A Triumph of Love

By GEORGE BUTTE, Professor of English

ate’s story begins before Kate. I met her mother, Billie, when I was 45. We fell in love over our first three-hour coffee at Poor Richard’s. Later, when Billie’s 8-year-old son, Reid, came to live with us, I got a second chance to understand myself and the tangled webs of family life. As I came to comprehend the love and tensions among the three of us, I earned a clearer view of my own history. Why had I always chosen relationships in which my partner and I would not or could not make a child? Somehow out of this process came the irrational decision that Billie and I would do that -- make a child.

I still feel that moment of blind submission to our choice. It’s sort of like the moment on the really high diving board, when you lean forward just too far to step back, when you begin to fall and gravity’s hands grab your shoulders, and you tip down toward the water. For me, to jump off the high dive at 47 required looking off into the distance first, to measure in a new way my life story: Would I see this child’s college graduation? Thirtieth birthday? The child’s child? This new life required me to be clearer about my own death.

But then -- after all that mental preparation -- the story didn’t follow the prescribed outline. Instead it became the story of my wife’s courage and stubbornness, seven miscarriages and one major surgery. At the end of the summer of 1997, we were ready to give up. After all the pain and loss, we couldn’t believe any more. Each miscarriage was a death, and the grief took its toll on us. I had turned 50, and wondered what on earth I was doing. (I knew Tony Randall just had another baby at 78, but I wanted to be part of this child’s life, not just a dim memory!) Well, we finally had a pretty good diagnosis of the cause of Billie’s miscarriages, and we decided to try one last time. You know the results.

But Billie’s courage would still be tested, as her pregnancy went through one difficulty after another. Reid and I were tested, too. We knew after the amniocentesis that our baby was a girl. We named her Kate. Already we felt we knew her: how she turned in Billie’s womb, how she sucked her thumb, how she pushed and pushed with her powerful thighs so that Billie ached. When we weren’t sure we could keep her alive, all of us struggled -- Reid, too, because he had become very attached to this tough little spirit. We had learned that in a previous pregnancy the baby had been a little girl, and Billie -- who is more metaphysical than I am -- believed this spirit was trying very hard to be born. We had wonderful doctors, and the perionatologist said every week, every day the pregnancy continued was very important to Kate. So we lived day to day, week to week -- while the medical staff watched Kate’s every move, and Billie drank gallons of water and lived with a permanent IV in her arm and a heparin pump at her waist. For months, taking a shower was a major production for her. And at the end Billie had gestational diabetes and an elevated heart rate (as if she’d just run a couple of miles).

But Billie held on, and Kate held on, and Reid and I and the doctors held on, and Kate was born 32 weeks and 2 days after conception. Although she had four weeks in the hospital (and four weeks of maybe the best care anywhere in the world), there were no medical complications, no deficits, no fevers, no medications: She was a triumph of love, and will, and yes, medical science (sometimes doctors know what they’re doing). I feel that Kate is Kate’s triumph, too: She needed help, but all of us know she is a powerful force on her own, a will and character of great strength and beauty.

From the very first she was stubborn and very strong: She kept fighting the nurses and pulling out her tubes, so that the neo-natal ICU staff nicknamed her Wild Woman.

Kate’s real name is Katharine Grace Butte Ratliff -- lots of names for a little girl. Those names are her link to the past, and I hope a guide to the future. Katharine was Billie’s beloved and strong paternal grandmother, and Grace was my mother’s name -- old-fashioned, beautiful, feminine in a traditional way. So, "Kate" is strong, "Grace" is gentle: Maybe she can be both. She is both a Butte and a Ratliff. When she is old enough, she can figure out how to balance and combine those traditions.

I watch Kate’s face when she is enchanted by the play of light at her window, or when she gazes in complete absorption at her mother’s face, and I know why I made this leap of faith. I feel her strength and hope, however nascent and unself-conscious. Kate is already deeply in the world, and she knows that fundamental secret about the world: It’s so interesting. I’m just beginning to learn the lessons Kate has to teach me.

Our new, blended family of four is beginning another story now. Kate is already changing Billie, Reid and me. And we are becoming characters in her narrative. I can’t wait to see what Kate’s going to make of us in the years to come. What an adventure it will be! What an adventure it already is.

Katharine Grace Butte Ratliff was born to Billie Ratliff and George Butte on April 16, 1998 (on what is thought to be Shakespeare’s birthday). George, who is a professor of English with special interests in the 19th Century British novel, Hitchcock, and film comedy, addressed these remarks to the congregation at All Souls Unitarian Church in Colorado Springs on June 21, 1998. Today (Dec. 1, 1998) seven-month-old Kate is teething and practicing her irregular verbs. She has already sat through her first screening of Citizen Kane.

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