‘She looks like Popeye.’
That was my very first thought upon seeing Katherine, my newborn baby girl. Sure, in the anecdotes to friends and family that followed, I would slide “After I had been assured by the doctor that she was fine, my next thought was…” in there ahead of it, because who wants to reveal his first thought on the birth of his first child was a comparison to a 1930s cartoon character (and not even Swee’pea, at that)? But at best, it was a tie—an interior monologue photo finish of sorts. And as soon as I had been assured that the squinty eye and drooping lip on the left side of my daughter’s face were temporary, my very next thought was, ‘All she needs is a little pipe, a little sailor’s hat, maybe an anchor tattoo on her forearm…’
Our little Popeye impersonator had arrived two weeks’ later than scheduled. But once she decided to come, it seemed, at least initially, like she was determined to make the transition from fetus to “Awww…” a quick one. Within a few minutes of the first contraction, we had abandoned our plans for a leisurely pre-admission walk in the park. (The film we watched in our babies-for-beginners class made it look so appealing!) Within a few hours, Sarah was medicated, dilated and primed for delivery. Then I jinxed things by telling our gathered family that it could happen in the next 15-30 minutes. Though fully dilated and a fetal noggin’ mere inches from the light, progress just stopped. (Advice to fathers-to-be: Do not joke about “going to 11” when your wife reaches 10 centimeters. Your newborn will need a father.) Sarah did all she could for the next four hours, but Katherine had apparently decided she liked her snug efficiency more than the pink-walled room of her own we had waiting for her back home.
Eventually, with Sarah exhausted by Katherine’s staunch insistence on keeping the “in” in “in utero,” our midwife brought in the on-call physician who in turn sized things up and brought out… salad tongs.
Now, I’m no stranger to forceps—I’ve eaten at Olive Garden. And the same class that fed our delusion that we’d have hours to spend in quiet contemplation of the miracle underway also covered forceps as a means of recalcitrant baby delivery. But though my wife and I had discussed at length natural versus epidural, as well as vaginal versus C-section, we hadn’t spent any time on tongs. In my mind, forceps as a baby-grappling option occupied the same abandoned hall in the Museum of “Get this baby OUT!” as vacuum extraction (also still used, it turns out).
Though they worked, it turns out that forceps come with their own set of potential complications. In the case of Katherine, their use led to a compressed facial nerve, which in turn led to a passing bout of Bell’s Palsy and, from there, voila!—Katherine’s initial resemblance to a certain sailor man.
Fortunately, in the days that followed her eye soon lost its perma-squint, her lip its droop. But the forceps had left at least one lasting legacy that night in the delivery room. It gave my new daughter her first nickname—“Spinach.”
As I stood there watching Katherine squiggle under a heat lamp as she endured medical attention, and later, as I held her in my arms, a verse from Popeye’s theme song kept playing over and over in my head (no doubt lodged there along with his signature chuckle by the rogue first impression):
I’m strong to the finish, ’cause I eats me spinach.
Our baby daughter may have come into the world looking like Popeye, but in truth, she was the spinach. And “strong to the finish”? That was my job, now. There would be plenty of Blutos of time and circumstance, of impatience and distraction, but just as Popeye only needed to reach for that can of spinach whenever things got especially tough, I held in my hands the only thing I’d need to refresh my resolve, to harden my determination, to stay strong to the finish, whatever that finish might be.
“Spinach.” I’m pretty sure she won’t like the nickname much, especially when she gets older. But it’ll mean the world to me.