The Compleat And Actual Adventures of Marcella White Campbell

Ten years ago last Tuesday, we went from a family of two to a family of three.

Everyone says that when you have a baby, your life is changed forever. What struck me, when our tiny, spindly little person arrived, was how oddly the same everything was. Most of my tiny, non-nuclear family was in the room when she was born. There were four of us: my mother, my sister, my husband and myself. (My grandfather, a father of six, has yet to attend a birth.) There was a lot of screaming and some gentle encouragement.

And then, abruptly, there was another person. We were all the same, but it was as if we had all naturally shifted over and made room on the metaphorical couch. I held the baby, with her thick, damp, straight black hair, and my husband sang Happy Birthday, because it was.

We strapped her new carseat into the back of our 1984 Cadillac Coupe de Ville and drove, so slowly, back to our cold Cole Valley flat. The flat had no central heat, so we barricaded ourselves in the bedroom with a space heater, a warm, dark December place where she cried and we cried and everything smelled and she was such a beautiful baby, golden with jaundice and so small. I could not bear to put her in the big, cold crib so I lay her down on the bed between me and the wall, with pillows on both sides of her, listening for the barely audible breaths that meant everything was okay.

Nothing else seemed okay, for a long while of endless winter nights. We fed her, we changed her, rocked her, thousands of times, and, by the time spring came, we had built our lives around her. We had crafted our brand-new marriage to her design. She was our family. And, yet, she was the one always changing, from hour to hour, laughing and then running, and now she is basically flying.

She is ten. Ten! And there are four of us, now, but that is another story, because this was a story about how two became the magic number three.

Happy (belated) birthday to a Ninja Princess/Skateboarder/Basketball Player/Mathematician/Firstborn!