Our doula said I could look, and so I did, peering over the surgical shield as Pepin was wrested from Lucy's womb. Feet first, then the head, which took some doing, like angling a chair through a doorway. When Pepin was set on a table, suctioned and wiped, her legs were pinned back by her ears.
I told the nurse I was impressed by Pepin's flexibility and she looked at me funny. Breeched. Four and a half weeks early. Five pounds, one ounce. "This one's not going anywhere," she said. "Two weeks, at least."
It's been 16 weeks since Pepin arrived, folded up like a diver who didn't have a chance to untuck. The 11 days she spent in the Special Care Nursery now seem like one long night, a long time ago, as though it were some other baby who was set on my chest like a starfish, kept alive with a feeding tube.
Not the one asleep upstairs, the one with folds we've never seen into, her neck like the dark side of the moon. The one who seems this close to making a grilled-cheese sandwich and watching The Gilmore Girls.
This is the last post of Debut Dad. After three months, the debut has given way to a long-running performance and the stage fright has worn off, even if I sometimes still can't think of anything better to do with unwanted food in the fridge than throw it out the door.
Pepin seems indestructible now in a way I couldn't have imagined. She sleeps two five-hour stretches at night and is no longer terrorized by the bottle, though she's still touchy, like undetonated ordnance. We've passed from a war zone into a minefield and settled in. Not because she's any less demanding, but because we are. We've retracted, pulled back the furniture of our lives so she can take up as much room as she needs, which of course is as much as we have.
A couple weeks ago, we returned to the Special Care Nursery at Methodist Hospital to deliver care packages — clothes, books, diapers — for anyone who might need them. It looked the same coming off the elevator: the check-in desk, the double doors that power open, the table in the lobby where we used to eat whatever anyone brought us, huddled like refugees.
But the check-in nurse was unfamiliar. And when the doors cracked open, a nurse who'd once put Pepin through her paces took the packages, thanked us, and slipped back inside — the first time we hadn't walked through. There were other babies back there now. We were on the outside, and when the door closed there was nothing to do but go home with Pepin and think about the ghosts we left behind, the people whose skin we'd already outgrown.
