I looked at her and smelled her and touched her and didn’t want to do anything else. Her mouth was sweet and rosy. I would rest my face against her body and feel full of love, more than I ever had before. This girl. People tell each other “You’re mine” or “You belong to me.” There are songs. I didn’t feel she belonged to me. I felt she was part of me. This is science—genetics—but it is also emotion. Mothers say it all the time. For fathers I think it can be too much, like looking at the sun or into the face of God if you believed in God. She was born on August 7, 2002. About a week before, I had felt Marielle’s cervix start to soften, and a few days after that my fingertip found an opening. Then one morning the opening seemed to have widened. Marielle had been uncomfortable, up with contractions in the middle of the night, and we called our doula. No, she said, it didn’t sound like labor had really started. The contractions were irregular and too far apart.
