The Winter Cradle

I had my first child when winter began its yearly shuffle to our town. The season is seldom rude; it enters quietly and carefully sets its luggage down. There is time to get accustomed to it.

With my fetal furnace smoldering constantly I hardly noticed the cold wreathing itself around our neighborhood. The early dark was soothing and welcome, my fatigue felt doubly right in the chill black.

Thanksgiving that year was similarly quiet and dark, my husband and I alone at our table. Internet radio crooned oldies from the 1940s while we ate our Whole Foods. I remember it occurring to me that this was the last Thanksgiving we would share with our family numbering two, and that it was strange that I wasn’t drinking wine. We talked, but I couldn’t tell you what it was about, just like I couldn’t tell you who was on the radio. All of it was atmospheric, softly enveloping and unobtrusive.

The only action happening was behind a red curtain as tiny fists began to feel for a way out. I was scheduled to be induced eight days later, a precaution against an ultrasound that revealed a smaller-than-average creature.

Instead, those tiny fists found their ejector button, and three days later the contractions began.

Winter was still unpacking, and so on a bright, chilly morning I jerked awake from my half-sleep. Groggy from an evening corrugated with twisting pains so deep inside me I could have been sensing them from another dimension, I called my doctor’s office and was told to come in.

The next thirty minutes were spent in a flurry of early morning sunshine as I roused my husband and convinced his semi-consciousness that he was to call in sick to work and drive me to the doctor.

“This is it,” I told him.

“You’re not due for two weeks,” he replied, rubbing at his eyes pointedly.

“That’s not how it works,” I countered, and added pleasantly, “couldn’t you have guessed a child of mine would be early?”

He padded off to dress, and I urged him “quickly, please.”

I stuffed my purse with KIND chocolate-and-almond bars for me and Fiber One coffee-cake bars for him. I stared pointedly at my kitchen floor, the slants of light criss-crossing the weathered old wood. The…

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