Gwen said the old page looked like a legal brief. I have added a heart. This is as far as I'm prepared to go.

Sunday, 6/6/99
Naomi: three days old

She's here.

Naomi Chana Adler. Born Thursday, June 3, at 4:12 in the afternoon, on her due date to the day, which the nurses said almost never happens and which I choose to interpret as early evidence of respect for deadlines. Seven pounds, two ounces. Dark hair, a great deal of it. A voice that could carry a union hall.

The short version, since there's a limit to what anyone wants to read and a limit to what I'm prepared to publish: it started Wednesday at eleven at night. Gwen drove me in at two in the morning, running every yellow light on the Jamaicaway and telling me to breathe in the voice she uses on toddlers. My mother met us there at four with a thermos and a bag of hard candies and a copy of the Globe. It was a long day. I am not a hero; I asked for everything they had and I'm glad I did. And then at 4:12 there was a person in the room who hadn't been there before, and they put her on my chest, and she stopped yelling and looked at me, cross-eyed and furious, and I said, "Oh, it's you." As if we'd arranged to meet and she was late.

Chana is for my grandmother Hannah, my father's mother, who carried that suitcase from Poland.

My father came to the hospital Thursday night at eight. He stood in the doorway of my room in his raincoat for a long time, hat in his hands, like a man at the wrong address. My mother had Naomi. She held her out to him. He didn't take her. He looked, for a long time, and then he said, "She has my mother's chin," and put his hat back on and said he'd let me rest, and left.

My mother said, "That's a lot, from him." I know. I know it is. I cried anyway, after they'd gone, with Naomi asleep on me, and a nurse came in and said, "Hormones, honey," and I let her think so.

Wednesday, 6/2/99
Week 39, day 6

Due tomorrow. Nothing is happening. I've cleaned the oven, which I have not done since I bought the condo. I've alphabetized the spice rack. I've written a memo to myself about what to bring to the hospital and then revised it. The bag has been by the door for two weeks, like a dog waiting for a walk.

Friday, 5/21/99
Week 38

Last day at the office before leave. Twelve weeks, plus the vacation I never take, which gets me to the day after Labor Day. I handed off nineteen files with memos longer than some of my briefs. My secretary, Dolores, who has worked with me eight years and has never once let me see her cry, cried, and then told me to go home before I had the baby on the carpet, which she'd just had cleaned.

I took my plant home. I don't trust anybody else with it. Practice, I suppose.

Sunday, 5/16/99
Week 37

Two showers this week, which is two more than I had planned on.

The first was at the office, in the big conference room, with a sheet cake and paper plates, and all the lawyers standing around holding their plates at chest height and not knowing what to do with their hands. The partners gave me a very handsome car seat. One of the associates gave me a onesie that says "Future Shop Steward."

The second was a surprise, at the union hall of the nurses' local I've represented for six years, and I cried for most of it. They'd all signed a card. Two hundred and some names. Half of them wrote advice. Most of the advice was "Sleep now." One of them wrote, You got us a contract when nobody thought we could. You can do this. I've put that one on the refrigerator.

Sunday, 4/11/99
Week 32

Passover at my parents'. Twenty at the table, Avi's whole crew and my mother's cousins from Newton, and me, very round, in the chair closest to the kitchen so I could get up often, which I did.

My father led the seder, the way he always does, the long version, every word, while the children slid under the table and the cousins from Newton looked at their watches. And at the part where we talk about the four children, the wise one and the wicked one and the simple one and the one who doesn't know how to ask, he looked up, just for a second, and his eyes went to my stomach, and away again.

He hasn't said the word "pregnant" once. Not once. He says "your situation." He asks my mother, in front of me, "How is Ruth's situation?"

But here is what happened about an hour in. I shifted in the chair, because the chair was hard and my back was killing me, and without a word, without looking at me, my father got up, went into the living room, came back with a cushion from the sofa, and put it behind my back. Then he sat down and went on reading about the plagues.

Nobody at the table said anything. My mother looked at her plate so hard I thought it might crack.

Sunday, 3/14/99
Week 28

Avi called tonight from Teaneck. My little brother, who wears a black hat and has four children and a mortgage and whom I used to lock out of the bathroom, called to ask how I was feeling, and whether I needed anything, and whether I'd like Shira's crib, since they're "probably done." (They say that every time.)

Then he said, "Abba doesn't know what to do with it, Ruthie. He's not angry. He just doesn't have a place in his head to put it."

I know. The truth is, my father's question at that Shabbos table a year ago, what will you tell the child?, is the question I lie awake with too, more than anything. More than money or sleep or the partners. I have a whole file on it. Books, articles, a list of phrases other women in the group have used. "Some families have a mommy and a daddy. Ours has a mommy who wanted you very much." They're good phrases. I still don't know if they're enough. I suspect nothing is enough, and you say it anyway, and you keep saying it for twenty years.

I'm taking the crib.

Thursday, 2/25/99
Week 26

Two-day arbitration, a discharge case: a bus mechanic with nineteen years in, fired over a paperwork dispute that had a great deal more to do with his supervisor than with any paperwork. I'm visibly, unmistakably pregnant now. The company's lawyer, a man I've been across the table from for ten years, spent the first morning trying to decide where to look. At the lunch break he held a door for me with such elaborate care you'd have thought I was a crate of eggs.

Then, in the afternoon, he made the mistake of treating me like a crate of eggs on cross. I took his witness apart. I'm not proud of how much I enjoyed it. All right, I'm a little proud.

The mechanic's wife sat in the back row both days, knitting. At the end she came up and gave me what she'd been making: a yellow sweater, baby size. "Whatever happens," she said. We won't have the award for a month. I'd have taken the case for the sweater.

Sunday, 2/14/99
Week 24

Valentine's Day. Gwen and I had Chinese food and went to see Shakespeare in Love, which Gwen had already seen twice. I made it to the last half hour and fell asleep sitting up, and woke with the popcorn balanced on my stomach and the baby kicking at it. Gwen has decided the baby is a critic.

I spent the last month waking up at two in the morning with heartburn and watching the Senate trial on C-SPAN reruns, because nothing else is on and there is something soothing, at that hour, about a hundred people in suits taking forever to arrive at an outcome everyone predicted. They acquitted him Friday. My mother called to tell me, as though I might have missed it. She calls about everything now. She's in training.

Gwen's dossier is in China. She's waiting for a referral, which could be months. We're pregnant together, she says, only hers has more paperwork. I said mine has plenty.

Sunday, 1/17/99
Week 20

It's a girl.

The ultrasound was Thursday. The technician asked if I wanted to know, and I said I'm a lawyer, I always want to know, and she moved the wand and waited and said, "Well, I'd paint in yellow, but I'd buy a few dresses." I lay there with the cold jelly on my stomach and watched my daughter, gray on gray, put her hand up by her face like she was thinking something over. She's the size of a banana, according to the chart on the wall. A banana with opinions.

I told the partners at the office last week, before it became impossible not to. The managing partner, who is sixty-three and has five grandchildren and has never once in eleven years asked me a personal question, said, "Congratulations, Ruth. Is the... will you be..." and I said, "Yes, alone; and yes, I'll be back after twelve weeks," and he said, "Well, then," and shook my hand, and then, at the door, turned around and said, "My wife will want to knit something," and fled.

Everybody wants to knit something. I'm going to have the best-dressed child in Suffolk County.

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