What is it about a refrigerator door loaded with junk — inundated with old pictures, to-do lists, magnets, bits of Thanksgiving dinner leftovers and random tidbits of life — that something meaningful occasionally cuts through the clutter while you reach for the water pitcher and gives you a boost.
I read the saying, almost crowded out by a Key West chicken magnet and a New Yorker cartoon, and laughed.
It was a quote by Winston Churchill that read: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Thank you refrigerator door loaded with crap. Thank you for your wisdom and sense of humor. You knew what I needed.
OK, it wasn’t hell, but giving birth — Thompson-style — was as close as I ever want to come. (And I was on the easy side!)
My wife’s water partially broke on Christmas morning, and we would spend the next six days in the hospital enjoying hours and hours of labor, a C-section, drugs that made her think I was Ricardo Montalban, endless nurse visits, pokes, proddings and things that went bump in the night, a toilet that sounded like a jet plane taking off when flushed, a loss of all modesty, painful catheters and so much Jell-O that we’ve now qualified for a special club. And that was just Monday.
These were low, low times — times when I thought we would never get out of there, that the pain wouldn’t stop, that the walls would close in and crush us. I felt so helpless, struggling to care for a wife and a new baby when my best qualifications are typing keys, not administering drugs or tending to ailments that will sprain your tongue when you say them.
But, if you’re going through, keep going.
And we did. Now look at us. A family, a happy, happy family, with a gorgeous little girl topped by a head full of hair like an old man’s toupee. That’s my Cuban side.
Time has already started to cut through the hardship like a razor-sharp snow plow, and suddenly, only the good memories linger. Like the first time I held my daughter and looked deep into her little blue eyes, like tiny marbles all shimmering and bright. That’s no hell.
There was the look on my wife’s face when she was told she could eat solid foods again and that the hospital staff would ceremoniously execute the last tin of Jell-O she didn’t eat. Death by firing squad, wretched jiggly stuff.
How her eyes lit up when I brought home a 99-cent snow globe from the drug store on Christmas night, just to dress up the hospital room.
Or the jig we danced when we got the all-clear to leave the hospital for good. How can I forget that first breath of fresh air as we walked to the car and tried out the car seat, no clue as to whether it was in correctly, or even right-side-up.
Or any time my little girl grips my hand so tight I wonder when steroids were introduced to her diet.
But best of all was the moment during the C-section when huddled behind a blue screen with just my wife’s head and arms (the rest of her was who knows where), we heard a voice climb over and ask: “Are you ready to see the baby?”
How do you answer a question like that? And why, at such an incredible, monumental moment, can’t you come up with anything better to say than, “Okie-dokie” or “grble-grble-gah,”
Then came this little baby, puffed up and purple like a plumb, all covered in blood and that beautiful head of hair.
“Oh my God,” I remember saying when I glimpsed that mop, “she must be 13.”
She had sideburns like her daddy, and she was gorgeous.
We named our 8-pound, 13-ounce bundle of baby Amelie Elle Thompson. It was quite a journey getting her out, and then getting her home, but we kept going, and now we’re there.