Chapter 35

Chicago

January 2015

The day I found out I was pregnant, I rushed out to Target and bought a gender-neutral onesie that said “I love my daddy.” That evening, when Dave got home from work, I presented him with the gift bag.

“A surprise for you,” I said, trying to temper my grin as I gave him the package.

Dave reached into the tissue paper and pulled out the onesie, along with the stick that presented the positive test results—yes, the same stick on which I had peed, but he’s a doctor; he’s not squeamish about bodily fluids.

“Really?” He looked up at me, incredulous.

“Really.” I nodded. “We’re going to have a baby.”

Dave was thrilled—and completely surprised. He admitted that when he had first seen the baby outfit, for a brief moment, he had assumed out of habit it was a dog outfit for Penny. He had not even thought it possible that I’d know I was pregnant so soon.

The day after my father’s presidential announcement, I flew back to Chicago for our twenty-week obstetrician appointment. That morning we had a forty-five-minute transabdominal ultrasound in which we gleaned a thorough view of our healthy baby. We saw everything from the length of the leg bones to the outlines of the ten tiny fingers. It was also during that appointment that our doctor determined the baby’s gender, but we opted not to be told that day. Instead, the technician in our doctor’s office called a family member with the results. This family member then went and picked up a piñata, filled with candy. When Dave and I gathered with family members that weekend, we hit the piñata and pink candy sprayed all over the room. We could not have been more thrilled to discover that we were having a girl.

Now, a moment of important context here: Dave is the youngest of six boys. Dave likes sports. A lot. Dave had planned to raise a pack of boys, all of them little left-handed athletes whom he would coach in baseball, lacrosse, basketball, football, and anything else they found time to play.

In spite of this conviction of his—or perhaps precisely because of this conviction of his—I had come to believe that Dave was destined to have a brood of baby girls. I saw him sitting patiently while one little daughter smeared lipstick across his cheeks and another sprinkled his hair with brightly colored barrettes. I knew my mother-in-law, the mother of all boys, also really wanted to add a baby girl to the ranks of Levys (she confessed after the fact that she’d worn a blue shirt the day of the piñata because she was mentally preparing herself to welcome yet another boy).

“When I first saw that pink candy, I immediately felt this protective instinct,” Dave told me. “I’ve always known very little about women, not having had sisters. It was funny to me to be having a little girl—it was a big growing experience because it dawned on me that I would be having a little girl whom I would introduce to the world. I would teach her, but I would learn about little girls in the process.”

That night, Dave read a bedtime story to our two-year-old niece, Annabel. He went over the images on the pages with her, delighting in her pronunciation of the words “banana” and “yellow.” I could just see a change in him, and my sister-in-law Erin, Annabel’s mom, pulled me aside to tell me what a wonderful dad Dave was going to be.

What I remember from those weeks was just how excited we were. Just how lucky we felt.