The Baby Story

“Do you want me to tell you The Baby Story?” I asked the curly hair boy tucked in his second-hand toddler bed that I got from a couple who was changing duty stations.

My baby, as if the day had not been arduous. As if I hadn’t lost my cool more times than I cared to remember, nodded his head with so much enthusiasm his beachy curls bobbed covering up his eye for a few seconds. He had heard this story many times. It was the story I told him to remind him that no matter what happens during the day, he was and will always be my gift.

Deep inside, I knew it was a story I told myself to remind me that this was the gift, I chose. Motherhood was terrifying most of the time and frustrating for a good chunk of it. Hence, I had to hold on to these times when it was just him and I. Our obnoxiously loud air conditioning and second-hand mismatched furniture. And The Baby Story—our story.

“Okay, but you have to listen.”

My baby’s eyes went super wide, and once again, his curls tussled when he nodded. Those were my curls, my nose, my lips. ‘Pin-pun,’ my family would say. Pin-pun means ‘just like you’ in Dominican slang. Back then, I used to wonder if that’s why his dad left. There was so little of him in our baby.

“A long, long time ago, Mami felt a big pain in her belly.”

I pressed my hand to my stomach and leaned over in fake pain. This always elicited gasps from my son.

“You okay, Mami?”

I stood straight. “Yes, Yes. It’s The Baby Story, remember?”

I hated that he worried. I never wanted him to worry. That was not his job. It was all mine.

“Next thing you know,” I continued. I pressed my lips together and made a pop sound.

“Water, so much water came out of me.”

“Why you have water Mami?” he asked. Not because he didn’t know but because he wanted to hear one of his favorite parts.

“Because you used to swim in here,” I filled my stomach with air. God knew that was the only thing in there and pointed at it. I made the shark swimming motion afterward, and it never failed to make him laugh.

“Is that why I love swimming, Mami?”

I wanted to say: You love swimming because I made sure you weren’t scared shitless like me of water and incapable of swimming. So I put you in every swimming class I could afford and squeeze into my chaotic work schedule. Instead, I nodded and continued.

“The pain got worse, and I called someone.”

I never told him who that someone was, and he never really asked, and I don’t blame him. This is the start of the action in The Baby Story. B characters are not so important, in fiction. But this was no fiction, and to me, he was very important.

I was stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, away from everyone I knew and loved. The only thing I had was an alert roster with everyone’s names and phone numbers in my platoon. At 3:00 AM on a Saturday I grabbed my flip phone and called my section Sergeant — SSG Riley.

He picked up after three rings.

“I’ll be right there,” he said. His voice shook, and I could tell through that short response that this man who had deployed and jumped from aircrafts was scared.

My platoon already knew I would be due any minute. They knew I was by myself with no family. Because of them, I had all sorts of second-hand free and low-priced furniture in my small trailer. Without them, I wouldn’t even have that.

Good to his word, SSG Riley showed up in ten minutes flat. I knew he sped through so many roads because I lived on the side of town that my leadership didn’t. When I opened the door, he grabbed my baby-to-go bag, and when we reached his car, he lined the passenger seat with a towel.

“Sorry, but…”

I realized he was apologizing for covering his seat, but honestly, I didn’t blame him. He had a nice car, and I would have covered that entire thing before I went in.

This is the part I kept from The Baby Story.

Back with my son, I continued, “They came with a car. A super-fast car. Right at our front door.”

I made the fast car motion with my hands. “Zoom, zoom, zoom we go through all the streets in Fayetteville and then…”

My baby’s eyes go wide again. “And then what happened?”

I gasped. “Sirens.”

“Ooh, Mami, you were a bad girl,” he admonished me.

And this is when I usually defended myself by blaming him. “Well, someone wanted to get out of my belly, so…”

In his bed, my baby crossed his arm and looked at the wall, trying to be all fake mad.

But I slapped my thigh to bring my audience back into the story. This was our happy time. I didn’t want mad or fake mad in it. “The policeman said ‘why you going so fast?’ and then he saw me. His face goes really white.”

“Why? Why?”

“Well, because I was in a lot of pain,” I answered. But really, I was a mess with water down my legs as if I had pissed on myself, huffing loudly and grunting. “So the kind policeman got in front of us, put on his lights, and siren, and took us to the hospital.”

With my own military escort that day, I felt more important than the general himself. We bypassed the gate guards, all the stops, and red lights and went straight into Womack Army Medical Center, where a wheelchair and two nurses waited for me.

“Then the nurses put me in this nice bed, and the doctor came in,” I tell him.

“And what did he say?”

I get my voice to go deep and uppity. “It will be a while.”

“And what did you say.”

“I said, ‘No, sir, this baby is ready now,’ and I was right, you know?”

By this time, my baby was full-on, smirking.

“The doctor had to come back from home because he didn’t want to listen to me, and then he told me to push, and I did. I pushed, pushed and pushed, and suddenly — “ I start crying like a baby.

“This little slimy, red, head full of black hair thing comes out.”

I used to call my baby ‘It.’ At that time a specific Army directive, prohibited soldiers from knowing the sex of their baby. Rumor was that a wife sued when they got it wrong and the Army stopped doing that for soldiers. So during a time of technology, my baby was a mystery to me until his birth.

“Was that me?” my baby asked.

“Yeah, that was you” I shook the bed playfully and slapped a kiss on his cheek. “Like a tomato and so loud. So, so, so, loud, and then the doctor put the baby right here.” I pointed at my chest.

I lowered my voice. “And I took one look at the baby and said his name is Johnny Angel because he’s my gift from heaven.”

For the longest, my baby thought that was his name, and when he started kindergarten, I had to correct him. Yes, he is my angel, a gift that irrevocably changed my life. But his name is not Angel. In my heart, though, that’s what I inscribed.

I had my baby when I was nineteen. It was the most challenging decision I’ve ever made. I am grateful to have had a choice. Because if I had been forced, I wouldn’t be here looking back at this terrifying time fondly.