5/5/2023 0 Comments 1 2 3 4 cakeI’m a little bit nervous about the state of the world, but mostly I’m thinking about my own immediate situation. The stacks of diapers piled neatly on the shelves. I rock in the white linen armchair and look at the tiny clothes. I am increasingly ill at ease, escaping the noise to sit in the just-finished nursery-the room quiet and dark. So there he is, at home all day, surgery recovery kicking his paternity leave into an early start-headphones in and a steady stream of engineering-related jargon swirling loudly around the air. Look, I never claimed to be reasonable all of the time!) (But between you and me, I was still low-key annoyed that he went even though he turned out to be right. Nine hours in the ER waiting room and one emergency appendectomy later, I was slightly apologetic for being wrong. “ It’s probably something you ate!” I said. People were just starting to throw around the words pandemic and quarantine. I stayed home, heavily pregnant and silently (okay not so silently) cursing him for taking the risk of walking into a hospital waiting room with this confusing, nebulous threat of a virus hanging over us. He’d been planning to start two weeks of paternity leave once I gave birth, but of course life loves a good PLOT TWIST, and here’s a good one for you: Five days earlier, he came home from work complaining of a stomachache that increased rapidly in severity, until he swore he had to go to the ER. My husband typed away at his hastily built standing desk on the marble island. It was sunny outside, but cold, and I didn’t want to try and stretch the zipper of my down jacket over my very pregnant stomach. A year and three days ago, almost to the hour, I stood in the kitchen of our New York City apartment and thought about lunch.
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