The Blue Toe

The other day I discovered that if I give my right breast a squeeze in just the right place, milk will shoot out across the room. I quickly padded down the hall to find Steven to show him my new party trick.

"Check this out," I said, then sent a stream of breast milk a few inches into the air.

"Great," said Steven. Then, apropos of nothing, he added, "lots of women hand-express."

"What?" I said. "Where did you hear that?"

"I'm informed," he muttered. "I know things."

Nothing makes words come out of your mouth that you never in a million years thought you might say like having a baby around. When Steven and I were first introduced, 8 years ago, in a dark and drafty TV studio, it never crossed my mind that one day we would be discussing ways of producing breast milk.

I'm not sure whether it's the fact that we now have a joint product and a shared person whom we're utterly invested in, or the knowledge that Steven now owns a pair of jeans that were once splattered with amniotic fluid, but Steven and I are suddenly discussing all kinds of things that we didn't before Milo arrived on the scene. It probably started when I was pregnant and I developed a sort of uncontrolled burping as a result of the heartburn that plagued me night and day. I secretly hoped the burping was endearing, because I'd never burped in front of Steven before. But now, safe with the knowledge that he has watched all sorts of scary things come out of my body, I'm totally free to burp whenever I please. I feel liberated. Of course, this is probably also partially due to the fact that my burps pale in comparison to the endless stream of chunky spit up and bright yellow poop that is our son.

I didn't realize how much things had changed for us until last week, when Milo had his first medical drama (well, second if you count the jaundice episode). He woke up on Friday morning with a blue toe. Upon further inspection, we discovered that he had a hair (one of mine, natch, so I can live with the guilt for the rest of my life) wrapped tightly around the toe and it was cutting off his circulation. After several frantic minutes of trying and failing to get the hair off, we called the pediatrician, who told us to bring Milo in immediately. And so Steven took the baby and ran the fifteen blocks to the pediatrician, who ended up getting the hair of with Nair.

After the episode was over and Milo had returned from a wailing baby in pain to one who was happy as a clam, I looked at Steven and saw that he had not only run out of the house without brushing his teeth, but also without a coat or socks. I saw that as much Milo had been in pain, Steven had been in pain too. The three of us had all suffered together, and I loved both my boys more for it.