three years

Our path to parenthood started on a hot Sunday afternoon. We were in the car when I said, "Do you want to have a baby?" You reached for my hand and answered, "Rachy, I've always wanted to have a baby with you."

The bits between week 1 and week 38 only strengthened my trust in you: All the times I threw up, and you rubbed my back quietly until I was finished. The days in my first trimester when I came home from work to an apartment chilled to a perfect sub-70 degrees (who knew a cluster of cells could make me so hot and sweaty?). The nights before bed when you massaged the soreness from my lower back so I could fall asleep. The ultrasounds we sat through, and how the technician kept saying things like, "Here's her leg," "There's her heart," "See her elbow?" And you quietly watched the screen, and then eventually admitted, "I'm really glad you can see all that, because I sure can't."

The stares we got at the gym when you tied my shoes because I couldn't reach. The showers where I called to you to help wash my back because my tummy was too large for me to twist. The pillows I used that took up two-thirds of the bed, and yet you never complained. It all led up to the gentle, encouraging words you offered in that final hour of labor--the way you held me and said, "You can do this. We can do this," as I cried and yelled in pain and said that I was scared. I was so scared.

They said the biggest decision I'd make is who I married. That's not true. Marriage is largely reversible. I think the biggest decision I made is with whom I chose to have children, because children and parenthood can't be undone. I think about that every night when I look at you and Sage sleeping--the way she pouts her lower lip when she's deep in a dream, just like her dad. That is my favorite part of the day: nodding off in hypnotic breaths, feeling overcome that in this bed where there were once two warm bodies, there are three.

Happy three years, Fred. Thank you for being my husband, and thank you for being Sage's dad.