Following Ezra Read Free Page B

woman, gather her advice, follow it, using the right technique to get him engaged with other kids and his teachers, and solve the Ezra problem.
     
     
    A few days later, in an ordinary office building on a busy street, we visit Ruth. She is an angular woman, with a no-nonsense, grandmotherly style. Though the seating is more comfortable than in Karen’s classroom—Shawn and I share a plush maroon love seat—I still feel anxious, off balance.
    Ruth begins by taking a case history.
    “Tell me about your pregnancy with Ezra,” she says with a slight smile.
    It began when we were spending a year—the third of six years of Shawn’s rabbinical studies—in Jerusalem. We were leasing a small walk-up apartment in a pale stone building on a quiet, one-block side street called Tel Chai—Hebrew for “hill of life.”
    For me, it was a year of changed plans. I arrived with vague notions of pursuing my work as a freelance journalist, writing newspaper and magazine features about Israel. Instead I mostly cared for Ami, who was just over three months old when we arrived. While Shawn studied Talmud and Jewish law, I maneuvered the black fold-up stroller through the city’s labyrinthine streets and the narrow passageways of the openair produce markets, simultaneously becoming intimately acquainted with the ancient city and my infant son as I changed diapers in bus shelters and cafés.
    We knew we wanted more children—maybe three or four more—and by the time we moved the next July to New York—where Shawn would complete her rabbinic studies and I landed a job writing for a weekly magazine—Shawn was into her second trimester.
    Before long, we met in Manhattan’s east seventies for a late-morning appointment with an ultrasound technician.
    “You need to tell me if you want to know —or not,” the young woman said as she squeezed bluish goop onto Shawn’s belly and pushed some buttons on the sonogram machine.
    We had talked about whether we wanted to learn the gender. We did, each of us for a different reason, and neither of us because we wanted to know whether the nursery should be painted blue or pink. For Shawn it was about control: Pregnancy was so wrought with uncertainty that she wanted the comfort of knowing something for sure. For me it was the journalist’s instinct: If there was vital information available, I wanted to have it.
    As the woman traced Shawn’s belly with the sonogram’s wand, we looked at the small monitor, trying to make sense of the blurry shapes appearing on the tiny screen. “There’s the spine . . . the kidneys. You can see the little heart beating,” she said. To me it looked more like bad video from one of the Apollo missions.
    “Everything looks good and healthy,” she said. “What’s your older child—boy or girl?”
    “A boy,” we said in unison.
    “Looks like he’s going to have a brother.”
    Shawn and I smiled at each other, half surprised, half amused. Two boys.
    And then something happened I couldn’t explain. I decided on our son’s name. In that moment, I simply knew. As long as Shawn and I had been together, I had been the indecisive partner, the one who labored over even the simplest choices—restaurants, birthday gifts, which movie to rent—and then second-guessed myself; her style was to make snap decisions (usually wisely) and never look back. We had chosen Ami’s name, for instance, after collaborating on a list of criteria and then consulting a stack of books. (His full name, Amiel, was a combination of the Hebrew words for “my people” and God.) But as soon as the technician wiped the goop off Shawn’s belly and left us, I told my wife our fetus’s name.
    “I think he’s going to be Ezra,” I told her. Hebrew for “help . ” It was not a name we had discussed. But I knew that was it.
    Shawn mulled it over. “You think ?”
    “I think,” I said.

    “Anything unusual about your delivery?” Ruth asks.
    In fact, it was traumatic. Ami had been