New Baby Love

They came from short and long distances to meet him. They came before work and after work, and in between commitments and appointments and all the things that everyone has to do every day. They stopped doing these things, took a break, and showed up at my door smiling, walked in, sat down, held out their arms and oohed and aahed.

It's the universal language. Smiles and oohs and aahs.

Babies do this. They make people slow down. They bring people together. They make people happy.

My grandson, Luke, is seven months old, not an infant anymore, but he lives in Manhattan so none of my friends had met him. To them he was just a photograph in my wallet, a story I’d tell, an imagined baby, a small, male version of his 2-year-old sister, Megan. 

Until he arrived for a weeklong stay a few weeks ago. Then he became real. His mom and sister were in Scotland visiting her family. And his dad, my son, brought Luke home to us. And it was like a succession of holidays, Valentine's Day, Easter, the Fourth of July, Christmas, New Year's, every day a party, every day someone new at the door.

My daughter Lauren took the week off from work to be near him. She fed him. She rocked him. She sang to him, played with him, and loved him.

So did his cousins and all their little friends. It was wall-to-wall children some days, Dora on TV in the family room, Fred Penner singing his children’s songs on CD in the living room, the 5-and-6-year-olds coloring, the 2-and-3-year-olds singing and dancing, Luke the catalyst for it all.

We never read a newspaper. We never watched the news. We lived in a different world for an entire week, a world full of Fisher Price Little People and toy animals that moo and quack, and stuffed bears that sing and games of patty-cake and walks with Luke in the carriage and friends, so many friends, stopping by.

I thought when my children grew up and left home, the cacophony that is childhood had vanished along with them. That there would never again be doors slamming and kids shouting and babies squealing and someone saying "I'm hungry!" and the doorbell ringing and toys all over the floor.

And that never again would there be a group of us, parents and friends, whose hearth had been our children, who got together because of them, who learned from them and laughed with them and enjoyed them, sitting around in a new mix, watching and learning and enjoying their children.

But here we are, parents redux, the blush never off the rose, the joy in each new child, new joy, just invented. But old joy, too. Familiar and missed and and because of this, so very welcome.

Everyone wanted to hold Luke and feed Luke and watch Luke because Luke wasn't just my son as a baby. Luke was all our babies.

Every time one of our grown-up kids comes home, we race to a house. We sit at a table. We drink tea or wine and we ooh and we aah over everything. A good grade. A chance at a job. A new love.

And when there's a baby? We beg to hold the baby. And we smile and our hearts swell.

Luke left six days after he arrived. The doorbell stopped ringing. Lauren went back to work. The little kids went back to school. The baby toys were put away.

I look at the pictures we took, proof that I didn’t imagine the week. In every one, someone is smiling.