Not an Ice Cream Dad

“Congratulations! Its a girl!”

Even through the haze of exhaustion (she had been in labor for over 24 hours at that point), Amelia heard the doctor’s words. A girl. She had just given birth to a baby girl.

Amelia had looked down in amazement as a tiny baby wrapped in a pink and white blanket was placed into her arms. The little girl’s eyes were wide open, already exploring the world.

Twenty years later, Amelia would get a call from Paris; her daughter, at the top of the Eiffel Tower, all of the city spread out below, and she would think of this moment.

“Mom its so beautiful. Its just like I had hoped it would be.”

When Lacey was six years old she had started a club and invited (more like insisted) her two best friends to join. This in itself was not out of the ordinary, every little girl in Brooklyn had at least one secret club formed at the lunchroom table or underneath the playground slide. Unlike many of those other clubs, whose main purpose was simply to keep other kids (mostly yucky boys) out, Lacey’s club had a theme.

“We are called the Cool Climbers,” she explained the next morning, while Amelia was packing her lunch. “And we are going to climb to the top of every mountain in the world.”

The Cool Climbers started with every structure in the school playground, followed by all the hills in nearby Prospect Park. By June, when first grade had run its course, the club had grown to include 15 members who had dragged their parents to multiple playgrounds across Brooklyn in search of ever cooler climbs.

As is the way with all childhood ideas, Lacey lost interest in the club a few weeks into second grade, and she and her friends moved on to other activities. The Cool Climbers were forgotten, packed away in the back of Amelia’s mind, much like the long outgrown ice skates, and sparkly gymnastics leotards, that lived in the back of the hall closet. There the memory stayed, until one fall evening in Lacey’s junior year, when her daughter was finishing up college applications.

“Oooh I should include that club I started! The Cool Climbers?” Lacey burst out laughing. “Do you remember? In elementary school? God I was so obnoxious. I made everyone compete to see who could climb up the slide the fastest. I can’t believe my friends tolerated this.”

Amelia smiled at the memory. “Yes,” she replied. “You were certainly a force to be reckoned with.”

What Amelia didn’t say was that Lacey could have led her friends anywhere, that Lacey could lead anyone anywhere. That was just who her daughter was, she radiated confidence and charisma like sunshine. Everyone wanted to be like her, to be near her. She had always been this way, even at 6 years old.

Cool Climbers did not make it onto the application, but Lacey got accepted to NYU anyway.

Amelia sighed, her body sinking deeper into the seat cushion. The hospital waiting room was fairly empty, most likely the result of it being a Wednesday morning. She imagined on a weekend it would look quite different, and she was grateful for the space and the silence.

Her gaze went to the couple seated across from her and the man gave her a small smile.

“Your daughter?” he asked.

Amelia nodded.

“We have three girls,” he said. “Eight grandkids. The wait never gets any easier.”

The woman seated next to him said nothing, most likely lost in her own thoughts, her own memories.

Lacey had graduated college a semester early, eager to get it over with and get on with her life. Not that she didn’t enjoy her time at NYU; she socialized as much as anyone and often came home with funny stories of all the interesting people she had met. But she had always seen college as a means to an end, and found students who wasted their time there irritating.

“Why would you spend all of that money and then not go to class? You are literally paying by the hour.”

Amelia thought her daughter had a point, and she certainly appreciated this responsible attitude. To Lacey, a college degree was for getting a job first; education and experiences came second. She had been excited, however, to spend her second semester junior year studying in Paris.

About half an hour later, the man went to go get a cup of coffee. When he had left the waiting room, his wife turned to Amelia with a tired smile.

“Jess’s husband is great. Jess, that’s my oldest. Her husband did all the things, took the classes, went with her to all the appointments.” The woman shook her head. “My youngest didn’t even want her guy in the room with her.”

Amelia nodded politely, unsure what to say.

“But Daniel, he is a really good dad. The kind who goes to all the baseball games and stops at the rest area for snacks.” She grinned. “Jess calls him an ice cream dad.”

“How about your daughter? Is her husband useful? Or is he one of those workaholic ones? You know, the kind who are always too busy to spend time with their kids.”

Amelia thought of the photo that Lacey used to keep by her bed, the one taken underneath the Eiffel Tower at night.

“No,” she replied. “Mikael is not an ice cream dad.”

Lacey had been in Paris for about 3 weeks when she called home with the news that she had met a wonderful man. He was tall, with wild brown hair and dark eyes and spoke fluent English with a thick French accent that Lacey said was “sexy as hell.” When Amelia asked where they had met, her daughter had laughed.

“In a cafe of course. He was drinking coffee and reading poetry just like some old French movie. He is totally a cliche!”

Amelia could hear the excitement in her daughter’s voice.

“That’s great, honey,” she replied. “I’m really happy for you. Just don’t forget about your classes.”

Lacey signed. “Obviously. He’s just a guy, mom. Its not that serious.”

He wasn’t just a guy, and it did become pretty serious, although to her credit Lacey never missed a single class. Her and Mikael stayed together through her entire semester abroad, and then attempted another 6 months long distance. When they finally broke up a few weeks before graduation, a tearful Lacey proclaimed that he was her first love and, of course, that they would “always have Paris.”

Life went on. Lacey finished college and went on to accept a position at the company where she had been a summer intern. She got an apartment on the Lower East Side with an old roommate. There was Ikea furniture, and later on, a small dog named Jaques. Her daughter was happy, successful, and therefore Amelia was happy too.

And then, about a year and a half into this adult life, Lacey asked Amelia to meet her at a local diner for coffee. While cradling a warm mug in both hands, her daughter had looked across the shiny blue tabletop and told her mother that she was pregnant.

“It was a one night stand?” The woman in the waiting room raised her eyebrows, a small frown on her lips.

Amelia nodded, although she supposed that wasn’t quite true. Was it still a one night stand if the guy in question was your first love?

“Does he know about the baby?”

It occurred to Amelia then that this woman was in fact, a total stranger, that they would most likely never see each other again after today. That it did not matter at all what this woman thought of her, or of Lacey. That the only thing that really mattered in the end was that somewhere beyond the double doors of the hospital delivery room, her only daughter was about to give birth.

“No,” she lied. “He doesn’t know.”

Mikael had only been in town for one weekend. Lacey had met up with her ex at a brightly lit and noisy bar on the Upper East Side. It was the kind of place with a pool table and darts and a jukebox, the kind of place where deep conversation was impossible. She figured she would have one drink, a simple glass of white wine, and some polite small talk about how each of their lives was going. But one drink turned into three, and one bar turned into two, and the rest, as the saying goes, was history.

Mikael always had been a bit of a cliche.

The surprise was not the conversation, which went far beyond small talk, or the sex, which was fiery and frantic, with items of clothing thrown all across his hotel room.

No, the surprise had been when Lacey decided that she wanted to have the baby.

In typical Lacey fashion, she desired and expected nothing from Mikael, and she told him as much. He could visit his child if he chose to, but she knew his life was in Paris and she did not need or want that to change.

“I have a great job”, Lacey explained .“I have a nice apartment.”

Her daughter shrugged then and took another long sip of her coffee.

“I mean I was going to become a mom eventually right? Why not now?”

There had been plenty of things Amelia could have said in response. That being a mom meant giving up a piece of your heart, and then watching as your heart went off to kindergarten, climbed the highest structure in the playground, rode the subway to high school alone, moved boxes into a college dorm room, went off to Paris. She could have said that the only thing scarier than being a mom, was being a mom alone. On this last topic, Amelia could have written a novel.

But Amelia didn’t say any of those things. Because beyond all of that, the truth was that being a mother was the part of her life that had mattered the most. Sometimes, when she was locking the door to her empty Brooklyn apartment at night, she thought it was the only part that had mattered at all.

So instead she simply smiled at her daughter and asked, “What do you need from me?”

“Mrs Langly?”

Amelia blinked at the doctor, who seemed to have suddenly appeared right in front of her, as if he were one of those wizards in all the Harry Potter stories. Lacey had really loved those books.

“Are you Mrs. Langly? Lacey’s mother?”

She briefly considered correcting him, like she did everyone else who assigned her the title of a married woman. But instead she just nodded.

“Yes, that’s me. Lacey’s mother.”

The doctor grinned at her then, a big, beautiful smile that reached all the way to his eyes.

“Congratulations! Its a girl!"