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Mitchell Miller
Dr. David R DiSarro
ENG 101-OL03
30 January 2014
My Little Homey
When researching the word “homey” (Merriam-Webster, 2014) it was interesting to find the definition in Webster’s dictionary as “homeboy” (Merriam-Webster, 2014). It was more interesting to read the example sentence for “homey”: “The fatal shooting of a fellow homey was just the wake-up call he needed to get out of the drug trade” (Merriam-Webster, 2014). This very negative connotation isn’t what I had in mind when I gave the nick name “Little Homey” to my first born daughter. I grew up in North Philly where the word “homey” was synonymous with friend, mentor, and parental figure.
Aaliyah Marie Miller was born January 27 th
2007 on a clear, cold night in Red Bank,
New Jersey at the Riverview Medical Center. After only twenty six hours of labor, two epidurals and some of the most graphic and scarring memories I have, my 9 pound 6 ounce baby girl was born at about 10:30 at night. I say about 10:30 because after the umbilical cord snapped as the interning physician tried to remove it from around her neck, blood shot everywhere leaving the smell of iron in the room. The senior physician and midwife moved in, hip-checking the less experienced doctor out of the way, and the gangbusters also known as the ICU (intensive care unit) rolled in and rolled out like the tide with the unflinching infant. With all that commotion, I cannot be sure of Aaliyah’s exact time of birth.

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The first words from the ICU doctors were, “Baby is going to have a rough night”. So there I was six or seven hours after my daughter’s birth and I hadn’t even gotten a good look at her face. The only glance that I got was of a pale, gangly, baby-like creature covered in blood and slime, similar to the hatching scene from an Aliens movie. With about a dozen relatives going crazy in the waiting room something had to give. Finally! One of the ICU nurses came out and asked “who is here for A-lie-ya!” Even with the pronunciation wrong, we knew they were talking about us. Her mother and I both raised our hands. The RN escorted us back to the wash up room and began to demonstrate the process necessary to enter the infant ICU. As I scrubbed my hand with the hermetically sealed scrub brush and soap the RN started a timer on the sink. A full three minutes of scrubbing was required in order to get into the unit. The RN then handed us two white doctor’s masks. “A-lie-ya is right this way.”
The first real look I got at Aaliyah was that of The Matrix when “Neo” chose the blue pill and was reborn. She had cables and tubes everywhere. A monitor cable was attached to her toe.
She had a blood transfusion machine attached to her umbilical nub. There was an I.V. attached to her forehead. Apparently the most developed veins in newborns are in their foreheads. The I.V. was for antibiotics; the split seconds that the umbilical cord was unclamped meant there was a possibility of infection. There were also a few stick-on vital monitors attached to her chest and head.
Once I got past all of that, there was a beautiful baby girl snoozing away. I remember thinking, “if she can sleep with all that on her, she should be able to sleep though anything.” She had jet black hair under a not so tiny pink bonnet. I could tell that most babies that visited the
ICU were preemies. The clear plastic containers with blankets that the hospital used for the children’s beds didn’t really suit Aaliyah at all. She had been measured at 23 inches and if she

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She now had some color in her face and resembled a cup of French vanilla cappuccino with extra cream. Her feet, like her head, seemed enormous for her size. Her super soft skin and baby fat made touching her feel like squeezing together marshmallows.
I asked the nurse if I could pick her up and she explained that it would not be possible until the blood transfusion was complete in another 10 – 12 hours. All we could do was watch!
Unlike the first ICU doctor, the RN assured us that she would be ok. The blood transfusion was because newborns cannot afford to lose the slightest amount of blood, and the antibiotics were strictly a precaution. This did however mean that we would not be able to take Aaliyah home for
10 days.
The next day we showed up almost exactly 12 hours from our last visit. Today would be the day that I finally got to hold Aaliyah and get to look into her eyes, and it would be the first time she got to see her dad. After scrubbing the skin from my flesh I rushed over to hold my baby. Disappointment set in immediately. I don’t know why I thought she would be cable free for me to snatch up, but she wasn’t. The transfusion cable was gone but the rest remained. “Can we hold her now?” I asked the current servicing RN. “Yes” she replied “but I’ll have to help you”. She pulled over a rocking chair and gently lifted the baby from the holder and placed her in my arms with care not to tug on any cables. “I wish I would have known you were coming, I just fed her” the RN stated. “Sorry I missed that”, I replied. “She’s a big one; she sucked down the whole 2 ounces”. As I rocked Aaliyah for the first time, I could feel her heart beating. The rapid beat reminded me of a cat’s fast paced heartbeat. Evil I know, but I did everything in my power to try and wake Aaliyah so that I could stare into her eyes. Nothing worked! We spent an hour there holding and caressing her and her peepers stayed shut tightly.

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On January 30 th
it finally happened, I arrived to the ICU 20 minutes before Aaliyah’s scheduled feeding time. The same RN from the previous day was there. She handed me the warm bottle and placed Aaliyah in my arms. I rubbed the bottle slightly on her lips and she sprang into action. At first her eyes stayed shut, but then they exploded open! She scanned my face; I could see the curiosity in her eyes. It was that of a kid on Christmas day. “I’m your daddy,” I repeated over and over again. After about three minutes she finished the bottle. I sat it down and took my pointer finger and slipped it into her tightly grasped fingers. She clinched onto my finger with all her might. The next 20 minutes we spent examining and getting to know each other.
I believe that something changed in me that day. I went from a somewhat selfish and selfabsorbed nobody to a father! I knew then that I would have to change my thinking. I would have to plan and include this person in a life that was previously about one person. Everything would have to be “us” now, not “I”. I would have to put her before my own personal agenda. I would have to be there for her no matter what. And that’s exactly what I’ve done! Today is exactly 7 years from that day and my bond with Aaliyah is as strong as ever. It’s been a joy to watch her grow, she makes me a better person, and I love my “little homey”.

Works Cited
Merriam-Webster. (2014). Homey . Retrieved January 30, 2014, from www.merriamwebster.com: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homey
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