Miss me?
It’s been a while, I realize. Almost six months.
Evita has opened and closed. Nana and Pop-Pop have come and gone. I turned 49 and did two minutes of indoor freefall. The house reconstruction is finally done. Fastelavn has come and gone. Easter has come and gone. We had the annual Kammer family Pinse picnic (this year at Klaus’s). Skt. Hans Aften has come and gone. Maddie graduated from børnehaven to school and is now on summer break, starting 0 grade in August. Molli Malou is done with third grade and advances to fourth in August. I have changed jobs (again). We decided to get a puppy, “reserved” one from a family kennel with a bitch who wasn’t even yet pregnant, and will be bringing our 8-week-old puppy home on Saturday. There have been school events, work events, neighborhood events, and a thousand-and-one little daily life events. Winter became spring became summer. Molli Malou enrolled in Instagram. Maddie (just this last Friday) has developed not just one but two loose teeth — the front two in the bottom. (And she is appalled that she forgot to brag about it on Skype over the weekend.)
Meanwhile, as our schedules finally began to include some breathing room these last few weeks, instead of throwing my energy into getting this blog caught up — and believe me, it is not over, not by a long shot — I threw my energy into developing a photo-book to commemorate Molli Malou’s tenth birthday: a ten-year retrospective of her life.
Before I move on to the main subject of this post, let me say one thing: this blog will resume with more frequent updates, starting with a huge six-month-catchup edition — beginning in about two weeks, when our vacation begins.
And now, let’s move on to our feature presentation.
# # #
Ten years ago this very moment, I was lying with Trine in her hospital bed at Hvidovre Hospital. She’d had a good day, and for reasons I no longer remember had found herself the sole occupant of a room. With leads from monitors galore taped to her swollen tummy, she lay beside me and we watched Die Hard or something on the hospital room television and nibbled on candy, happy for the time alone together, and for the sudden stability of the pregnancy, and for the way Bruce Willis kept up all that plucky courage. We took pictures of Trine’s tummy. I even took a video of the baby pressing a hand or foot against her abdomen. Eventually, about 9 years, 364 days, 23 hours, and 30 or 40 minutes ago from this very moment, I kissed Trine goodnight and left.
Since things had been so good, we’d agreed I should drive up to Hillerød the following morning (a Saturday) to pick up the barnevogn we’d ordered from a Baby Sam up there. The deal was: I should wake up whenever I woke up, have a nice breakfast, drive up to Hillerød, pick up and pay for the barnevogn, then drive down to the hospital to show it to Trine. We’d have lunch together. It would be nice.
So I slept relatively late — back then, “relatively late” meant something obscene like 9 or even 10 in the morning — and didn’t hit the road until “morning” was perilously close to becoming “noonish.” I hadn’t called Trine because that had been part of the deal: things had been good, but we both know she needed all the rest she could get, so I was not to call her until she called me. And she hadn’t called me. I assumed, woefully incorrectly, that the silence of my little toaster phone was an indication of good news.
The phone rang, ironically enough, just as I had driven through Værløse and Farum and was crossing into rural Nordsjælland. It was Trine.
“It’s time,” she said, “you have to turn around and come here. Now.”
I was just passing an exit. I told Trine I would turn around at the next one and head straight there.
“OK,” she said, “just hurry.”
I drove about a kilometer before I saw a highway sign that said the next exit was 34 million miles ahead. Or something. (In truth it was closer to 8 or 9 kilometers, but when you’re driving on a busy, shoulderless, two-lane highway, and your pregnant wife has told you to get to the hospital now, I think 8 or 9 kilometers is in fact roughly equivalent to 34 million.)
I had no choice but to drive like hell to the aforementioned next exit, reverse course, and plot my way back toward Hvidovre. There was no GPS back then — not in our POS Corolla, anyway, and certainly not on my phone — so I pulled over on the off-ramp from the highway and flipped through our atlas. I mapped out the shortest route to Hvidovre, then resumed driving.
Somehow, half an hour later, I found myself hopelessly lost in downtown Hvidovre. There was a water tower I recognized, and I could sometimes see the twin smokestacks of the Hviovre Hospital Crematorium that were my north star, but I just couldn’t find my way to the hospital. I had to call Trine and tell her I was hopelessly lost, probably within a few hundred meters of the hospital.
Emergency things were happening. She was not very conversational. I heard frantic doctors and nurses and midwives in the background. I would have to figure this one out on my own. (Reminder: I was not yet fluent in Danish.)
Somehow or other I made it to the hospital in the nick of time: they were just wheeling Trine’s gurney out of some totally different room than the one I’d left her in and straight into a delivery room. I was given a smock, gloves, a mask, a surgical hat, and led along beside her into the tiny antiseptic chamber… and then they started trying to do a bunch of medical things they decided I shouldn’t see and I was escorted out into a little antechamber off the delivery room. A lovely young nurse or midwife stood there beside me, smiling. I took reassurance from her smile, because I was suddenly scared as hell.
We’d only been there a few moments before someone stepped on a cat or something in one of the rooms around us.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, spooked.
“Your daughter,” she said. “Come.”
I followed her into the delivery room and a guy in hospital greens was holding a squishy, muck-covered, flailing bundle of arms and legs up in the air.
“Congratulations,” he said, “you have a beautiful daughter.”
He actually handed her to me. I stopped breathing: I was terrified. I’d never held a newborn. I’d never even imagined a newborn could be so small!
I also noticed that she’d stopped breathing.
“Ohmygod,” I exclaimed, “she’s not breathing!”
The doctor snatched her out of my hands, slapped her back between her shoulder blades, and — as the little thing visibly resumed drawing breath, said, “they do that sometimes. Perfectly normal, don’t worry. She’s a beautiful girl.”
And she was. And she is. And here are ten years of pictures to prove it. (Note: the ten-year retrospective I compiled for her birthday has almost 300 photos… well more than the one per month of her life that I aimed for. So right here, right now, I’m just going to try and present one picture from on or around her birthday each year, from July 3 of 2004 right up to last month.)
# # #
Great blog. Glad you got to it.