He read a poem about
seeing the baby in the
womb via ultrasound. He

didn’t have that vantage
point when his two were
growing in the womb. The

poet used expressive lang-
uage to describe the baby —
a shrimp in her mother’s

sea, a comma punctuating,
a star for a heart. What
he saw was a baby flipped

onto his mother’s lap: “Oh
my, it’s a boy,” when he had
been expecting a girl.

Surprise. He just got a warm,
loving e-mail from that man-
child. And then, of all things,

with the second, he wasn’t al-
lowed to see the birth, but he
caught a glimpse of her and

heard her screaming down the
hall into the nursery. “It’s
a girl and she looks just like

your mother. It’s little Alice,”
he said to his wife. She is
now a beautiful, quiet artist

just like her deceased mother
used to be. Surprise. Every
day, they surprise him. He

never saw them in the womb,
but every day he placed his
ear on his wife’s stomach

and heard the heart and
felt the foot’s kick and saw
stars that turned to tears.