She’s here, she’s here, my little niece is here! My rockstar sister brought her into the world on Saturday morning, and she has spent the last five days being perfect. Please, just look at this face.

Her name is Fiona Catherine, and I’m allowed to call her Fee, but not Fifi.

So, naturally…

“Come, Fifi,” I say in an important voice, whenever anyone offers to put her on my lap. As if we are off to the country club to meet her friends Binky and Peroxide. As if we are having tea with the Queen.

“Fifi makes her sound like a dog,” my sister complains. But this is not a good argument for me, because my own daughter’s nickname is Scout, and although we were thinking Scout Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, it turns out to be a very doggy kind of name.

The week after Scarlett was born, my grandmother called to tell me that not one, but two sitcoms she had watched that night featured dogs named Scout. She cackled into the phone and hung up. At least that’s how I remember it.

But I can tell that Fiona doesn’t care what I call her. When I kiss her, she tries to eat my face. Her skin feels like flower petals, and she does not like it when you pick her nose. Luckily for her, it took most of my energy and dexterity to pick it that one time, so it probably won’t be a regular occurrence.

This new baby looks so much like Scarlett to me. She is delicate and dark, the way Scarlett was before she suddenly became a blond toddler. I’ve been flipping through old photo albums to compare the two, how pictures of them yawning look the same, how their little sweet faces look up at the camera, even though they don’t know what it is or where they are. I can’t hold a baby in my arms anymore, but there is proof that I once did. And I can still remember what it felt like.

There are nine steps from the street to Fiona’s door, so she is kind of like Rapunzel. At least that’s the way it seems to an ALS patient who can’t walk or climb stairs. I love my sister’s home, but I don’t go there much anymore. The arrival of Fiona changed that.

Liz had the foresight to suggest that we bring my travel wheelchair into her house and just leave it there for all of my Fiona viewing needs. Rob carried me up the stairs on Saturday morning to meet my niece for the first time. That evening, he carried me back up the stairs so that we could have dinner with the baby, because our family doesn’t understand concepts like privacy and recuperation. Or, more accurately, we understand them. We just don’t care. We smell a baby, and we’re coming over.

This is probably why my darling nephew Jack has felt it necessary to remind us who the baby truly belongs to.

“That’s ours,” he told my mother sternly, when he felt she had been holding Fiona for long enough.

On Monday, Rob started his first day at a new job, so when my sister texted to invite me over, I became someone else’s heavy lifting. Specifically, my brother-in-law, also named Rob. I felt guiltier about that than about asking my own husband to carry me up the stairs, because this guy is the new dad. What if I break him?

Plus, I felt compelled to say to him, “Try not to expose me, I’m not wearing underwear,” which is something that no one wants to hear from their sister-in-law at any point, ever. But he made it seem easy, carefully settling me into my chair like it was nothing.

I rolled into the living room, jutting my chin toward my niece, and said “Come Fifi.” She was placed in a Boppy in my lap, and we held hands.

Share this post on your social platform