My oldest child turns 40 this week. I haven’t heard how she’ll celebrate, but I’ll be looking back on the day she was born like I’m watching it on a movie screen. Her father and I, young and fresh-faced, had moved from a tiny one-bedroom apartment to a new home just the day before.
     Two bedrooms on the first floor of a duplex in south Minneapolis, the rent was a lot—100 dollars—but I wanted my baby to have her own room with a new crib and the chest of drawers my mother had saved from my own childhood. We’d painted the dresser, adding wooden alphabet blocks for drawer pulls.
     Dark gray stucco with a big front porch, the house was across the street from a school and close to my mother’s. My husband’s high school buddies helped us move. When we walked into the new place and saw it without any furniture, everyone groaned. "No wonder they’d had the drapes closed when we looked at it," my husband said. "The walls are filthy."
     "We’ll paint," I said. "And steam clean the carpet."
     "You’d better look at this," someone said. The walls of the closet were covered in the same wallpaper as the bedroom. Pink hydrangeas on a once-tan background seemed to have wilted and were coated with greasy dust. A gold lamp hanging inside was slick with grime. The bulb was missing. It took all afternoon to get the closet clean enough to hang our clothes on the rods. It’s no wonder I started having pains during the night.
     We hadn’t been able to get any room completely finished before we went to bed because we’d spent so much time scrubbing walls and cleaning filthy woodwork. We even tore down the grungy window shades and dragged them to the trash, then stood on the radiators to hang sheets to give us privacy.
     I scoured the tub and cleaned the kitchen sink so I could take a bath and wash my hair, holding my breath with each contraction.
     After my bath, I curled my hair and put on my good maternity dress, then waited in the dark until the sun came up. I woke up my husband and told him he should get ready because we needed to leave for the hospital. "Wear something nice so we don’t look like a couple of kids who don’t know what we’re doing," I said.
     Husbands weren’t allowed in the delivery room then, so we said good-bye in the hallway. Later, when they wheeled me back, he was waiting just outside the door.
     "Did you see her? Isn’t she beautiful?" I asked. He only nodded; his eyes were watery.
     He’d been busy himself, dropping coins into the pay phone, calling family and friends. He walked alongside as the orderly wheeled me to my room. I had so much to tell him but never got a chance because everyone we knew was waiting for the new daddy to take them to the nursery to see our baby girl.
     It would be awhile before she would crawl around on the floor, but I wanted to tell him we should buy new carpet for her room, a color that would match new ruffled curtains. Her nursery would need to be painted, too.
     I didn’t know where we’d get the money, but now that I’d seen her precious little face and heard her cry, I wanted her world to be as perfect as possible.
     Forty years later, it’s still my hope.