Donnie
April 6, 2003
The doctor came in and told us there was a problem. I wasn’t worried — not the way I should have been, probably. Jessica had been pushing for a while and it wasn’t working. He was stuck. They made the call for a c-section pretty quickly after that, and then everything moved fast — the room changed, the lights changed, people in scrubs appeared and started wheeling her toward the OR at Bellin Hospital in Green Bay.
It was just me and his mom. I stood where they told me to stand and watched it happen. There’s a curtain they put up so you don’t see the cutting, but you see everything else — the urgency, the calm voices that are trying to sound calmer than they are, and then the moment they lift the baby out and he exists.
His head was big. That’s what I noticed first. This big-headed little person, and he was so small otherwise — jaundiced, yellowish, not the pink baby you picture. But his head. I thought it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.
Jessica was so happy to see him. That’s the image I carry — not the surgery, not the fluorescent lights, but her face when they brought him close. Relief and joy at the same time, the two things pressed together so hard you couldn’t tell them apart.
We named him there. We’d had some ideas going in but nothing was decided. Jessica said Donnie, and I looked at her, surprised. She’d named him after me. I didn’t have anything better. I was a little embarrassed, honestly — I’d never expected that. Edward was for her grandfather’s father. Donnie Edward Krumpos. It sounded like a real person. It sounded like someone who’d been expected for a long time.
My sister came. She was teaching 2nd grade and she brought her whole class to the hospital to see him. A line of seven-year-olds peering through the nursery window at this tiny jaundiced baby with the big head. One little girl had just gotten a baby brother herself, so she was the expert — she knew what it was like. I remember the kids’ faces. They were so serious about it. A new person was a big deal to them, and they were right.
Debbie Schaut came through too — a family friend who had taught our Lamaze classes. She happened to be at the hospital and stopped in, and it felt like the universe was sending the right people at the right time.
Wes came with their grandma. I don’t remember exactly what Wes said or did, but I remember the looking. This careful, studying look at this new creature that had appeared in the family. I think Wes liked him a lot at first. The jealousy came later — it always does when you’re little and the attention shifts. But that first meeting was pure curiosity. Two kids sizing each other up.
Twenty-two years later, they’re really good friends. That’s special to me. Whatever rocky stretch came in between — the jealousy, the adjustments, all the things siblings put each other through — they came out the other side as people who actually like each other. I didn’t know that would happen, standing in that hospital room. I just knew I had a son, and his head was big, and he was such a cute little beeler.
That’s what my family called me when I was little. Beeler. And now I had one of my own.