In eight days, I’ll sit in a cold, stark room and watch as a sonographer wheels in the machine of her trade. A frigid dollop of gel will be slicked the length of a belt buckle, and for the first time since you’ve been here, the wand the doctor sets aglide will provide me moving images of you. I hope to see two arms and legs, the arc of your soft sloping cranium, and tight little balls of fist and foot. I hope to hear the word, “healthy,” as I stare transfixed at the screen that projects you.

I am told I might also be able to find out your gender that day, if you’re positioned just so and you’re feeling cooperative. I must confess that I’m far more eager about this than I should be. I have a shamefully strong preference, one that I hope will become little more than a trifle over which we’ll share a chuckle someday.

Should you defy all prediction and pleading, I promise to sing you this during 3 am feedings (though not as awesomely or loudly as DeeDee does):

In the meantime, I’m just trying to focus on growing you—and you’re making it surprisingly easy. There’s been no nausea, little heartburn, and relatively uneventful sleep in these first sixteen weeks with you. And sometimes, when we’re alone, and I hook a pair of headphones onto my ears, up the volume on my Doppler, and listen to you moving (because your sound is too delicious to be confined to 45-second soundbites in doctors’ offices), the swish of you, somewhere inside me, brings a peace more profound than any I’ve known.

I realize, when I hear you now, that it won’t matter to me if you’re boy or you’re girl, if you’re pensive like your mother or brooding like your father, if you play some sport for which I have little knowledge or tolerance, if you require long nights and longer patience, if we need to learn to speak with hands instead of mouths to communicate, if you excel at wind instruments or show less aptitude for English than Math.

It won’t matter as much as I thought it would, when we begin, in unconscious ways, to hurt one another. I won’t likely lament the loss of these quiet, autonomous days Before, when all you are is sound and a shadowy, shimmying figure on a screen of greenish static, as often as I suspected I would.

I know this by the sound of you, somersaulting currents of amniotic fluid, as eager to join the world as I am to deliver you to it.

I think of this sound far more often than I indulge in my urge to hear it. My heart has it memorized; listening too often would obliterate the workday veneer of poise I use to pretend that pregnancy is simple biology, that growing a human is something short of incredulous and spectacular.

I know now, whoever you are, I just want you here and I want you alive. At four months and a week, we are nearly half-there.

Spend the balance of winter and spring surviving the confines of my body and I promise I’ll devote each day to making you believe it was worth your while.

It feels strange to write to you of God, when it’s quite possible that you know more about him right now than I do.

I could be wrong, but I imagine that embryos’ knowledge moves in reverse, so that by the time they are infants, they’re amnesiac and have the overwhelming task of relearning things they knew when they were wise and ageless spirits luxuriating in an open heaven. (I think F. Scott Fitzgerald might’ve agreed with me, which you’ll understand when I read you “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” before bed. I’ll probably read you Fitzgerald till you groan. Do try to be tolerant, until you’re old enough to develop your own literary interests.)

You will hear me say this a lot, this “I could be wrong”—especially in our conversations about God. This is because I’m not always sure what I know. I’m not entirely confident that the truth as I understand it is the way the truth should be understood. My life—and quite possibly everyone’s lives, from the evangelist to the atheist—is full of the unexpected and the unexplainable. No one has developed so precise a formula for understanding, that his life is entirely exempt of uncertainty.

And so I can’t say with complete confidence whether I’m right about many of the things I’ll teach you. The more we know, the less we know; for me, this has become something of a mantra.

But in our household, God exists. He is quite real, as real as oxygen or hydrogen or any other element on the periodic table that’s invisible or intangible to the naked eye. God is ever-present, listening and watching closely. In crisis, people often expect Him to, but He does not always intervene. Sometimes, when unspeakable atrocities occur, our belief in the existence and presence of God helps us to cope. Sometimes, it doesn’t help nearly as much as we’d like it to.

In our household, we believe that God can be felt in wind and seen in sunrise. Sometimes, we think we hear Him when we think. Sometimes, we stop in the midst of our toiling and it occurs to us that we’ve gotten to where we are and we’re heading toward wherever we’re destined, not due to any particular foresight of our own, but because of propulsion from a force far greater than our Selves.

And in that moment of pause, we thank God.

You will hear many of His names, uttered and sung, over the course of your childhood. But I cannot guarantee how often we’ll go to church. I went just about every Sunday of my little-girl life, and there’s part of me that wishes this for you. There is an irreplaceable sense of community you’d find, growing up in pilgrimage to the same building and seeing the same people, listening to and learning the idiosyncrasies of their worship, listening to and learning the poetry of the bible.

There is nothing more lyrical than a sermon. I’ve found this to be true, regardless of denomination. The minor melodies of the Jewish cantor’s Hebrew are as beautiful as the recitation of the rosary; the slow and rocking baritone the Baptist minister rolls up from the barrel of his gut can be as fascinating as Arabic incantations prayed eastward five times a day.

This may sound confusing. It isn’t always. Our world is full of faiths, and our family has espoused one. In tandem with the tenets of our faith, you will learn about free will and how the decision to accept or decline a faith is personal and individual. But you will also realize that we are born into traditions of worship—or born into an absence of them, and this free will to decide your faith doesn’t really kick in until you’re grown. Even then, you’d be hard-pressed to eradicate all of the rituals with which you were raised, and it’s likely you won’t want to.

In our house, we believe in Christ, crucified and resurrected. We believe in the Trinity. We believe in asking for salvation from sin, even though sin is inherent to humankind. We believe in an afterlife that includes both a heaven and hell. We believe that the occurrences recorded in the bible are historical and instructional, not fictional.

But we do not isolate ourselves from those who don’t. And we do not respond defensively when people question our beliefs. They are ours; in the end, the only people who need to understand why hold fast to them are us.

Perhaps this is why you’ll need church—because I don’t always understand why I hold fast. And ultimately, that will be a knowledge you’ll need to acquire on your own.

In the meantime, before you arrive, I’ll look out for a place to which I feel I can entrust the delicate acquisition of each point on your moral compass, the infinite beauty of a life aimed toward a higher purpose than its own caprice or pursuit.

I started the fifteenth week of your growth, groping through the ether in search of your father. I found him, though part of me wishes I hadn’t. It’s unsettling how little we know each other now. It’s unsettling how little we ever knew each other.

It began as a series of Saturday morning text messages. I told him some of what I’ve learned about you, because that seemed fair and necessary, but I didn’t give him everything. I didn’t, for instance, tell him precisely when Nature believes you’ll arrive. I didn’t tell him the exact date that I’ll learn if you’re boy or you’re girl. But I told him that you pulse through me—that I’ve felt you and heard you do it. He has no way of knowing how matchless this is. So I didn’t bother trying to explain that your heartbeat is a stampede and the last time I listened for it, you dodged the fetal Doppler, whenever the doctor applied pressure, so now, I think of you as part-thoroughbred and part-phantom.

I didn’t tell him that I think I’m starting to know you, in as much as I believe humans are knowable. But I told him that it seems you will exist and he should try to find a way to care about it.

Then I got out of bed, determined to fill my day with distractions. I shopped for clothing that will accommodate your growth. I strolled through a Babies R Us for the first time since I found out about you. I picked out a crib and a sling and your great-aunt bought you your very first onesies; they are plain and pristine and white.

The experience didn’t yield the hives or hyperventilation I thought it would.

I’m getting used to you.

But even with all the tiny revelations a weekend brings, during those glorious hours when work recedes in your mind and you’re left only with leisure, I compulsively checked my phone, half-looking for some sort of response to all that I’d told him. It never came.

I knew, by now, to expect silence, to anticipate being ignored. Sometimes, I imagine that he puts us out of his mind with such an alarming ease that he startles even himself. And it’s that oblivious image of him, that unwitting callousness that sometimes clouds his eyes and masks his voice, that keeps me from trying to contact him more.

That I reach for him at all—and I’ve done so two times in three months—has more to do with you than it does with me. You will need him, and you will need him lucid and accepting, neither of which he seems to be right now.

Oh, but he was, once upon a time. He could be beautiful, before. Before he started down the road to Forgetting. (I imagine Forgetting as a dying village, full of abandoners; all its inhabitants wear thick, dark shades, even though it’s pitch black there eleven months of the year, and they daily imbibe an elixir that provides them selective dementia.)

It seems entirely unjust that you should be deprived of that past part of him, that former-self when he was altogether lovely, at times, in those years before, when I didn’t sleep and wake imagining him as an ogre.

This strangely absent, selfish soul is near-unrecognizable as the wooer who cut into a tree and gave me a slice of it one Valentine’s Day, our names and the year soldered into the palm-sized bark. He is not the man with whom I’d once spent a summer afternoon finger-painting electric blues and burnished oranges on a grassy knoll in a Maryland park. He isn’t the fearless, unembarrassed foreigner who’d walk up to stone-faced Parisians and blurt out, “Y’all speak English?!” or ask me how to say, “Where is [whatever?]” in the limited French I’d learned for the trip, so we could find our trails through the gilded city when I stood apart wide-eyed and silent, too afraid to butcher the country’s language.

He isn’t even the cat who just months ago, engaged me in a months-long game of Truth or Dare, wherein we were still, nearly nine years into our lives together, unearthing new mysteries about one another.

You should know that your father is funny–unexpectedly so; he doesn’t seem it, but he can tell a story about his childhood that will make you laugh until your stomach tightens, that will make you grin at random for weeks to come, whenever you remember a line of it. And he’s heroic, when other men wouldn’t be: once, at a gas station, an elderly woman accidentally pumped gas into her eyes, sealing  them shut, and I watched, as your father rushed to her aid, taking her elbow as she clung, terrified, to his waist. He ushered her to the outdoor bathroom, barking urgent, eerily calm orders to the impassive spectators nearby. I think she hugged him, afterward, as her grandson stood expressionless aside. Her thanks were so profuse he could barely break away.

His specialty seems to be car-related distresses. He tells a hilarious tale about stopping to aide a near catatonic woman on the side of the road. And once, when he visited me in New York (a story I’ll reserve for an occasion when you decide that a grand gesture is the best way to win back someone you’ve lost), he changed the tire of a mother and daughter who afterward kept insisting he was an angel in plainclothes, until their insistence weirded him out and he left.

He’s agile, too; he’s been known to shimmy up the sides of brick buildings, to pull himself up from the rungs of iron balconies and fire escapes, to slip himself through narrow entrances.

This is who he is.

But this is beneath what he’s become. And it worries me that you might grow, year in and out, with only my inadequate stories to patch yourself a tapestry of who he once was and who he might’ve been to you—or perhaps you may also have the occasional film he produces, should his reason for leaving you yield the success he desires.

Perhaps.

If I let you watch them.

Two days after I wrote to him of you, he did deign to respond. I found the return texts–eight of them–blinking, waiting, when I woke in the third watch of night; and I spent all of the 4 am hour, returning them. He did not mention you. He wrote instead of the life he has always wanted and how there is little place for me in it, now that you’ve begun to push through me. He says that I have always known this, that the noncommittal nature of the transient artist’s life he began just two years ago should be no surprise to me.

I suppose it isn’t.

Neither of us was in any hurry to fully commit to the other. But then, for neither of us was there ever a you.

There are still five months left before you land here, on the Outside. Perhaps by then, none of these notes will be relevant. By then, perhaps my better memories of your father will be the only parts of him you’ll ever have occasion to know. He could be as compassionate to you then as he is indifferent about you now.

That is certainly my hope, though you needn’t ever worry that I’ll be unprepared for likelier possibilities.

I felt you. Sunday morning. I was in bed, and my body had managed to contort itself into a kind of half twist at the torso. In the stillness, as the darkened winter daylight wafted through the window, there you were—all your tiny ounces aflutter, stretching toward the edges of your warm, widening room.

You felt like a ripple of water under the skip of a stone.

When you first took root, I would awaken panicked every morning, acutely, uneasily aware that you were present and wholly unsure what I was supposed to do with you. This was why I told everyone about you so early. I didn’t trust myself as the sole bearer of such a profound actuality. You were too large an occurrence to keep secret; even before you could be felt, you seemed to me a seahorse, a lavish curl of vertebrae, all this soft and pliant tissue pulling itself into bigger whirls of baby everyday.

In my mind, you have this rich interior life. You’re thinking about the time Before, which was vast and infinite. You’re anxious about who you’ll be on the Outside, terrified you won’t remember the refinement, the satisfaction of eternity. None of us do, once we’re here. I’m sorry to have pulled you from it.

But now I feel you moving. And I must admit: this makes me selfish. The Outside yearns for you now, tangible and finite. I want to watch you swell into someone incredible and I’m desperately impatient about it.

You’ve made my life a precipice. I’m driven by a wave of want, propelled by intricate fantasies of what our lives together will be, pushed toward an ideal apex, a fever pitch of wonder: you’re there.

But in this state, I also feel poised to crash. There are terrors, too, and doubts. I have no idea who you’ll be—or who I’ll be to you. How often will we fail each other? Will we grow old and apart, without ever understanding who the other truly is? Will you read these essays about your pre-self and feel alienated rather than adored?

Is it possible that we will prove to be too much for each other?

As often as I marvel, I’m also overwhelmed. Unlike so much of my life, you will not remain interior. You are not a philosophy or ideal; you’re flesh, incubating. And when you arrive, I will be your only source. I have often been a source, but never someone’s only.

The magnitude of this is enough to pull me under.

You mustn’t worry; I don’t plan to succumb. Mama trades in melodrama and rarely takes leave of her senses. But this bit about the precipice is true: you’re the tidal wave and the undertow. You’re the division between Before and After; you’re the gravest test of my sink/swim mettle.

I do not intend to drown.

Your village is growing.

I was afraid, for a while, that we’d be almost alone there, living next door to just one or two other inhabitants, holed up in our home, often feeling too timid to knock on neighbors’ doors and borrow sugar.

Recently, your father called. I didn’t talk to him and, when I listened to his message, it seemed vague and distant, as though left under haze and duress. It was clear he wouldn’t live among us, guiding you through marsh and wood and watching you become a mudperson, brandishing bugs and wielding worms, with clay streaking your face.

I thought I might have to teach you to forage alone. I thought our little land might be barren.

But now twigs are pushing through the loam. And now, there is talk of fatted calves, a small cluster of huts with perpetually open doors, and lovely wooden trellises of fruit-yielding vines. This blueprint resembles the communal world I dream for you, of bonfires with bright orange swirls of embers, crackling toward the black that shrouds Orion. We will dance too close to that fire, till our bare feet and night-cooled calves are in low-grade danger of singeing.

We are so happy to have it.

The whisperers have ceased their mocking—or better, their mocking has ceased to matter. Every village, on its outskirts, has its whisperers. And idiots. We cannot be bothered to banish them all and, in ways, they are good for the land.

Just know that this place is now sacred for you. I am soldering your shields. I am sharpening sabers of iron, of light. You must be protected here. Your village should feel like an insulation, from calamity and pretense and meanness. Whenever you retreat to it, you should feel free to run half-wild. Beloved, it is better to be wild than tame (though it’s imperative to know when you should wrangle yourself, for company).

I want desperately to screen out anyone who might damage you. I wish my only job were to sit in a tower with bowed twine stretched taut, fashioning flint for arrowheads, sniping attackers of your esteem. But there is so much other work ahead, so much past to re-envision.

Once, my own village overflowed with elders. Now, many of its pillars have crumbled under the weight of age and passed into eternity. I had a great-grandmother until I was 25. You will start with one, as well. I hope you have her just as long. You’ll begin with maternal grandparents. These you will have, for certain. You’ll have also great-aunts and great-uncles, cousins just a few years your senior, second cousins far cooler than your mother. You will have aunts by friendship, not blood, and two uncles, of the same kind of relation.

If you’re as blessed as I was, you won’t lose a single one, until you’re grown. If you’re as blessed as I was, every one of them will help me shape you. From one, you’ll glean all the confidence I lack. Another will broaden your humor, making it sharp and quick and wry. One will keep you kind, when angst and anger begin to set you adrift. One will teach you pride in our ancestry. One will hang high hopes on your shoulders, perhaps before they’re broad enough to bear them.

They all will adore you; I’ve made sure of that. Should this change, I will have them evicted.

There’s safety here, in this village, though we will not always be near it. I will send you back, when the last school bell of each annum releases you into sanguine summer. And in its pools and gardens, you will laugh and plant and dive great depths.

When you were three months grown, an earthquake cracked an island into a thousand fissures and, in minutes, a 95% Black nation— the world’s first, oldest Black-led republic —toppled under iron and stone.

This is the kind of world you’re inheriting, composed of so much troubled water and sudden collapse.

I do not worry for you as much as I should. Just a few years ago, a hard rain fell and swept away one of our own country’s most dazzling Southern cities. Its people are still crawling up from the slime and marsh, still making themselves new again.

There will be days—like the day Haiti was half-swallowed into the Earth’s core, like when bodies floated through the ninth ward of New Orleans and it took three days for our government to send drinkable water—when life itself seems quite arbitrary, when you’ll disbelieve in the fairness I’ll teach you exists. You will, like all humanity,  have your long queue of queries, the most pressing of which won’t be answered while you live, at least not to your satisfaction. And the weight of all the things you cannot know will begin to stagger you.

There is plenty to fear, if I let you. But I won’t. You will be born Black and American; I cannot begin to describe how resilient this makes you. Your marrow might as well be admantium. Over time, you’ll half-believe you’re Wolverine.

Fret will be senseless. My name means resurrection; we will always be a family that regenerates itself. And this will not be the last time a great brown nation finds itself imperiled.

We will find our hope in history, in stories embellished by optimistic ancestors. Our courage will come from the rhythm of keeping record: look at what’s been done; look at what’s left to do. We will send slates to the children, parceled with ribbon, cashews, clementines. We will write to them of a future and tell them we’re sure it will surface, because it has emerged for others, because it has come here, to us.

Age 18

Four days into the year you were born, I threw out your father’s shit things. After we found out I was carrying you, there was a massive communication breakdown: he refused to consider you and I refused not to. He left, with a ticket I bought him¹. He flew to Vegas for a job; it’d been arranged before we knew you were here.

I was distraught that day. I woke up furious. I hurled a half-eaten can of off-brand cashews at his feet that morning. They kept cropping up; it seemed like they were in every room of my place. He’d bought them in Baltimore, over Thanksgiving break, and just as we left in the car I’d rented, driving eleven hours back to Michigan, he ripped back the foil on the cheap tin can and I had to listen to him chewing those stupid cheap cashew halves for hours, to avoid talking to me. That he’d brought them into my house, carting them around like a protective shield from the threat of honest conversation, was too much to take.

When you’re a little older, if you’re interested, I’ll tell you what else went on, in those days after our return from Maryland, in those strange initial days, after finding you, intangible but present inside.

He did try talking that morning. To his credit, he set forth a few tentative words. But I couldn’t hear them. My ears were too full of the cruel silences and curious ultimatums of previous days: If you have this baby, it’ll be the beginning of the end of us. I care for you, but that’s beside the point.

He was full of points and bluster, your father. There was a time I really loved that about him.

At the airport, I wouldn’t look at him, training my eyes on the stop signs ahead and the pedestrians merrily dragging baggage toward far-off locales. Airports always leave me envious, even when I’m flying. I’m sure you know by now, my desire to be everywhere at once is irreconcilable.

He leaned across the armrest and half-hugged me, whispering, “I’m here for you, whatever you decide.”

This was the only lie he told, during conversations about you. I liked him better callous, abandoning, and honest.

He searched my face for gratitude, but I couldn’t feign any, so he recoiled, opened his door, and left. A valet or customer (I couldn’t tell in my periphery) at the curb had been watching. He smirked and quipped when your father slammed my door. I didn’t hear what was said.

By the time I got home, I was gutted. In a fit of conciliatory pique, he’d suggested changing or canceling his flight and sticking around until we came to a mutual agreement. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t. Before you, I’d been looking forward to having my solitude back: I’d read and take pictures and regain control over the television remote. I’d stop cooking.

But after you, I needed him to stay. I’d already started to hate him.

It was hard, climbing the three flights to my apartment with leaden legs, but I made it. I’d even started to calm down. The tears had cooled in their ducts. You’ll be fine, I told myself.

Then, just inside the door, beneath the hanging coats and unpacked boxes, I spotted a faux leather bag with two massive black shoes crossed atop it. How had neither of us noticed it before he left? Had he left them intentionally?

We talked, by phone or instant message, for three weeks after he was gone. During one of those exchanges, I told him he’d left things.

“I have to look at them every time I cross the threshold.”

“You don’t sound very happy about that.”

“I’m not.”

“You can throw them away, if you want.”

I told him I wouldn’t throw away his things, but the truth was, it crossed my mind each time I pushed back my front door. Depending on how the rest of my day had gone, the sight of that bag and shoes could reduce me to tremulous rage or a fetal curl of sadness.

I kept them through the month of December, not for sentimentality or considerateness, not because I missed him.

I kept them for leverage. I kept them because, for a while, it felt that as long as I had them, he’d have to return for them. And when he did, I’d have a plan: I’d make him sign away his paternal rights or I’d force him to be my Lamaze partner or I’d keep them until he finally manned up, called his mother, and told her he had a child on the way.

I see you laughing. I know; your mom can be really delusional sometimes. But you should know it doesn’t take me long to snap out of it.

This time, it took about two weeks. We’d talked five days before Christmas, via a series of curt email within which he said, I feel like you want me to be fine with things the way they are, within which he said, I really feel we’re making a mistake with this decision.

I assured him I had no expectation of him being “fine with things the way they are.” I had no expectation of things being fine this way, with him across the country in denial and me bearing the brunt of everyone’s commentary, with him contributing nothing and me preparing to restructure everything.

“I want you to change the way things are.”

I’m trying to change the way things are, he said. I’m willing to be there and go to the clinic with you.

I explained, as I often have to, that demanding an action of me requires nothing of him.

“You change.” Accept parenthood—or don’t, I suggested. But get off this record-skipping abortion track and begin to deal with what lies ahead.

He never responded.

The holidays passed. A new decade dawned and he was as gone as he’d been the day he hopped out of my car, trailing promises to “be here for me, whatever I decided.”

So just before I returned to work, two days before my first prenatal appointment, I scooped up that bag of faded graphic tees, that size-14 pair of Naturalizers, and hurled them into the dumpster behind my building.

I’d thought about keeping them, for you, but there seemed a great futility in that: if your father ever became a parent, you wouldn’t need them; if he didn’t, you wouldn’t want them.

¹ By the time you’re 18, it will have become very uncharacteristic for me to itemize what I’ve purchased for people. It’s uncharacteristic now. I only do it with your father. I fear that can’t be helped.