One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (36 page)

A nurse came in after fifteen minutes to read the tape. “How does it look?” I asked.

“Perfect, but Dr. Middleton is very smart. If she’s concerned, it’s not without good reason. I’ll check again in fifteen minutes.”

Another nurse popped her head in. “The doctor wants an ultrasound, SGA. Someone will come take her down when they’re ready.”

I watched TV. And the clock. 6:15. 6:30.
Lorene should be here soon.
The monitor checker apologized, “They’re always backed up down there.”

“Could I get a snack?”

“I’m sorry, your doctor doesn’t want you—” Just then I saw Dr. Bunnell,
my
doctor, coming down the hall.

“C’mon, let’s get you out of here.” She started unhooking me from the monitor. “I don’t know exactly what triggered this—the baby may be a little small, but by the time you get an ultrasound and some resident reads it in the middle of the night . . . ”

“What’s SGA?”

“Somebody said something about SGA?”

SGA

Small for gestational age:
constitutional or pathological

IGR

Internal growth retardation:
physical growth slow, mental growth appropriate, risk for hypoxia, hypoglycemia

She shook her head, “I would be shocked if—” Lorene walked in. Dr. Bunnell put her arm around her. “No emergency, you can take her home. I’ll have the office schedule an ultrasound Monday—Monday’s a holiday—Tuesday.”

“I had to get our neighbor to drive me—” Lorene started to cry. “God, I am just so happy to see you,” she hugged me. “
And
you,” she patted my belly, “and you,” she squeezed Dr. Bunnell’s arm.

I drove us home. “You could still make it to yoga,” Lorene said. “The relaxation would be good for you.”

The irony of shoehorning yoga into the end of this day was irresistible. I don’t know that I would have had the self-discipline not to tell my toxic hospital tale in the sacred space, but I wasn’t given any opening. That night we were invited to share exactly one word. The word that best described the little being inside us; the word that would describe her forever since we, as mothers, had already come to know her spirit intimately.

Small.
I tried to think of another word in between
luminous, joyful, curious, wise, teacher,
and the ten others that were taken in the turns before mine.

“Compact.” I’d said it. I couldn’t take it back. I couldn’t qualify or explain it. I could only hope that my baby was busy or sleeping and hadn’t heard it.

The Home Stretch

I met my editor
and her husband in Concord and turned in the art for
Manny’s Cows.
She took the pieces out one by one and admired them on her picnic blanket. Turns out, she began apologetically, she would be seeing Manny into, but not through, production. Her husband had accepted a job in Chicago and they would be moving. She had plans to enroll in divinity school, and the two of them had begun the paperwork—they were going to adopt a baby.

How could I begrudge her? It was a glorious fall day, and at the conclusion of our picnic, I was officially on maternity leave!

I stopped in and poked around my favorite antique shop on the way to the car. A framed embroidery sampler caught my eye.
Schmaltz city.

Lorene and I switched sides of the bed; I gave up the wall side so I wouldn’t wake her when I got up to go to the bathroom. And the Middleton affair had given me insomnia, so I also had to try not to wake her after I got back.

Our baby aced the Tuesday ultrasound. She scored eight out of eight on her “biophysical profile,” whatever that was. Her weight (five pounds, eleven ounces) was in the bottom tenth percentile, but we were
on
the charts. We had a very healthy baby with a low birth weight. Dr. Bunnell told us that one of her daughters weighed under six pounds at birth, and by age five, she was in the 95th percentile.

My uterus, however, was not off the hook. I would need another ultrasound in two weeks to make sure the baby was maintaining or gaining weight; if not, they would induce labor.

“Two weeks? That’s when you’re due anyway. Do we want to wait two weeks to see whether she’s gaining weight?” Lorene asked as we were leaving the building.

“Dr. Bunnell seemed fine with it.”

“You should’ve been having these ultrasounds all along; we were worried about your size—we would’ve had a baseline.”

Thank God, Jehovah, or whomever I hadn’t had all the ultrasounds!
I would’ve spent the entire pregnancy living in fear from one to the next. “Do you want to call the birth instructor and see what she knows about low birth weights?”

We hadn’t spoken with her since the summer. She was happy to hear from us.

“Is that what they’re telling you?” she moaned. “They’ve got no research, no data to back up this claim that babies do better outside the uterus.”

Data or no, they certainly had more experience dealing with low-birth-weight babies than my uterus, but we decided to believe in the instructor. Worrying couldn’t possibly be good for the baby or the uterus.

W
e spent the last few nights before Steve arrived putting the finishing touches on the nursery, which was also his room. It bore no resemblance to the Pottery Barn baby sanctuary I’d envisioned—gleaming white furniture and me, on a sliding rocker in the corner where the guest bed now stood. But “when-since,” as Lorene would say-ask, is anything in our lives gleaming white? There were a half dozen Hefty bags full of hand-me-downs waiting to be put into the bureau, changing table, closet, and attic. The night-light spun orangey-yellow stars on the ceiling from where it sat on the bureau. This was our soon-to-be real baby’s real room.

Our last night alone, we packed our bags for the hospital and stowed them by the kitchen door. Mister sniffed the bags. “That’s right, your life is about to change!” Lorene told him. He sat looking expectantly at the biscuit door. She gave both dogs biscuits and we went to bed.

“Just so you know, if I wasn’t so tired, I’d consider, you know—it’s not that I don’t have desires. You look so beautiful, and I’m never going to get this body again,” Lorene said. She kissed me and turned out her light.

I didn’t have desires.
And
I loved her so much.