White Plains Hospital, Star Diner, and the Son Who Made Me Cry

On the day my middle child was born, I didn't cry. I woke up at three in the morning, looked over at my pained wife, waited for my parents to come watch my oldest, kissed my oldest, then took my wife to White Plains Hospital across from Star Diner in White Plains, New York. The nurse received us, the doctor talked to my wife, and said how dilated she was. We were put in a room with a machine where I watched a monitor that tracked her contractions. It looked like a bad day on Wall Street. After a while, my wife told me the contractions were getting worse. There was pushing, there was waiting, and there was more pushing. When my middle child came out, he was quiet, beautiful, and then they poked him a bunch on a table, and he was still quiet (not at all like on the television). My wife fell asleep, and they took him to  the NICU for a week. I sat in a chair and watched television in that NICU. I watched many bad movies and saw commercials for a show called Paw Patrol. After that week, the doctor said we could bring him home. 

I didn't cry when he came home. 

On my middle child's birthday this year, I didn't cry. I woke him up at six in the morning like I always do. That's a lie, and I don't want to lie to my readers. So... he woke me up at six in the morning like he always does. He was wearing Paw Patrol pajamas. His arms wrapped around my back and his head fell into the crook of my neck. That experience, that moment,  has been, for as long as I've been getting him from his crib and bringing him into our bed, one of my favorite seconds of the day every day. And that morning, as he lay in between me and my sleeping wife, asking for a bottle of milk, telling me to put on an alarm on so that I might open my eyes and get out of bed faster. My child turned to me and without prompting said, "I love you." My insides felt like a truck had run through me. "Don't go to work, Daddy." But I had to go. I got him his 1% milk. Made him an avocado toast breakfast. Then went to work on his birthday, where I followed his day in the pictures his preschool teachers posted to the parent portal. 

I didn't cry on my middle child's birthday.

The other day, I was walking in downtown White Plains, looking at possible apartments for my brother, and I stopped in front of the hospital that my middle child was born in. He was next to me, his hand in my hand, his attention on the ambulances going in and out of the emergency drop off area. The sirens and the red lights consumed him. 

"This is where you were born," I said. My son looked from the hospital to me and then back to the hospital. 

"Why you say that?" he asked. 

"Because this is where Daddy got you." 

"I came out of mommy's belly here?" he asked. I nodded that he had. He stared at the hospital as if it held some meaning that he could only get if he looked at it hard enough. "Do they have hamburgers?" Star Diner was behind us. It's neon scrubbed exterior calling to us. I listened to the calls. We found a booth, and as requested, we ordered hamburgers. I sat in that retro seats watching my middle son ignore the hamburger and devour the ketchup that he had squeezed onto the plate. "Is this ketchup?" he asked. 

I didn't cry on the day my child was born, on any of his birthdays, or countless other times. I cried on the day he asked me about ketchup. I guess I just didn't know how many more times he would ask me about simple things like that. When he grew up, when he went off to school, to his first love, to college, to his first day of work, to his first purchase of pajamas for his second child. As the tears fell down my face, he looked at me as if those tears had some deeper meaning. 

"Is Paw Patrol Playing?"