My daughter spent months preparing for her baby brother. Hours after he was born, she took one look at him and screamed, “That’s not my brother.” I thought she was overwhelmed. Three days later, she proved me wrong.
I’d been awake for close to 30 hours by the time they placed my baby boy in my arms. The labor had been hard, and somewhere in the middle of it, I’d needed emergency surgery, which meant that the first window of holding him was shorter than I’d wanted. But he was there.
He was healthy. And when the nurse wheeled me back with Bobby bundled against my chest, I couldn’t stop my tears. My husband, Josh, was beside me, smoothing the blanket around the baby with the careful tenderness of a man who still couldn’t believe it was real.
Then my daughter, Elaine, walked in. She’d been waiting in the family area, and the moment the door opened, I saw her face. Elaine was smiling that huge, lit-up smile she’d been wearing for nine months straight, the same one she had while sewing tiny clothes and picking out toys for her baby brother with money she’d saved doing garden work and small errands around the neighborhood.
She crossed the room in three steps, leaned in to see Bobby, and then froze. Josh straightened up sharply. “Elly, what…”
“That’s not him, Dad!”
“Elly?” I said.
“This is your brother. Stop it right now. You were so excited about him.”
She flinched, turned, and walked out.
Josh looked at me over the baby’s head, uncertain whether to follow her or stay. I shook my head slightly. We both told ourselves the same thing without saying it out loud.
Elaine just needs time. She’ll come around.
She didn’t come around. The first day home, I told myself our daughter was adjusting.
The second day, when Elaine sat at dinner with her eyes fixed on her plate and didn’t once look toward the bassinet, I told myself it was a phase. By the third day, when she stood in the nursery doorway as if she couldn’t cross the threshold, I stopped explaining it away. Elaine wasn’t indifferent.
That was what kept snagging at me. I’d catch her standing at the edge of the room when she thought I wasn’t watching, studying the baby with an expression I couldn’t name. “She’s just working through it,” Josh said one night.
“Give her a week.”
I didn’t have an answer. But two days later, Elaine gave me one. I was folding laundry in the hallway when she appeared beside me.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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