Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [58]
Just like people wanted to help me and Maddy, I wanted to help the people around us, and so I passed on what I received to those who needed it more. It became a really important part of what the blog brought to my life, and an important part of my beginning to heal after Liz’s death. Concentrating my attention on others allowed me to remove some of the focus from my own situation, and finally I felt less like a victim of my horrible circumstances.
Chapter 15
she’s got so
much of her mom
in her.
as a kid,
sitting on a swing
(more than capable of propelling herself)
liz
would say, “somebody push me!”
she wanted attention
and loved having
people around.
madeline is obviously no
different.
her cries said,
“somebody hold me!”
so i did.
almost all day.
Though I had many sources of advice, there were some things I was beginning to realize I could figure out for myself. While some parents claimed allegiance to Dr. Spock, I was more from the MacGyver school of parenting, which was less about having an arsenal of baby equipment and more about troubleshooting with whatever was available. Early on, I took Maddy to a Dodgers game. This was something that Liz and I had imagined doing with our future child from the moment we put the down payment on our first year of season tickets—way before Liz was even pregnant. And just like in our dream, Maddy was dressed in a pink and white pinstriped Dodgers onesie and wrapped in a free blanket we had been given on one of the team’s many promotional nights. Of course, the dream included the two of us here with our baby, but in reality Liz was dead and I was at the stadium with her friend, Diane. Madeline was still so small that she was only drinking formula. I had remembered the diapers, I had remembered the wipes, I had remembered the formula, but I had forgotten the bottle.
What the fuck does a guy do for a kid who doesn’t have a bottle to drink from? I felt like an asshole. She needed to eat, but I didn’t want to leave the game, defeated by my forgetfulness and ruining my daughter’s first Dodgers experience. I sat there for a couple of minutes thinking that there had to be a solution.
I bought a bottle of water from the concession stand, which I needed for the formula anyway, and I asked for one of the lapel pins behind the glass case—the kind they sell with the Dodgers logo. I removed the pin from the packaging and sterilized it with a lighter borrowed from a man behind me in line, and then jammed it through the water bottle cap. I mixed the water with the formula and squirted it into Maddy’s mouth, just a little bit at a time. I felt as victorious as I used to when I beat Liz in a game of Scattergories—I had to think on the spot. It worked for us, but that’s not something you’re going to see in any parenting book.
And once during our travels, I didn’t realize until we were already on the plane that the pants I had put Madeline in were way too big for her tiny waist. With her other clothes in our checked luggage, I had to come up with some way to keep her pants from continuously falling down. After considering—and ultimately deciding against—tying my BlackBerry USB charger around her waist, I decided the simplest and most effective way to deal with the problem was simply to button her onesie over her pants. After I posted a photo of it on the blog, some of my readers questioned whether or not I had any idea how to dress a baby girl, but others defended my function-driven sensibilities and left comments telling me that they were now dressing their babies the same way. Well, with that slick move, Madeline and I had accidentally