I love not telling anyone when it's my birthday--going about the most beautiful of ordinary days with a secret is one of my great pleasures in life. A secret hugged close and guarded in a small smile. I mean, its no surprise I get a kick out of this. I kept an entire pregnancy secret till the baby was born. Speaking of said baby, my birthday fell on a weekday so it was just her and I all day. We went out to lunch at the local cafe that has delicious refilling coffee and gluten free toast. Then wandered around the playground till I had to pee too badly to wait any longer and we dashed through the tree lined garden path to the library and I used her to get into the clean children's floor loo. Then home where we ate peanut butter out of the jar on the floor because, while storybookish, the cafe is much to expensive to actually fill us both up. And then Jesse came home laden with groceries and gin and made me pizza and negronis. Essentially the New York birthdays have all been full of ordinary magic. Probably because I'm exactly where I want to be. And November may just be the most beautiful month in NYC... or anywhere... actually, maybe not in LA or Florida. I turned thirty.

When I google jobs for moms who are primary care givers I get article after article about how companies give 16 weeks paid parental leave for primary caregivers but that they are not fair to men who are parents. Which is just an eye roll... I’m all for paternity leave, Jesse had it and it was incredible and completely necessary but to say that in response for my 2am google for work I can take my baby to or do from home because I can’t afford child care, that’s incredibly insensitive and sexist. I know it’s just a search engine, but still. How is there not an answer for this yet??? I’m turning 30 this year and still have a roommate! I know part of it is because I only have a bachelor degree... but also, THAT SHOULD GET ME A REAL JOB. While I know that I am very privileged, I do not think my complaint about this is only something I can bring up because of this privilege. If I am struggling with this, as a white, upper middle class, college graduate women who has time to write a blog that no one will read then how much more someone with none of those privileges?! Children are treated as something shameful in the workplace... even for men. If you have the audacity to chose to both work and have children you better not breath a word of their existence or your qualifications will be called into question. I recently applied for a receptionist job at a women's co-working club that touts itself to be mother friendly ("we have a lactation room!"). The bambi was much younger when I applied and I asked if I could bring her with me. Let me be clear, on the list of job requirements was "pillow fluffling"-- this was not a job that was in any way hard to multi task through or dangerous for a child. In fact, it was very much what I do at home every single day. I did not hear back.

It’s been over two years since my last entry, I wasn’t pregnant and I wasn’t again and maybe once again, and then I was. I got that coffee shop job and opened it three mornings a week and made damn good coffee. I created a home for regulars in a forgotten corner of manhattan’s lower east side, just a short walk from our apartment. After I got pregnant Jesse walked with me to work and opened the heavy gate for me and carried the outside benches out to keep the secret baby safe. And then she wasn’t a secret. To my regulars at least. My belly had a smear of coffee grinds right where it gently bumped the counter every shot I tamped. All that summer my legs were streaked with espresso and our second tiny baby danced to Regina Spektor and coffee grinding and the hiss of the steam wand. Then winter came and we were both small enough to squeeze together inside my puffer coat. We voted and lost. We mourned. I mourned my first baby. Still. I was racked with anxiety. Pregnancy was hard. I did not love it. March 3 came and went. I sat at home stitching and staring out the grey windows. I went to a Chinese tea shop down the street and she sold me a garbage bag of red raspberry leaf and told me not to let them induce me. I had been in early labor for over a week. The gallons of tea did nothing but make me pee. Finally one night after the contractions had been every three minutes for over five hours we decided to hop on the B train at Grand Street. They weren’t that painful. But I knew the train ride was about 35 minutes up to the hospital in the Upper West Side. And I couldn’t wait. We resolved to not be sent home. No matter what. I never went into labor with the first baby. And I was convinced it simply wasn’t something my body did. I’m still convinced of that. They monitored me absentmindedly, the contractions making scribbles across a pink graph. I tore a bit of it off when the nurse was out of the room because it was so beautiful. I read a faded pink paperback. Finally Jesse said “we are concerned for the health of the baby” (we’d read that we could try that phrase). It worked instantly. I was unstrapped and put in a room. They hooked bambi up to a monitor and me to an IV of whatever it is to induce labor. And for awhile we sat there by ourselves listening to her heartbeat. I read and read and read. And cannot remember any of it. Then things got blurry and bad. Her heart rate kept crashing. I was on oxygen, for her. And the room was full of people. I got an epidural. The anesthesiaologist was a bro who told me I was crushing it. I ignored him but I loved the L&D nurse, Ashley.  My water broke on Jesse’s shoes. And then things got even worse. I don’t remember barely anything. But I remember them saying they’d need to vacuum soon and I told them no. And then it was over but she was blue and grey and lifeless. The cord was around her neck three times. All I can remember is Jesse leaving my side and his face and he ran to the corner where they took her. I couldn’t see her. They gave her oxygen and she came alive and grabbed the oxygen tube from Ashley. And sound and movement and light came back into the room and I was being stitched up and everything felt cold and silvery and thick and quivery. Light really was coming into the room because she was born exactly at sunrise. The rooflines of the upper west side were tinged with pink as they rushed her to the corner by the window. Then finally they gave her to me once I was no longer bleeding out and she lay there and tried to nurse and the room was empty and it was the three of us.

And now she is one year old and it’s summer of 2018.