In early pregnancy, before anyone knew that we were any different from the day before, I recall a moment in a crosswalk in which I was a little bit nauseous but also very happy. You and I and him before he even knew it, growing a secret shaped like whatever fruit the baby was in that particular week.

I felt powerful and maternal and scared all at once. You felt happy from the very beginning, though it was hard to know what to say in the earliest of days, for all of us. Well look at that!, or Can you believe we made a person? was the closest we could come to knowing that there were three of us.

In the car, I cry when I hear things that do or don’t have to do with children and parents. Everything is either about children or parents because everything is about the world and someday he will not live in my body anymore.  Just like that, my focus has become singular.

I cry because teenagers feel so depressed that they take their own lives. I cry because there’s a story in which black mothers are talking about how they’re going to talk to their boys about the possibility that they’ll be shot at. This is right after I know that I am having a son and it breaks me.

I am happy to feel so full. It feels good to be always on the verge of something.

I know I don’t yet appreciate the gravity of that statement, but I think I am learning. The moment we first heard his heartbeat, I gasped and cried and squeaked like a small animal. You squeezed my hand. It was hard to know what to look at, I was so in love with both of you.