January 10, 2026
Dear Sophia,
It’s still dark in the early morning, and with my hand palming your mother’s belly like a basketball, I can feel you kicking. Are you exercising in there? Are you expressing yourself?
Your mom walked the curb today. People stared like the lemurs in a nature documentary.
“We are trying to shake something loose,” I said on the embedded video. “There’s a baby whose ETA is RIGHT NOW.”
I await the transformation into your father with both fascination and trepidation. After decades of being a single man who had spent no time imagining fatherhood, the change in identity the day you are born will be as abrupt and feel as odd as if I were to one day wake up and realize I was not a writer or lawyer but a chef or a criminal mastermind, a golf pro or a goatherder in sub-Saharan Africa.
Your mom has said she feels like she knows you. She has talked to you aloud and communicated with you in other, more mysterious ways. Earlier I overheard her.
Your mother talks to you aloud and communicates with you in other, more mysterious ways. Earlier I overheard her.
“It’s okay,” she was saying softly, looking down at her belly and stroking it gently. “You can take your time.” She stopped and seemed to listen. “You’re nervous? I understand. We believe in you and we love you and you can come when you’re ready.”
She turned to me. “I feel like I just love her so much.” She began to cry. “It’s like pain.”
“Like an ache?”
I was so grateful that you didn’t emerge last night. I was so tired I couldn’t imagine it. And now I’m so grateful at how polite you already are.
It seems last night before bedtime you knocked on the door (contraction), saying, “Excuse me. Excuse me, but may I say something?” Contraction. “I know you’re very tired after all this waiting” (contraction), “and you’d rather I start coming through the door when you’re awake and rested” (contraction), “so I just wanted to let you know that I will be starting sometime tomorrow.” Contraction.
These were the first real contractions. None of those Braxton-Hicks imposters, it seemed. They were new sensations, so painful they wore your mom out, about eight of them through the middle of the night, averaging around thirty seconds each. I timed them with an app on my phone.
Any day now.
Standing in another dimension, you are knocking at the door of the one we are in. A new consciousness is about to enter the world, a miracle as clear as any recorded by the Catholic Church and far more numerous, and nothing will ever be the same.