The Lady with the Ermine Coat

Your fever broke. Of course it did. And so yesterday was filled with gingerbread cake and half filled glasses of Diet Coke and car seats squatting along the hallway. Our living room area is small (4 by 6) but the world outside is still cold and so yesterday brought 6 other mamas and 7 other kiddos into the space; tripping, spilling, rolling on one another, but all of us glad to be cozy and not alone.

You love to stand, with support of course; you love to stiffen and thrust your face forward, toward whomever is holding you. Sitting, you remind me of the stump of a tree. If I take my hands away, you can sometimes balance for five or six seconds before beginning your slow fall back to earth. You don't yet have the instinct to protect yourself from the fall, you don't reach out your hands or turn in the direction of the motion. You believe you will be caught. Or, you don't know you are in danger.

Still, it is cold.

You have invented a new sound. I call it radiator whine. Or mild discontent. Or woman-with-ermine-coat-and-leather-handbag-is-told-she-must-walk-the-twenty-flights-to-her-penthouse.

While I broke eggs into a glass bowl for the gingerbread cake, you held onto the wire strands of a whisk.

Last night, I drank my first gin and tonic from a tall blue glass. My first since becoming pregnant with you.

During sex, I still feel you at the edges of my consciousness, still cannot help thinking of how you emerged from me, through me. My body still does not entirely belong to me.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that one day you will no longer need to nurse. Such an obvious fact, such a snag in my throat.

It is 1pm on a Friday afternoon. Your father is done teaching for the week. We are sitting side by side on the couch, laptops open on our laps, Luxy curled at our feet. Upstairs, you are crying in fits and starts. We raise our eyebrows at one another every few minutes, look at the clock, look back at our computers. One of us will go to you eventually.