'I'm coming! Stay awake!'

Exactly a week after our Pennsylvania move, I awoke groggy from the bizarre kind of nightmare only pregnancy can bring. Afterward, still in a dream-fog, I clomped downstairs and poured orange juice onto my cereal instead of milk.

Forty minutes later I sat down to work at a local coffee shop, my campout spot until our cable internet is installed. Beginning to type, I realized to my chagrin that I had forgotten how to spell blueberry. I sighed. Clearly, this was not a good day for me to walk among men, much less go to work in the world of words. On my napkin-list of things to do, I wrote: “Stay awake.”

If you saw our little house right now, you might debate whether to call it a residence or a graveyard for cardboard boxes. Of course, we conquered many hurdles on the path to this semi-settlement. We walked miles in store aisles seeking the perfect furnishings and supplies. The electrician visited twice to replace the dryer’s wall socket. I dropped my engagement ring down the unstopped bathroom sink, and my husband became the first person since Methuselah to unscrew the sink’s ancient J-pipe. Once he had recovered the ring, he went to the trouble of proposing to me again. These are the joys of moving. They have their sweetness, but they make you very tired.

So I sat at the coffee shop window on that seventh day, half-asleep, watching a Mennonite girl in a pink dress bicycle down the adjacent hill. Nothing could be sleepier than this Pennsylvania morning. Except, possibly, for me. And then I felt something. A good, firm kick.

We had first started feeling kicks—the quickening, as they used to call it—two nights earlier. The vital moment came in our new Pennsylvania house just before we fell asleep.

“Hello, Kumquat,” Jonathan said to the baby then. “We love you.” They say at this point in pregnancy the baby can hear you talk. But now, suddenly, we felt like the baby could talk back. In the mental fog that came with moving, making decisions, trying to tell people how they could help, and feeling sleep-deprived, this moment of clarity came. A new, kicking life said, “I’m coming! Stay awake!”

The hope still feels foggy to me. I know the baby will help us fill this house that feels too big for two. I look down at the living room area rug—one of the first marks of civilization we have managed to add to our home—while a big shaft of sun filters through the wood-framed windows. “One day soon,” I tell Jonathan, “our little baby will be playing on that rug, in that spot of sun.” For me, this feels something like preaching the gospel to myself. It is so hard, sometimes, to grasp, and to fit into the busy parts of my mind that are trying to remember how to spell blueberry. But I keep saying it for the sake of my own heart. I keep saying it because it is true.