Waking in the desert
One month has passed since I first saw you with my own eyes. For 8 months, we had seen you in other ways. We saw you on a plus mark on the pregnancy test. We saw you in the midday naps I needed. We saw you in a message from my doctor in August, after screening showed a “normal baby girl.” We saw you later that month in the monochrome of your first ultrasound. We saw you in the excited eyes of your siblings when we showed them those ultrasound pictures and told them you were coming. We saw you in the next ultrasound, the one where I absentmindedly told the technician, “sometimes, this is all you get.” But that was not all we got. Even though, on that October day, everything in our world changed, that ultrasound was not all we got. We got four more months of belly kisses and book readings and coffee abstentions. We got four more months of kicks and rolls and many, many ultrasounds. We got a lot of good. And four months after finding out, you were not “normal,” you came three weeks early,...