Family

First Child

We took turns, and our baby girl snuffled in our necks as we walked and walked and walked in the still hours of the night.

The Doob being introduced to her great-grandmother

Our first child was born late in 1967. She was full-term, but underweight, 71 ounces, and whisked off to an incubator without even letting Linda touch her. They don’t do that nowadays, didn’t do it seven years later when our second weighed in at 59 ounces, but things were different then. Don’t even ask: fathers were most definitely not welcome in the delivery room in 1967.

We did get to see her, but only through glass windows, straining to see a forlorn little bundle of clothes in a box, with tubes stuck in impossibly tiny arms. It was hard; I could see that Linda wanted so badly to hold her baby, and we both were frightened by the doctor’s cautious responses to our questions about her health.

A few days later, I took Linda home. We had expected to come back with our daughter; we had her crib, and diaper service, and clothing, and lotions, and bottles and pins and everything else we could think of and more, but no baby — a strange and sad homecoming.

We visited her every night. These visits were disappointing because we were not allowed to touch her, but we had nothing else to make her real, so staring…