Normal.
I have to admit that most of my life I have been against being normal. I don't like popular music. Most of the best-selling movies stink. And there is not one person on the annual list of most intriguing people that interests me at all.
But, now I am going to be a parent and the word "normal" has a completely new meaning.
I used to think it was a cop-out when I would ask a prospective parent if they wanted a boy or a girl and the response would always be: "I don't really care. I just hope it's normal and healthy."
Now that I am on the receiving end of that question, I feel the same way.
I don't wish for superior intelligence or x-ray vision, I just want him to be normal. Like all parents, I fear that my son won't have five fingers or five toes or will have three arms or whatever.
Those nine months seem like the longest of all time when you have those things to be worried about. The doctors explain to you that most kids are born without any problems, but that does nothing to cure the worried mind.
To try to calm down these parents, medical folks have invented all these different types of tests to make sure all the kid's chromosomes and other long words are normal.
My wife and I decided we should take only the most basic test - a blood test to check for a few problems.
Before the test, we were told that because of my wife's age, there was a 220 to 1 chance that our baby would have some type of problem. If someone had told us that we had a 220 to 1 chance of being hit by a car while crossing the street, we'd feel pretty safe.
But adult odds and baby odds are totally different. If cops catch only one speeder out of 100, we feel pretty safe putting the old petal down. But if one out of 100 babies are hurt because of some newfangled toy, there is no way our kid is going near it.
Needless to say, we didn't feel all that confident with 220 to 1 odds. We wanted more specific information. It's not that we'd feel any less paranoid if the odds were 2 trillion to 1, but at least we were doing something about it.
We took the test and the results came back:
10 to 1.
All of the sudden, our paranoid fears were reality. Our hopes of having a normal child were gone. It was amazing how the thought of our child not being normal hit me. I was breathless and frozen.
Neither my wife nor I realized how much we already loved that lump in her belly until that moment. We held each other - silently praying for those numbers to change.
Ten percent. That may seem like a pretty low figure, but it sounded almost insurmountable to us.
Through my job as a newspaper reporter, I have met a lot of parents of kids who aren't "normal." I thought about my wife and I joining their ranks and I was terrified. Those people all had an inner strength - fortitude - that I was not sure I had.
They had patience and understanding. Before this incident, my biggest fear was toilet training. I didn't have any concept of caring for a kid that was anything other than normal. It was incomprehensible to me.
Our doctor tried to tell us that we still had a 90 percent chance of a normal child. We were focused on the other 10 percent.
Because of that fear of not knowing for sure, our doctor set up another test for two days later. Forty-eight hours.
Both nights were sleepless. My wife and I tried to keep our days busy to keep our minds from wandering back to that 10 percent, but it didn't work.
Finally, the day came. The test we needed required an ultrasound first and the ultrasound technician could tell we were tense.
She put the wand up to my wife's belly and the image of our baby filled the screen. The first thing the technician said was, "This baby's not as old as you think it is." Apparently our original due date was 30 days too early.
We didn't find out for a few tense moments later what that meant. Apparently the odds of a problem in the test are figured based on the due date. Our doctor quickly refigured the results and we found out the odds of a problem were 437 to 1.
The relief on our faces was obvious as the ultrasound technician said, "That's just the first of a million scares you'll have. Welcome to parenthood."
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