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Amy Santiago sat on the hospital bed she'd been confined to, holding her own child in her arms. With her husband often getting himself in dangerous or frankly stupid situations, she was usually on the caregiver end of things. She wasn't used to being on the receiving end of medical treatment, but she was being allowed home with her newborn son after two days together in the hospital. The new mom had to admit that she'd been feeling strange since the birth of her child. Even though she'd been looking forward to it immensely, she'd always imagined it to be different.
The tiny boy was only two days old, and Amy had never felt as at a loss with herself as she did now. She found it strange to think that this was the child she had carried for eight and a half months, the child that her and Jake had tried so hard for. The child that was currently snoozing in her arms. Baby boy for now as they hadn't named the baby yet. In her current state she couldn't think of one suitable name.
Most of the time, the baby stared back at the entranced woman who just couldn't take her eyes off of him. Occasionally, small hands, strong hands, as Captain Holt had blessed them, reached up and grasped a strand of the long, wavy hair that hung close to him, but Amy didn't mind. It wasn't like the tiny hands were trying to remove that hair from her skull, it was more of an observation of it, curling it around his newborn fingers.
Amy stared at the baby still, her head and her mind in two separate places, yet they were still focused on the baby. She was so lost in thought that she didn't hear the approaching footsteps.
"Hey."
Amy looked up at the voice, her eyes leaving the face of her child for the first time in two hours, and sees Jake heading towards her. She gave him a small smile as he continued to head towards her. She was glad that she had him. Parenting would have over-consumed her to the point of helplessness two days ago had it not been for him. After all, Jake was the reason that both her and her child were safe. Without him, there was a high chance that one or both of them would have died in childbirth.
Trust Amy Santiago to decide to go into early labor in the middle of a suspected terrorist scare when there was no chance of getting to a hospital. Their son was almost born on the street, outside of a bodega, while Amy screamed at a confused Jake about not getting anywhere near the rat poison.
"Hey." She replied quietly.
"How is my baby mama and my mini me?" He asked brightly. This time not putting his pinky up to his lip imitating Dr. Evil, something that Amy shut down the second time it happened.
"Confused." Amy said simply, as she turned her attention back to the baby.
Jake sat down beside her on the bed, their shoulders tight against each other, and he reached out to stroke his son's head. The baby seemed to wake up as soon as he heard voices in the room and stared at him, and Jake smiled as the baby’s attention was drawn back to Amy's hair.
"Why are we confused?" He asked with a gentle frown of concern.
Amy kept her eyes on the baby as before, not meeting his worry-filled eyes. "Because Baby keeps looking around to see what's causing all the noise. Terry and Charles walked past arguing a few minutes ago about a certain bet involving our child's nose." She told him.
Jake rolled his eyes. It had once come up as a topic of conversation around the precinct, whether Baby Peraltiago would inherit his father’s… interesting nose. Jake and Amy both tried their best to shut down any notion that said genetic inheritance would be a bad thing, but Jake had secretly prayed to the Gods that their child took after it’s mother in that aspect. And it looks like he most definitely did, if the tiny button on the baby’s face was any indication.
“Thank God for strong Santiago genes”, Jake claimed earning him a soft slap on the arm from Amy. “Oh hush.” She had said then. “I’m still holding out hope he will take after you more as time goes on.”
Maybe baby boy looked almost exactly like Amy, but to her, his eyes reminded her of the kind and soft eyes belonging to her husband.
"And why is Mommy confused?" Jake asked her.
"Mommy's confused because she doesn't know what to do." She revealed. Mommy was still a new term to her, and one that she was having trouble adapting to.
"What do you mean?" He asked, still the ever-caring Jake that wanted to take away all her cares so that she could enjoy life again. Because of him, she could do that.
She bit her lip, trying not to cry as she admitted what she was most ashamed of. "I don't know how to be a Mom, Jake." She muttered.
Jake frowned, then a confused look took over his face. “What? What are you talking about, you know exactly how to be a mom. You are Amy Santiago; the past year has been all about pregnancy and baby books and baby classes and following I don’t know how many mommy blogs!”
Yes, if Amy Santiago had to be labeled into one thing it was being a star student. Parenting books were light reading by now. By the time her first trimester was over, Jake was sure they owned almost every single parenting book there ever was. It even inspired him to go out and buy his own books, starting with of course, Cry Hard – With a Vengeance. If there was one man who could tackle the challenges of being a dad, while still looking badass, it was Bruce Willis. While he read plenty to prepare him for his soon to arrive son, it was nothing compared to how Amy had studied. That is why it made no sense to him hearing the words coming from his wife right now.
“Yeah, I prepared for all hypothetical feeding and diapering issues that would come up and I know technically what to do, but now that he is here, I feel like nothing got through!” Amy cried, dabbing at the tears on her cheeks with the pajama top she wore.
He gave her a reassuring smile. "Ames, you know what to do, Terry, Charles and even Gina have been giving with their advice...not to mention your mom." He reminded her. “And come on, you have 300 nieces and nephews, I know you have taken care of them countless of times.”
It was true, just about a month ago, her brother’s kid Mason had come over for a few hours to give the couple a touch up on their babysitting experience. Also, Camila Santiago had upped her calls to 3 times a week ever since finding out about her new grandson to be. Amy appreciated her mother’s help, but sometimes her advice was too much for Amy’s liking.
"They've shown me the most efficient ways to change diapers and how to hold him properly, but..." She sighed heavily, tracing the side of the baby's face softly. "I don't know what else to do. Everyone kept saying the instincts will kick in as soon as the baby arrives, and I’ll be magically filled with the ever-powering wisdom...but it hasn’t I don’t have that super mom intuition."
"Of course, you have." Jake disagreed. This conversation was seriously concerning the new father. At the beginning of this ride Jake had come up with his own worries over fatherhood. Sure, his complex daddy issues were more cut and dry with him, but ever since the disaster of the sex reveal party those worries came few and far between. His own father, of all people, had all the faith in the world about
Jake’s impending new role. “Jake, you’re gonna be a great dad. Your son is gonna love you.” Roger Peralta had said.
And if that wasn’t enough, Amy reassured him of this every day. Now it was his turn to do the same for her.
She shook her head, the tears still reappearing in her eyes, waiting for the perfect opportunity to slip down her cheeks again. "Don't say that, Jake, because I don't." She said to him.
"Ames-" He started, but she cut him off.
"I look at him, and I see my child. The one I have been waiting so long for. And all I want in the world is for him to grow up happy and be safe and be the best version of himself. What if I can’t help him get there? " She asked sadly.
"He is a baby, Ames." He said gently, stroking her hair and looking at her adoringly. "a two-day old who just wants some boob milk and then cuddles. There aren’t any dangers here, he’s safe."
"I know." She nodded. "But I look down the road and there will be. I mean think about the day he was born, there was a freaking terrorist scare. Sure, he is in our little bubble now but he’s gonna grow up and face the world. The scary world you and I see at work every day.” Amy sniffled and tightened the swaddling blanket around the burrito looking child. “And not just that, how will I know to raise him well enough to be a good, upstanding citizen and not one of the perps we take in on a daily basis.”
Jake chuckled at his wife’s comment, not trying to make light of the conversation but internally laughing at the thought of his baby in an old school black and white striped prison outfit. What a good, ironic, Halloween costume idea, he thought. “What you think we are gonna be so bad at this that our kid, the son of two cops, will turn out a criminal?”
“Maybe!” Amy said with a pitch so high dogs could hear her a mile away. “What if everything I try to teach him is too much and it backfires somehow. I’m too high-strung Jake, I’m probably gonna drive him crazy with rules and safety concerns and all the pressure is gonna get to him eventually and he’ll crack. How do I know how to correctly punish him, or how long to, or not to! Or put so many expectations on him that he will never feel good enough or smart enough and he’ll end up resenting his place on our piano because I didn’t put him on the mantel!”
With this, Jake realized what she was talking about. She was worried about turning into her own mother. “Ames, sweetheart, you are not your mother." Amy bit her lip again. "Besides, you love her, don’t you?" He didn't want Amy to feel that their child wasn’t going to have the most wonderful human being ever as their mother. “And we won’t ever purchase a piano, so we definitely won’t make that mistake.”
"I do love my mother. She was wonderful and loving…” She looked at Jake, and he saw the pain in her eyes. "I don't want to sound ungrateful, like I didn’t have a great childhood. I did, but…I don’t know. Growing up, sometimes I did resent my mother for not letting me feel like I could be myself. She was tough, maybe because she knew I needed to be tough to stand out in a male dominated household that obviously mirrored the outside world. " Jake nodded, listening intently. “But sometimes I would go to bed crying because the science project I worked so hard on, only to receive a B plus, was not good enough for her. Even though I was proud of it, she looked so disappointed because I didn’t achieve my full potential. It seemed like nothing I did was enough.”
Amy traced her son’s cheek slightly, before rolling her eyes at herself. “It’s stupid I know; I just don’t ever want him to resent me. I don’t want to be that tough mom that drives her kid away and chips away at his confidence. How will I know to draw the line between encouraging and detrimental?”
"Hey, come here." Jake said, and wrapped his arm around her shoulder before she could start crying again. She leaned against him, his shoulder providing a resting place for her head, and the baby in her arms was now balanced between the two of them, looking up at his parents with deep interest, almost like he knew that they were talking about him.
"What do I do, Jake?" Amy asked helplessly. "I want to feel like Super Mom."
Jake nodded, placing a kiss on her forehead. "You can try what I did to feel like a Super Dad." He suggested.
She nodded as well. "I'll try anything. I just want to feel like I should. I want to feel happy, not confused."
"Is that why you can't decide on a name?" He asked her. The two of them had come up with a great selection of names, but now in the aftermath of labor she just could not land on a final decision.
After a few seconds of consideration, she nodded again. "Kinda. I knew that the name would come to me as soon as I looked at him, and I saw it. It's strange, but I haven't seen it yet. Maybe because my mind is so clouded" She explained to him.
"That's okay." He assured her. "At least we won't be one of those couples who wait until their kid is twelve until they're named." He joked.
Not being able to resist it, she laughed softly. "No." She agreed. "Definitely not."
He saw her smile fade after a few seconds, and he looked down at the beautiful child they had created. "Ames, I want you to look at him." Amy looked down, and on cue, the baby looked at her as well, their eyes locking. "I want you to remember everything you can about the eight and a half months you were carrying him; how scared you were, how much you were worried in case something went wrong, how excited you were..."
She spoke to him, not taking her eyes off the baby. "You helped me, though." She reminded him. "I would have panicked so much without you there."
"That doesn't mean that I'm going to disappear now." He reassured her. "I'm not going anywhere." He kissed the side of her head again. "Right, now do you remember the birth?"
She nodded. "Yeah. It hurt." She remembered.
"I know it did, and it hurt for a long time, didn't it?" She nodded with a sigh. She had been in labor for almost twelve hours and had never felt a pain like it before in her life. "After all of that pain, when he came out, and you heard him crying for the first time, what did you do?" He asked her, even though he knew.
"I cried." She said softly.
"Why?"
"I don't know."
He nodded at her. "Yes, you do."
She looked at him for a moment, and the back at the baby. That was his way of helping her. He was making her realize what went through her head so that she would stop doubting herself. In all honesty, she could barely remember why she cried, because it was such a swell of emotion that she couldn't do anything except let it out.
"I guess...I was...happy and proud." She realized quietly. "I was glad that he was okay, and that he wasn't hurt, and that nothing had gone wrong."
Jake smiled. "And then, when the doctor put him on your chest for the first time, how did it feel?"
"It was really nice." She said, smiling softly down at the baby. "'Cause I'd wanted to hold him properly for a long time, but I couldn't."
“What else did you do?”
Amy smiled thinking of that wrinkly, fresh-out-the-womb creature that was crying on her bosom. “I hugged him, and I kissed him and drew the blanket over him, and shielded his eyes.”
“why?”
“Because he was cold, and I don’t know…I felt like maybe the lights in the room were too bright and it was hurting his little eyes.”
Jake nodded. “And what happened then?”
“He stopped crying.”
Jake smiled. "Because of you. Because not even a minute after your son was out in the world you managed to decipher exactly what was bothering him and resolved the problem and made him feel safe.” He paused to take a hold of her hand. “You know what that’s called?”
Amy hummed knowing where this was leading.
“Super mom intuition!” Jake smiled widely, like he had just cracked some big case. “For the past two days, the only time he hasn't been in your arms is when he's in my arms, and most of that time you’re asleep." He pointed out.
She shrugged. "I just don't want to let him out of my sight." She admitted. "I don't want anything to happen to him."
"Why not?"
"Because he's my little boy and I love him unconditionally."
“Ah bingpot.”
Amy realized what she had just said and smiled deeply. No wonder this had worked for Jake. When she thought about all the things that could go wrong with her baby, she went to that feeling of unconditional love. There was nothing in the world that could ever break that bond with her child because there was something more powerful than all the terrible things in the world, Love. And that is exactly what she had told Jake all those months ago, when he was spiraling down the bad dad black hole. She had reassured him that no matter what, she trusted his abilities as a father because of how much he loved them. And that was all they needed. It was at that moment that she knew, her son could never feel the tiny sliver of resentment Amy felt for her upbringing. Because no matter what baby boy Peralta did, she would always have unconditional love for him. That’s when she knew, it would all be okay.
She turned to Jake and smiled at him, her first genuine smile in hours. "Thank you, babe."
They kissed briefly, and then he looked her in the eye. "The first time that you held him, right after he was born, I made a promise." He told her. "I saw how happy you were, and I promised that nothing would ever take that away from us, and that nothing would come between us and our little man."
She smiled and kissed him again. "I love you."
"I love you, too." He smiled back.
Amy returned her gaze to the baby again and leaned down to place a kiss on his forehead. Pulling back after placing her lips against her son’s head, she looked at Jake with a grin. "I know his name." She said excitedly.
"Okay, the moment of truth, what is it?" Jake asked brightly, having waited for his son to have a name for days, yet every time that he suggested one to Amy from their list, she had insisted that she hadn't seen it yet.
"Elias." She said with a satisfied smile. "His name is Elias Jacob Peralta."
Jake smiled. "I love it." He told her and looked down at the baby. “But are you sure you want to name him after me?”
Amy softly caressed the side of Jake’s face and gave him a soft kiss. “Of course, I want nothing more than for our son to turn out just like his loving, goofy, smart and incredible father.” Jake tried his hardest to hold back the giant smile that was threatening to take over his face.
"What do you think of your new name, Elias?" He said in that cute tone he reserved only for babies.
Elias, happy to have the attention from his father, opened his mouth wide and then gave a gentle smile.
Amy gasped. "He smiled!" She cried happily. "Jake! He's smiling!"
Jake laughed, not knowing that babies this young could smile, and rubbed his hand up the top of Amy’s arm. "Now do you feel like a Mom?" He asked her.
She nodded firmly. "The luckiest Mom in the world."