Daniel looked at his phone.
It was 3:47 in the afternoon when my son was born.
The room went quiet in the specific way that rooms go quiet when something real enters them. The doctor said something I didn’t catch. A nurse laughed softly — not unkindly, but with the warmth of someone who has witnessed this moment a thousand times and still finds it worth celebrating. And then he was placed in my arms: red-faced, furious, impossibly small, his eyes pressed shut against the brightness of the world.
I had prepared myself to feel many things. Exhaustion, certainly. Relief. Perhaps the delayed onset of love that people warn you about, that gradual warmth rather than instant lightning. What I had not prepared for was the feeling of recognition — as though I had known him before, as though some essential part of me had simply been waiting for the rest of me to catch up.
“Hello,” I whispered. “I’m your mother.”
He made a sound like a question.
Daniel glanced up from his phone.
