Reminiscence: The Children 1

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1

With A----- pregnant for the first time, naturally we began to think about children’s names. We agreed on several points:

• our children’s names would reflect our families’ Irish and English heritage

• we would always call them by their real names and not with well-intentioned but generic names (like Sugar, Dear, Cutie, Sweetie)

• and their names would not be easy to make into nicknames (like Robert, William, Elizabeth, Katherine).

Several years later, the second child - son W----- - was not feeling well. I was trying to comfort him while heating something up in the kitchen. I picked him up and held him, hugged him. He was a toddler, so after a few minutes he began to feel heavy. I put him on the kitchen counter, still holding him tightly.

After a minute, I looked him lovingly in the eye. “You’ll feel better soon,
W-----,” I said.

He suddenly threw up, right in my face.

I did not hit him. I tried my best to not even flinch, but to continue looking at him lovingly. I asked sweetly, “Feel a little better now, honey?”

In his most innocent, piteous little voice, he said, “I don’t like to be called ‘Honey.’”

2

While W----- was still an infant, he slept in a crib in his own room, next to ours. Our daughter L------ - who was 20 months older - had her room a few steps away down the hall. We had worked hard to make her feel good about a new baby’s arrival, and she did.

Every morning, for instance, when she would first wake up (and often before her parents were stirring), L------ would go into W-----’s room and climb up into his crib to murmur quietly to him in a few minutes they had to themselves.

One morning, when A----- went in, she found L----- clambering back down from the crib; she had a pained look on her face. Before A----- could even ask her the trouble, she said: “I don’t like that poop in my smell.”

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