Quarterback's Secret Baby(83)

Images of Kaden flickered through my mind. The smile he used to give me - not the cool-guy smile he gave his friends but the open, guileless smile he seemed to reserve only for me. Could he sense what was happening? Was he thinking of me as I lay in that hospital bed out of my mind with pain? There was no reason he would be, but in that state, it didn't matter.

After what felt like hours - it turned out to be forty minutes - of pushing, a nurse placed a tiny, slippery thing on my chest and Alisha and my mother started to cry. I looked down and heard my breath catch in my throat.

"It's a boy!" A nurse told us, as I stared deep into a pair of dark blue eyes and knew that everything was suddenly and profoundly different.

"Oh my God," Alisha whispered, "Tash, he's so beautiful. Look at him! He knows you're his mom."

Neither of them said it, the thing we were all thinking - not Alisha, not my mother. They left it to me. A few minutes later, when the sudden rush of the birth had calmed down and we were left alone with our new family member, I caught a glimpse of my son's face at a certain angle.

"He looks just like Kaden," I gasped, shocked at the resemblance.

"He does," my mom replied, running one finger down my baby's impossibly soft, newborn cheek. "He looks just like his daddy. He has your chin, though."

Alisha and my mom - and Ray - wanted me to tell Kaden. They were respectful about it, sensing that it was a sensitive issue for me, and they didn't push me or nag me, but I knew how they felt, even if none of them mentioned it in the immediate aftermath of the birth.

We didn't stay in the hospital for very long. I was discharged about five hours later and sent home with a pack of diapers, a doughnut pillow and a box of what appeared to be gigantic maxi pads. The doughnut pillow made me laugh at first, but Alisha gave me a look.

"You won't be laughing later," she said, "believe me."

I named my son Henry after my mother, Henrietta. If he had been a girl, Henrietta it would have been. There was never any doubt in my mind. Actually, I named him Henry Kaden, but I didn't mention his second name to my family, not right away, anyway, when my body and mind were still reeling from what I'd just been through, surfing waves of hormones I seemed to be in no control of.

And everyone was in love with Henry - not least his besotted, emotional mother. I have never been more prone to bursting into tears than I was during those first few weeks after his arrival. One time it was a diaper commercial on TV, another time the image of Rosa reaching into his bassinet and whispering a nursery rhyme that Ray and Alisha sang to her at bedtime.

The office hired a temporary replacement for three months - something they didn't have to do - and those three months went by in a blur of sleepless nights, tears (from Henry and from me) and love so fierce and pure it changed who I was. I've always been proud of my toughness, maybe stupidly so, but the arrival of Henry with his long eyelashes and his fat cheeks brought a fragility to me and the world that terrified me. Everything suddenly seemed so fraught, so precious. My mother caught me one evening in the kitchen, sobbing.

"Tash," she whispered, holding my head against her bosom, "now you know."

"Now I know what?" I asked, crying even harder at the thought that one day, I wouldn't have my mother there to hold me against her chest and make it seem like everything was going to be OK.

"Now you know what it is to love someone so much it breaks you in two."

And that's exactly what it was. Henry didn't just break me two, he smashed me into pieces, and then the love I had for him put me back together again, still me but sensitive now to all the dangers lurking in the world, more aware of how special my family and our interconnected bonds truly were.

I brought my son into the office when he was ten weeks old and the fear that he was going to catch some dread disease if I stepped outside of the house with him for even a second had dissipated - mostly. The women passed him around, cooing and squealing with delight when he offered up on of his wide, dimpled smiles. The men did their thing, too, commenting on how strong he looked, joking that they were going to have to be nicer to me now because Henry was clearly going to be able to beat them all up by the time he was two.

A couple of weeks after that, I went back to work. Alisha and Ray had taken on extra duties at their own jobs during the three months I had off and I knew I couldn't ask for any more. They pulled Rosa out of daycare and Alisha stayed home during the days to look after both her own daughter and my son. I split night duties with CeeCee when Alisha worked the night shift at her job. It was incredibly hard, but it was only temporary. When Henry was six months old he would go to the same daycare as Rosa and I would figure out my final schedule at work when the time came.