Today is my son’s 14th birthday. I will, of course, never forget his
birth by C-Section at Lenox Hill Hospital all those years. ago. When he
came out the nurse shouted: "He’s cute," and I figured that meant he
had all his fingers and toes.

My husband held him for the forty-five minutes or so while the
doctor sewed me up.They stared into each other’s eyes; it was the most
blissful thing in the world. That night, I remember singing to him: "Yes sir that’s my baby, No sir, I don’t mean maybe,  Yes sir, that’s my baby now."

It had been a difficult pregnancy. I spent five months in bed,
including one month in the pre-natal unit at Lenox Hill, with a case of
pre-term labor, a condition best treated with bed rest and a medication
called Tributilin.

I was under doctor’s orders to stay calm in an effort to  prevent
contractions from causing an early delivery. "Don’t laugh, don’t cry,"
my doctor said. And it worked: my son was born on his due date.

Needless to say, the staying calm part was pretty hard but I did
have an interesting time in bed. We moved into my mother’s Riverside
Drive apartment because our duplex in the East Village had a spiral
staircase and one bathroom on a separate floor from the bedroom. I was
taken care of by a steady stream of family and friends who brought
food, books, magazines, and news of the outside world.

I vowed not to waste my time in bed watching television although I
did become slightly addicted to the Sally Jessie Raphael Show and
eating Mallomars. My reading list was a veritable syllabus of books I
had always meant to read but had never gotten around to including
selections from: Balzac, Jane Austen, Henry James, The Brontes,
Virginia Woolf,  Flaubert, Joyce, E.M. Forster, Milan Kundera and a
wonderful biography of Simone Du Beauvoir. It was a pretty wonderful
way to spend five months and I proudly stacked the books on a shelf in
the room I’d grown up in. Painted blue, it had a gorgeous view of the
Hudson.

Maybe all that reading is the reason my son loves to read so much.
For his birthday, we bought him a bass amp, which we already gave him
for his gig last week with Cool and Unusual Punishment. But yesterday I
also went to Community Books and Barnes and Noble to pick out some
presents: "The New Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Stories From Crumb to
Clowes," "Beyond Good and Evil" by Frederick Nietzsche, "All the
Presidents Men" by Woodward and Bernstein, and "Kiss Like a Stranger,"
an autobiography by Gene Wilder.

We were the first of our friends to have a baby and we didn’t know
what to do. But we figured it out as we went along and we wrote a song
about it which we sang constantly:

"It’s hard work being a baby just ask H____ he knows, It takes a
lot of concentration to grow, and it shows. First they feed you, then
they burp you, then they put you to bed in your room. Then they wake
you and want you looking good so all the relatives will swoon…."

The now disparaged "What to Expect When You’re Expecting" was our
bible and the book I was holding in one hand, while I figured out how
to diaper him with the other. The breastfeeding was a trial and it took
days and days for him to latch on. I still have the breastfeeding
journal I kept at the time to keep track of which breast I used at each
feeding. It’s a weird list that goes on for pages and pages: Left.
Right. Right. Left. Left. Left.

It’s hard to believe that was 14 years ago. He spent yesterday in
Coney Island with friends. And tomorrow he’s taking his friends to the
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in Soho. He’s very much his own person
now: utterly handsome, interesting, full of humor and smarts.

Yes sir, that’s my baby.

Check out the OTBKB STORE for "Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn" and "It’s Only Natural"  T-shirts.  More designs to come…