Heather James
How Bubba Lukey Got His Name
We named our first son Sam. We loved him so much we decided to have another. When my wife, Leah, got into the second trimester, we started talking about names. We both wanted something biblical, but that was where the agreement ended.
One evening after dinner I ran a few possibilities by her. “How about Moses?” I asked, half seriously. “We could call him ‘Moe’ for short.”
Leah didn’t go for that.
“What about Nimrod?” I asked. “Nimrod the mighty hunter.”
She just rolled her eyes and turned away. But later, she pitched a few names of her own: “Jacob?”
Nope. Too popular.
“Matthew?”
Nope. We almost named our first son Matthew. I couldn’t dish out a leftover to our new son.
Then one day, sitting together at a Bible study, we came across the name Simeon: “. . . when she gave birth to a son . . . she named him Simeon” (Gen. 29:33). The “she” in the passage is Leah, and as the story goes, Simeon was Leah’s second son. There was a kind of neat symmetry about the whole thing.
“Hey,” I said, nudging Leah, “what about Simeon?”
“What about Simon?”
Close enough. We had ourselves a name, or so I thought. A few days later my wife came and said, “Ix-nay on Simon.”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong with Simon?”
“People will make fun of his name. They’ll call him Simple Simon.”
“But what about the biblical second-son-of-Leah thing?” I asked.
“Here’s the deal,” said my wife. “We name him Simon, but we call him something else. Simon doesn’t have to be a first name. It can be his middle name.”
So it was back to the name books. We tried Aaron and Zack, Jack and Shaq, Moby and Toby. None of them stuck.
Meanwhile, my wife’s belly grew rounder. One fall Saturday afternoon while I was watching football, she came to me and said, “Hey, how about Luke?”
“Luke.” I said it aloud. I repeated it a few times. It sounded good.
“And the best part,” she said, “is that no one can make fun of it.”
“It’s insult-proof,” I said. “Luke Simon Doughty.”
So we were agreed.
Until Sunday, at least. I was watching another football game when my wife came in and said, “It won’t work.”
I knew at once what she was referring to. “What’s wrong now?”
“His monogram: Luke Simon Doughty equals LSD. I can’t have my son’s initials be a major hallucinogen.”
“Look,” I said, turning off the football game. “It’s a bit late to be fooling with names again, don’t you think?”
My wife stood there shaking her head. “I can’t do it. My son will not have the initials LSD.”
Then I had the answer. “What if we name him Simon Luke Doughty, but call him by his middle name?”
She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, Simon Luke Doughty, but we’ll call him Luke. Works for me.”
Relieved, I went back to my game.
The very next Thursday, Leah delivered our baby boy—a cheeky seven-pounder, a delight just like his brother. On Saturday, we brought Baby Luke home, and family and friends came by with gifts and covered casseroles, hoping to catch a glimpse of the new bubba. Big brother Sam was as excited as anyone. “Can I hold Baby Wookey?” he asked all evening.
When things had settled down, I took Sam upstairs for bedtime. We knelt to pray beside his bed, and Sam added the “God blesses”: “God bless Mama and Daddy, God bless Sammy and” —and why didn’t I see this coming?—“and God bless Luke the Kook.”
Del Doughty
The Mouth That Roared
I couldn’t wait for my son to talk. Those first golden words, that first raggedy sentence: “More eat, Mom!”
Only later did I realize how little control I had over what he’d say—and when he’d say it. Shortly after Sam turned three, a new security guard appeared at day care. He was an older man with thinning hair; to compensate, he’d combed the few remaining strands jaggedly across his scalp. Not that I noticed until Sam called it to my attention.
“Mom, look! That man has broken hair!” I froze. Sam repeated himself, louder. “Hey, mister—you’ve got broken hair!” As the man’s entire head turned red, I winced, gave a “kids say the darndest things” shrug by way of apology, and hustled Mr. Observant into the car.
It was as good a place as any to start teaching him diplomacy. “I think you hurt that man’s feelings,” I said gently. “He knows he doesn’t have much hair.” I stopped for a light and checked the rearview mirror to see if I was getting through. Sam stared back blankly. “Okay,” I continued. “What if someone said, ‘Wow! What funny-looking teeth!’ That would bother you, right?”
Silence from the back. And then . . .
“Mom?”
“Yes, honey?”
“You have funny teeth!” he crowed, and giggled all the way home.
I began to see what I might be up against. And no wonder: Hadn’t we encouraged Sam to notice the world around him? “See the pretty kitty!” “Look at that big moon!” And hadn’t we bragged about Sam’s own candid assessments? A few weeks before the broken-hair incident, at an Italian restaurant, we ordered that child-friendly staple, mozzarella sticks. Sam nibbled one and pushed away the plate. A waiter later came by and asked Sam if he liked his entreé, spaghetti. “Yes,” he said, then pointed to his neglected appetizer. “But those are terrible!”
For weeks we laughed about Sam, Kid Critic: Yes, the mozzarella sticks were terrible! What a great little palate!
He was spontaneous, bright, open—everything we cherish in children. Only now did I see how it had led us to a balding man’s humiliation. We’d taught our son to be observant; what we hadn’t shown him was when and why to keep his observations to himself.
And so we tread warily in public with Sam, a walking, talking time bomb. What would set him off next? One day, he hailed a couple of elderly women. “You’d like my grandmother,” he assured them. “She’s old, too.” Another time he waved away a smoker: “Hey, you’re going to die!”
Each time, we’d stammer an apology and sweep Sam off for a chat. We’d explain that no, we don’t tell people they’re old or that smoking will kill them. It may be true, but for us to say so would only make them feel bad. We eventually boiled it down to “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Unfortunately, “nice” proved a relative term.
We found that out just after Sam’s fourth birthday, when my husband invited an old friend to dinner—a genial, portly man whose girth Sam obviously found mesmerizing. Despite our attempts at diversion, Sam stared until he could stand it no longer. Finally, he stepped right up and tapped the man on the belly. “Boy,” he said, with genuine admiration, “you’re fat!”
I stared into my wine, wishing I could drown in it, as our (childless) guest valiantly tried to laugh it off. It wasn’t until dessert that we regained our equilibrium.
The next day, we had another sedan sermonette. “We do not tell people they’re fat, old or bald,” I said. This time, when I peeked into the rearview mirror, I saw a gleam of comprehension. It dawned on me that the four-year-old was grappling with a notion the three-year-old couldn’t have fathomed: that words could embarrass or hurt. “Sorry,” Sam said, squirming.
Just how far Sam had come became clear weeks later, when I took him to my health club for a swim. As we passed the stair-climbing machines, an acquaintance caught my eye. He was a friendly, good-looking man whose left arm ended just below the shoulder. I smiled, or tried to, gritting my teeth as I imagined what Sam might say. As I pulled him along, his eyes widened, but he said nothing.
The next day, I complimented Sam on his restraint.
“Remember the man we saw at the health club, who had only one arm?” Sam, busy dismantling a Lego dinosaur, nodded.
“I’m v
ery proud of you. You noticed something was different, but you didn’t say anything. That’s great!”
“He knows he has one arm, Mom,” he replied, patiently. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”
“That’s right.” By God, he had it! And then . . .
“Mom? Could we take his picture?”
Maybe we have more work to do.
Barbara Hoffman
Tears
Tears are the safety valve of the heart when too much pressure is laid on.
Albert Smith
“I can’t find a heartbeat.” Dr. Deasy said these words with no evidence of emotion. His graying hair was a bit tousled, but he was completely professional as he glided his Doppler scope over my glistening (and already swelling) abdomen. He adjusted his glasses, as if seeing more clearly could somehow help him to hear a beating heart more distinctly. I began to feel just a little nervous but was not yet overly apprehensive. Surely he had just not found the right spot yet. If he kept trying, he’d find the baby’s heartbeat. I knew that a baby was sometimes in a position that made it awkward for the Doppler to pick up the sound of its beating heart.
“You are a little larger than you should be at fourteen weeks. There is a possibility that you have a placenta growing at an abnormal rate, but no actual fetus inside.”
“What?”
“It could be a ‘false’ pregnancy. Or, it is possible that you were pregnant, but the child did not survive. In that case, your body may have reacted by overproducing the hormones necessary to sustain a pregnancy, creating the appearance of a more advanced state of pregnancy.”
Now I was definitely apprehensive. My husband, standing beside me, squeezed my hand. All of the old feelings came back. Three times before, I had lost babies to miscarriage early in pregnancy. Three times, I had mourned the loss of little ones I would never know. But the intensity of that grief had been eased when I successfully carried two babies to full term.
I don’t think that those we love are ever “replaced” by someone else. Still, as we move toward other relationships, the pain of loss is lessened. My two healthy baby boys (now toddlers of one and two) had given me so much joy that the ache over my earlier losses had been overcome, if not forgotten. And certainly my “successful” pregnancies had given me confidence that the old problems were in the past.
Now here I was, faced with the old feelings again. How quickly those tears rose to the surface! For someone who has never experienced miscarriage, it may be hard to relate to the ordeal I was facing. I know that many of my friends did not understand it at the time. I would never presume that the anguish I experienced was even close to that of a mother who loses a child she has grown to know and love. I doubt seriously that anything could equal that torment. But there is a unique connection that develops between mother and child long before they ever meet face to face. Love begins to grow as a mother becomes increasingly aware of the tiny life within her. When that life is abruptly cut off, the grief experienced is as real as that for any other loss.
I left the doctor’s office that day in stunned disbelief. I had an appointment to get an ultrasound that afternoon, but there were several hours to wait. Since the doctor’s office was closer to my mom’s house than it was to ours, we went over there to wait the long hours before we could get into the hospital for an ultrasound—and confirmation of our loss. My parents were out of town, but I had a key, so we let ourselves in. As I sat on the bed making phone calls, the tears began to flow. I called my aunt and my pastor’s wife to ask for prayer. They comforted me, assured me of their love and prayers, and promised to call a few others to pray as we waited. Steve held me, and we both held the boys, gaining comfort and strength from one another.
As the hours of waiting passed slowly, I allowed myself to slip into depression. All the confidence of my two successful pregnancies disappeared. I managed to brace myself against the loss I was facing by putting up walls against the pain. When I walked into the hospital that afternoon, I was emotionally prepared for the worst. I had cried all my tears and was ready to accept the news I most feared. A knot had formed in the pit of my stomach from the stress I had dumped there. I knew that I may have gained control over my emotions, but my body would continue to feel the pain, refusing to be subdued by my tears.
Since we had the two boys with us, Steve was unable to come into the room with me as I received my ultrasound. I got up onto the cold, hard table and waited for the technician to begin. She was friendly and supportive, but somewhat “businesslike” in her efficiency, as she began the procedure. As a technician, she was not legally allowed to give me any diagnosis, but it was not long before it was easy to read her demeanor. She changed from having a guarded, professional approach to a relaxed and positive attitude. Although she couldn’t make a diagnosis, she could let me see the screen as she glided the ultrasonic head over my abdomen. She did not have to say a word. There, on the screen in front of me, I clearly saw the active and very much alive movements of the small child inside me. I could even see this tiny creature (only fourteen weeks since the day of conception) sucking its tiny thumb as it floated freely around the amniotic fluid in my body.
I was flooded with relief. I don’t think I knew until that instant just how much I had truly feared the loss of this child. Now the tears, which I had thought were under control, began to flow again. This time they were tears of joy and comfort. At that moment I did not think that anything could make me happier than the joy of having a healthy child inside me. But I was wrong.
When the technician had finished her job, she went out of the room to make her report to the radiologist. I had to wait to hear the good news officially from him. When he walked into the room, he asked me how I was. “Fine,” I said. “Terrific, in fact, now that I’ve seen the baby.”
“Which baby did you see?”
I thought it was a rather silly question.
“Mine, of course.”
“But which one did you see?”
“Huh? What do you mean? I saw the one inside me now.”
He was grinning, as if he were in on some sort of conspiracy. “But, there are two in there. Didn’t you notice? You are pregnant with twins!”
No. I hadn’t noticed. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the technician had been wandering all over my tummy with that ultrasound head and showing me first one baby and then another; I had been so excited and relieved to see a living, moving baby, that I hadn’t noticed. She had never shown them both at once, and I just assumed it was the same baby.
Steve, waiting patiently and prayerfully out in the hall with the boys, was now asked to come into the room. The radiologist then showed us both babies on the screen, as we watched in amazement.
The ride home from the hospital was a dramatic contrast to the ride we had taken earlier that same day from the doctor’s office to my parents’ house. Once again, we were stunned and having a hard time grasping the news. But our grief and fear had been swept away and emphatically replaced by joy and hope. There were still long moments of silence, but they were underscored now by laughter, amazement and wonder. Admittedly, there was a new sort of apprehension in me. I was facing an entirely new and unforeseen challenge. But the only tears now were tears of joy.
Bonnie J. Mansell
Miracle Baby
Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier.
E. C. McKenzie
When Sara Sieber was sixteen weeks pregnant, she and her husband, Tim, went to her obstetrician’s office for a routine ultrasound. The couple was looking forward to finding out whether their baby would be a boy or a girl. The sonogram showed that Sara was carrying a son, her fourth. But there was no time to celebrate the happy news, because the scan also revealed a serious defect.
Sara’s baby’s diaphragm, the thin wall of muscle and connective tissue that separates the abdomen from the chest, was not forming properly. The condition is known as congenital diaphragmatic hernia. Minor cases can usually be repaired surgic
ally shortly after birth. But the entire left half of Sara’s baby’s diaphragm was missing. His tiny stomach and liver were pushing their way into his chest cavity, leaving his tissue-thin lungs with absolutely no room to grow.
“Your baby has virtually no lungs at all,” the neonatolo-gist explained as he reviewed a second, more detailed set of ultrasounds. “I’m afraid there’s no hope. I would strongly recommend that you terminate the pregnancy immediately.”
“I can’t do that!” Sara gasped, clutching Tim’s hand in a white-knuckled grip.
“If you carry your baby to term, he will almost certainly suffocate to death at birth,” the neonatologist said sadly. “There’s a small chance we could keep him alive for up to several months on a ventilator, but then he would die anyway.”
“I felt like the whole world had dropped out from under me,” recalls Sara. “I’d suffered two previous miscarriages, but they’d happened early in my pregnancies. This was different. I could feel this baby moving inside me. I was already in love with him, and now the doctor was telling me I would never get to hold him in my arms.”
As Sara and Tim stood to leave, both of them in tears, the doctor remembered something he’d read in a recent medical journal. “There’s a surgeon in California who’s trying to operate on babies with this condition while they’re still in the womb. It’s highly experimental, and I don’t believe he’s had much success, but I can make a few calls, at least.”
Sara wasn’t hopeful. “By the time we got home, I was already grieving the loss of my baby,” she says. “I didn’t want him to be born, because as soon as he was born I knew I was going to lose him.”
Four days later, the doctor telephoned with a name: Dr. Michael Harrison with the Fetal Treatment Center at the University of California at San Francisco. Sara and Tim decided they had little to lose, so in February of 1996, the couple flew from North Carolina to California for an evaluation.