The best thing about Babies ‘R’ Us, when it still existed, was the expecting mothers’ parking spaces, which I suddenly realized that I could use after my husband parked the car there.  I screamed out, “This isn’t for us!”, but with one look from him and a questioning, “Raina?”, I realized we could with a following shout of glee.  I’m very expressive when it comes to emotions.   The worst thing about Babies ‘R’ Us?  The sheer amount of choices and things to try.  It was like a playground with torture devices where you couldn’t leave but you were expected to play.  Lift that heavy-ass stroller!  Fold it in without losing a finger (if you can figure out which button to press at what frequency)!  Why are these things so complex?!!  Being at the baby store I felt that I might have more success flying an alien spaceship than actually placing a child in a stroller, taking him out, and effectively folding the stroller to go someplace. I just wanted a checklist to fill out, an …

When I first held my son, I wondered if I could love him in the way that so many mothers tell it, that neverending immensity that sweetens and, at times, pains one’s life, a love that summons a strength mightier than that of Atlas and sometimes feels as weighted as the world he bore. The first word my son must have heard was me saying his name; I was purposeful in that choice, that he should hear the name he gave me in a dream.  He will always have his name. When he came, I felt mostly numb, not the love that I expected to flood me, riding the wave of oxytocin, during labor and into that period after birth.  I imagined there would be this rose-colored energetic swath I would feel after the triumph of giving birth, facing what is always the possibility of one’s own death and coming through with one life leading to two.  Instead, I became caught up in the details:  the midwives signal to push once more to expel the …