Dear Jordan,
A friend once said that to have a baby is to discover a whole new level of what it means to be human. She was right, as I discovered when you were born and suddenly there was a life that meant more to me than my own.
Katti drove my mother and me home with you the day I left the hospital, and it was like being in traffic for the first time. All the cars seemed too close to ours as I hovered over the car seat where you slept. When we finally made it, I fretted over whether I had dressed you too warm or too cold. Then, after I had fed, burped, and bathed you, I panicked when you cried, thinking I must have done something wrong.
Your grandmother did all she could to help me in those first, sleep-deprived weeks, and friends rescued me from my solitude. Still, there was no way to replace what I needed most—your dad. He and I were supposed to feel our way through those joyful yet exhausting days together—he assuring me that, no, you had not died of SIDS just because you were not snoring in your sleep; he running to buy the breast pump I thought I would not need; he getting up for the 4 a.m. feeding because my incision hurt. Although it was not just the caregiving that I craved. I longed for Charles to see what I saw: how you smiled in your sleep (I refused to believe it was gas); how you smelled right after your bath; how your head felt nestled in my neck. Those should have been his moments, too— and yours.
Your father called weekly to check on us that first month, and he always wanted to hear every new detail about his “Biscuit”
There was a new lightness in Charles’s voice, a new harmony in his laughter.
“How’s he doing, Ma? Bet you don’t even have time to miss me.”
“Of course I miss you,” I said. “I see you every time I look at Jordan. He’s doing great—it’s m£ you need to worry about.”
He asked what was wrong.
“Someone mistook me for Jordan’s nanny at the park again,” I said. “He’s so fair that people think he’s white. I was so fed up that I pulled out my breast and fed him right in front ofthat couple.”
“Just put the little biscuit in the sun. He’ll brown up.”
As the weeks passed, we settled into a routine, which is to say that I knew what you needed by the sound of your cry and could count on you to wake up every two hours. (I timed my showers, naps, and phone calls accordingly.) But I was still not the picture of togetherness. I called your pediatrician so often with my new-mother questions that he must have thought I was insane. I brought page-long lists of questions to your check-ups: “Does his head seem big? Are you sure he’s not color-blind? What about that red spot?”
Dr. Edelstein was incredibly patient, and it was a big day when the number of questions was in the single digits. I half expected him to reward me with a smiley face sticker.
When you were three months old, I took you to Los Angeles to see my sisters, Kim and Lynnette, and to have you baptized. Kim attended a small, multicultural Presbyterian church led by a young white pastor, the Reverend Howard Dodson, whom I admired. It would be his first christening.
Your aunts and I were having dinner at an Italian restaurant one evening when they commented on the unusual grunting sound you were making.
“He sounds like he’s having trouble breathing,” Lynnette said.
You seemed fine to me, and I worried that if I phoned your doctor one more time, he would stop returning my calls, so Lynnette suggested the “dial-a-nurse” service that my health insurer provided. We were in your aunt’s car on our way to her house when I reached a nurse on my cell phone and explained your symptoms.
“That doesn’t sound good at all,” the woman said. “What you’re describing might be respiratory distress.”
Distress was the only word I needed to hear. In no time, Lynnette and I were speeding down the freeway toward the nearest emergency room. Perhaps sensing our agitation, you began crying.
“Maybe we should call the highway patrol for an escort,” I wailed. “We’re only two miles away!” Lynnette said, turning on her flashers instead to move traffic along.
We burst through the emergency room doors crying that we had an infant in distress, whereupon a triage nurse assessed your vital signs: normal. A doctor examined you and ran tests. I rocked you anxiously until he returned with the results.
“Ma’am, there is nothing wrong with this baby. He has gas.”
He gave me a brochure about colic and sent me to the billing office, where I paid what your aunt and I still refer to as “the gas bill.”
“You did what?” Charles said, when he called my cell phone a few days later and I told him about our frantic emergency room expedition. “My poor son—I need to come home and rescue him.”
“The nurse said ‘distress.’ Wouldn’t you rather I be safe than sorry;
“Yes, Ma, but you don’t need to take him to the emergency room every time he burps.”
“Fine, next time I’ll let him suffer,” I teased.
“No, you won’t,” Charles said, laughing.
I promised to send him pictures of you in your baptism outfit, an adorable white satin shorts suit with a bow tie and doves embroidered on the lapel.
Your father never questioned the decision to have you baptized without him, but I suspect he knew that I feared, down deep, that he could be killed, and I wanted him at least to have known that we had dedicated his son’s life to God. Then he would know that even if he did not meet you on earth, he would see you someday in heaven.
The evening before the christening, I got a call from Dodson: there had been a change in plans, and what was supposed to be an intimate occasion would be anything but that. There had been a series of high-profile gang shootings in the neighborhood that week—shootings that left a teenage girl and boy dead. Dodson had hastily organized a reconciliation service for the families of the dead children, and it was scheduled for the same time as your baptism. (Apparently it was the only available time slot on the mayor’s calendar.) Since you and I were returning to New York on Monday, we could not reschedule the christening.
It seemed like a macabre idea, but Dodson said that he envisioned the ceremony as a homecoming for those families, culminating with a celebration of life for ours.
Reluctantly, I agreed.
Television crews and half a dozen police cars were parked outside the church when we arrived, and armed police officers stood guard on the church lawn. The sanctuary, ordinarily spacious, was packed with people. I questioned my judgment in agreeing to baptize you under such conditions. What if the rival gang members who had killed those kids decided to drive by and shoot up the church?
I was still trying to decide whether to back out when something miraculous happened. I saw those other parents seized in sorrow and knew then that our place was in the sanctuary. I wanted to ease their suffering in any way that I could.
When it was time for us to make our way to the front of the church, I stood there swaying with you in my arms as the pastor placed a hand on your forehead, closed his eyes, and prayed. I looked at the mother of one of the dead gang members and wondered if she was thinking back to a time when her own child was still tiny and untouched by hatred and violence.
Pastor Dodson had told me that during the service I would have to literally hand you over to the members of the congregation so that they could welcome you into the church. When that time came, I instinctively offered you to that dead child’s mother. She clutched you to her breast, shaking as she rocked you and wept. The brother of one of the victims, a boy of about sixteen, rubbed your head and kissed your cheek. Those strangers with whom we were suddenly connected passed you among themselves before someone placed you back in my arms. Tears flowed freely as you were welcomed into the church and christened as a child of God.
You squirmed when the minister sprinkled water on your head but otherwise remained silent and still. Then the congregation prayed for your father’s protection and for your health and safety.
As the service concluded, so many people wanted to greet us that we stood in an impromptu receiving line accepting their hugs and good wishes. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa held you and posed for pictures. An old Asian man with a creased face and white hair waited at the end of the line. When he finally made his way closer with an unsteady gait, he clutched my hand and smiled.
“God is pleased,” he said, looking at me with tired eyes, and hobbled off.
This was salvation.
The healing you brought to those hurting people must have been what your father meant when he wrote to me after you were born: I know he is a blessing to everyone who meets him.
I am not sure why, but I never told your father about the reconciliation service that preceded your baptism. Perhaps I wanted to ignore the symbolism of it, representing as it did the tenuous thread between life and death. I tried to provide as idyllic an image as possible of your life during the months that remained until your father could come home—in case it was all he would ever experience of it.
Within weeks of the trip to Los Angeles we were on a plane again, flying to Kentucky to spend a weekend with both sets of your grandparents. It was important to me that you meet them, and for your father to see pictures of you with them. I was surprised at how sentimental I felt returning home as a mother for the first time. I had come of age in Radcliff, had kissed my first boyfriend there and learned to drive on those roads. Now my son would sleep under the same roof where I had grown into womanhood and met his father.
You met my father that day and he held you up and tickled your face with his gray beard—no longer the fearsome man who had raised me, but a gentle, rotund grandfather, the kind who passes out candy before dinner and gives rides on the back of his electric wheelchair. Arthritis had claimed his body and age had softened his heart. He still liked to lecture and to have the last word, but usually not when his grandchildren were speaking. Maybe you represented our second chance.
I took you out into the front yard and pointed out the spot where I had knocked over a bush when I was learning to drive and where I once played hopscotch. Then we walked under the towering oak tree that I had loved as a girl—the tree your dad and I had walked under the day we met.
I was sitting with you on the front porch when the Kings arrived the next morning. Your grandmother walked up the driveway with arms outstretched long before she was close enough to touch you.
“Just look at this baby,” she beamed, rubbing her cheek against yours. Our two families were finally united. Even your aunt Gail, a lawyer in her mid-forties who was known as a fierce negotiator, softened when she took you into her arms. I did not know her well but she and I were both professional women with spunk and strong opinions, which might have been part of Charles’s attraction to me.
The Kings took enough pictures to wallpaper a room and covered you with kisses when they left two days later. I also snapped dozens of pictures to send your father. He was so happy to receive them, especially the ones of you in his parents’ arms. He told me he had been showing the pictures to his soldiers.
He wanted to know where I had gotten the Polo shirt and shorts you were wearing in the photos and how much weight you had gained. He asked if you were sleeping longer and wanted to know if I was still reading to you every day. I put the phone to your ear so he could speak to you and told him that you seemed to turn toward the sound of his voice. In those moments he was not simply a leader of men at war a world away—he was a father in love.