Candy Shue

            In the Land of Second Chances

            Gillian came into the world a month early--insisting on being born in the wee morning hours of Halloween, instead of during Thanksgiving vacation, her official due date.  Some of the nurses were already wandering around the hospital corridors in their costumes, so I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw Raggedy Anne and a tie-dyed Hippie passing by my room as I tried to ride out a wave of crowning contractions that doubled me over and had me gasping in a very un-Lamaze-like way. 

            She came out red-faced and fighting mad.  Maybe there were ill winds--or ghosts and witches in the air.  Whatever it was, Gillian chomped down so hard on the delivering doctor’s finger that he yelled, “Ow!  She bit me!” in a loudly shocked voiced.  How could a newborn gum a full-grown guy so hard?--she didn’t even have any teeth, for god’s sake!  And what was the doctor doing with his finger in my daughter’s mouth, anyway?

            My sister-in-law the Astrologer informed us that in addition to being a Halloween Witch, Gillian was also a Double Scorpio, a two-fold-whammy fire sign.  And my parents, as proud Chinese grandparents, were ecstatic that Gillian was not only born in 2000, The Year of the Dragon, she was born in the Year of The Golden Dragon, a very auspicious and special event that only occurred once every 144 years.  Apparently, we had hit a tri-fecta of cultural good omens.

            Whatever the reason--the Greek stars or the Chinese ones--in her first hours on the planet, Gillian would stop breathing, turn blue, and be rushed into the Newborn Intensive Care Unit, where the doctors festooned her with electronics that monitored her heart rate, temperature, and blood oxygen levels.  Allie, coming in to meet the new family member, took one look at all the tubes and wires coming out of her younger sister’s head and hands and dubbed her “The Octopus Baby, “ which made the nurses laugh and laugh.  At a whopping 5 pounds, 6 ounces, Gillian was full-term in their eyes; they had much preemie-er babies to worry about.

            My mother had always said that bad luck came in threes, but she usually only brought this up after seeing that some old movie star had died, so I thought it only applied to celebrities.  Gillian was colicky, sure, but who wouldn’t be after a bumpy beginning like that?  Ok, so her cry was as piercing as a baby pterodactyl’s and it made my husband want to escape to the other side of the house, but that’s what earplugs were made for, right?  Yes, she liked being up at 2am and asleep at 10am, which was highly inconvenient.  And sometimes she scared the bejesus out of me at night when I would go into her room to find her sitting up in her crib, giving me her creepy Cabbage Patch Baby stare--all bald head and huge dark unblinking eyes.  “Look,” my sister crowed, taking a ghastly picture of Gillian sitting ET-like amid a sofa full of hairless, cast-off dolls that even my nieces refused to play with anymore, “Gillian has found her people!”