21 Years ago...March 27, 1994
It felt as if I had waited my whole life to be a dad. I have always enjoyed being around kids and
even babies. When Uncle Bruce and Aunt Kathie adopted Brian in 1969 I was
enchanted: I said to Aunt Kathie,
“Finally there is someone I can tell, ‘I knew you when you were a baby.’ Three years later they adopted Suzanne. When two members of my church family, Wayne and Marilyn, adopted precious
little Robbie, he and I became inseparable on Sundays and at youth group
activities. I loved carting him
around. Then two other dear church
friends Bob and Betty McClimans adopted Celynd and she gave me my first real
experience with childcare. In the summer of 1978 her parents were stuck without
a babysitter for the summer and I had not yet found a summer job. Suddenly I found myself--a college freshman--caring
for a baby: feeding, diapering, bathing ….everything. And, I loved it.
Loving all of those wonderful adopted kids always made me
wonder whether God was preparing me to be an adoptive parent. And in fact, it took me so long to get
married, I was not sure if I was ever going to be any kind of a parent. By that time I had doted on several nieces
and nephews. Spending Amanda’s first year living near them in Nyack and seeing
my precious little niece every day only deepened my desire for fatherhood. In
1992 I finally did get married, and then to my surprise--but delight--we found
ourselves almost immediately pregnant. (So much for my paranoia about
infertility.) But to our great sorrow, we lost that baby at about six
weeks. When our dear obstetrician--Dr.
Miller--told us the news, he broke down and wept with us. Again, I wondered if
I would ever realize my dream of fatherhood.
In the sad empty void after the miscarriage I got started on a PhD
program.
Then in February of 1994, we discovered that we were once
again expecting a baby. Sally and Chris
were both expecting babies that spring and we went down to visit New Wilmington
on Palm Sunday weekend. We’d been to church
that morning and I was in the kitchen helping Mom fix dinner when Olga appeared
in the doorway with an ashen look on her face.
I knew something was terribly wrong.
“It’s happening again,’ she said.
We jumped into the car and hurried down to the emergency room at Jameson
Hospital in New Castle.
There we encountered an ER doctor whose command of the
English language was somewhat lacking.
He explained “threatening miscarriage, perhaps an ultrasound will tell us if baby alive.”
Olga lay on a gurney and I knelt beside it and we cried and prayed. They had to summon in an ultrasound
technician who had a long drive to the hospital. That endless, agonizing wait at Jameson is
seared into my memory forever. When the
technician finally arrived, still wearing his civilian clothes, he took us off
to another wing. As we passed through
the lobby, I saw that my sweet mom had driven in after us, still in her Sunday
clothes, the uneaten Sunday dinner still on the table. She sat in the waiting room and gave me a
brave and encouraging smile as we whisked past.
I knew she was praying for us.
The technician--who spoke English as his first language--was
very kind and friendly. He explained
that an ultrasound at only about five weeks may not show anything at all as
that was barely enough time for the heartbeat to begin. I asked if he would tell us what he saw. “That’s against policy,” he explained, “the
doctor has to go over the results with you.” That seemed so unfair and
illogical to me, the man in the ER was not our doctor and he barely spoke English, but I was
too emotionally spent to try to argue against the policy. He looked sympathetically at our tear-stained
faces as he hooked up the equipment.
Time seemed to freeze as he rolled the sensor around Olga’s
stomach, searching for any sign of life…my hopes dwindled. Then….”I SEE A HEARTBEAT!” he crowed! Then immediately, “Don’t tell them I told
you!” He guided our eyes to the screen and showed us a faint little flicker in
the fuzzy pattern. It mostly looked like
a TV channel that was not coming in. But
once he put his finger on it, we could see the steady pattern that he
meant.
In that moment, I became a father. In that moment, I first glimpsed Anthony Jay
Nichols, who would arrive safely about 30 weeks later. In that moment, I fell in love with that
teeny-tiny pinprick of a heartbeat. If
anyone had tried to harm that microscopic beating heart, I could have torn him apart with my bare hands. My 21-year
(and counting) adventure as a father, the greatest in my life, began at Jameson
Hospital on that terrible and glorious Palm Sunday afternoon.
I know that people agonize deeply over the question of when
life begins, but for me that question was answered that day. That baby was as much my son on that day as he
is on this day as a big strong junior in college.
