Possibly Maybe

I sit in our room waiting for the nurse to come grab me. There is a sense of déjà vu looming over me as the scrubs they gave me hang loosely over my jeans and my t-shirt. The slip covers on my shoes make it difficult to keep my feet planted underneath me with the slick tile floors. It is a miracle I haven’t slipped and hurt myself. Not like it will make much of a difference. I am in a hospital surrounded by dozens upon dozens of trained medical professionals.

The last nine and a half months have been grueling between having to juggle work and school, not to mention a raving four-year-old and her mama’s mood swings. I did not think I would be standing here so soon. There was still what felt like hundreds of things still sitting on my plate that I needed to take care of. Things like preparing for my certification tests, sending out my daughter’s preschool applications, putting the new crib together, making sure there’s room for the crib, finishing edits on books five and six while simultaneously working with my agent on book four. An agent who, despite me telling her about the surgery, has still called me several times this morning about setting up a signing tour for books one through three. I admire her tenacity in trying to push me onto the best seller list before the book four launch, but she was becoming incredibly exhausting.

“Mr. Anderson?” a nurse asks stepping carefully into the room. “I think we’re ready for you now.” Her smile is warm and welcoming, but I feel anything but.

My anxiety stirs in my chest forcing my breathing to come in short and shallow gulps. The first surgery four years ago made sense. So why the anxiety now? Why was I struggling to school my nerves after spending the last couple of years trying to get them under control? I hadn’t had an episode in months. Even with the multitude of tasks flowing over the edges of my plate.

I follow the nurse down the hall and into the surgical suite where they have my wife laid down on the bed with a partition laid just below her breasts so we cannot see the incision below. She reaches out with a wide smile spread across her face and I take it in mine, squeezing hard to let her know I’m here. She’s loopy, but only slightly from the epidural line they’re running directly into her spinal cord.

“This doesn’t feel real,” she says.

“I don’t think it ever will,” I say with a chuckle.

It really doesn’t. I can remember walking in the first time and seeing her lying there just as she is now with the same expressions playing across her face. It took them all of sixty seconds before they told us they were finished and were gesturing for me to cut my daughter’s umbilical cord. It was so spongey that I almost failed, but the shears managed to compensate for my shakiness. They clamp the remainder and send me back to sit in my stool while they stitch my wife closed and clean off our daughter. A daughter that they bring to us wrapped in a thin pink blanket.

The trans of my reminiscence is intoxicating and, before I know it, I’m already sitting in my stool with our second little bundle of joy wrapped up and crying softly. I reach down as they wriggle one of their little hands free and grab onto my finger with a vice that refuses to let go. My wife is beaming at me from the bedside next to me, her blue eyes sparkling in the fluorescents above us. It is then that I take in the bundle that they’ve handed me. A bundle that is the same shade of pink as the first one. Our baby Rory is a girl, and I would not have it any other way.

“Don’t worry, sweet girl,” I say softly, my wife placing a hand over my own that is still trapped in the baby’s grasp. “Dada’s got you.” I look up at my wife’s smiling face as fresh tears start to fall from her face and can’t help but feel the all too familiar sting in my own eyes. I choke back the lump in my throat. “We’ve got you,” I say.

Rory gives me one last coo before she heavy sighs and, I swear it, I see the corners of her mouth turn up in a small smile.