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.