the concerns she had early in her pregnancy were no longer the stuff of ob-gyn warnings; now they were very real possibilities.
While in the hospital, she had been reading a book about premature babies. One night she was so fed up with the negativity spewing forth from its pages that she sat up straight in her hospital bed and threw it to the other end of the room. “Fuck this piece of shit!” I looked up from my computer screen as the words left her lips and the book hit the whiteboard listing the names of her nurse and personal care attendant for the day.
“That was one hell of a throw,” I said, and turned to see her shaking as though she’d just been retrieved from beneath the surface of a frozen lake. Clearly this was no time for one of my jokes. I picked the book up from the floor and crawled into bed with her, doing everything I could to hug the pain away. After she calmed down, I opened the book and flipped straight to the copyright page. “Liz, this book was published in 1978,” I said. “I guarantee things have advanced in the field of premature babies in the last thirty years.” That was enough to coax a small chuckle from her, and for one more day I felt like I had done my best work, supporting my wife and best friend.
At night, when it got late and the visits from hospital staff became less frequent, Liz and I would fantasize about our future with our daughter. Liz talked of traveling the world, shopping for shoes and purses, mother-daughter spa trips for manis, pedis, and massages, and high tea at the ever-so-elegant Huntington Library. I talked of autumn nights at Dodger Stadium, shopping for records, father-daughter fishing trips to Alaska with her uncle Nick, and beers and Shirley Temples at the Polish restaurant down the street from our house.
As soon as we could possibly find out the sex of our baby, we did. Well, that wasn’t my choice. I had this very