Tiny beating heart

Peeling off layers as a parent-to-be

There is a hyper-specific loneliness to lying on a hospital bed in a darkened ultrasound room, a blanket over your legs, waiting for the doctor to come in and perform a congenital anomaly scan on the 24-week-old baby in your womb. Not for the first time I am struck by how pregnancy makes you so in tune with yourself and your needs, so fiercely protective of this fragile life ripening inside you, that it almost feels isolating. The room is silent, eerie.

The doctor walks in and begins, without much preamble or ceremony except to warn me that the gel will be cold and the scan will take a while. She glides the probe over my stomach. There were so many things that could go wrong. So much bad news she could potentially break. But as I watch the images flicker on the screen, trying to make sense of the amorphous forms in black and white, what I am struck with is the opposite: the sheer magnitude of the realization that maybe nothing would go wrong, that everything would go right, and that in a few months we would be holding our healthy, perfect child in our arms.

It is when I see what is unmistakably a tiny heart, beating steadfast like a flower blooming and closing and blooming again, that what has been welling up in my chest finally spills over. Something in me cracks open. The doctor is gracious enough to pretend not to notice me wiping away tears. I am hit by the sharp and sudden awareness that whatever I hold in my own beating heart, the baby now holds in theirs too. Every pain and frustration I carry, every sad and angry thought. But also, miraculously, every single joy, everyone and everything I’ve ever loved: stumbling through vivid streets at night in a neon city, the smell of coconut oil on a cloudless beach day, picking at a cheese plate with friends, all of us sunburnt and a little drunk, moving into a new home — so much space, the ridiculous possibility it represents, the sound of the car pulling into the driveway, my husband’s face at the door as our dog wags his tail and I stand over a boiling pot of pasta, hair still wet from the shower. I imagine a stream of moments and memories coursing through me, pumping into the baby’s veins like blood, like nourishment or poison or both. All of it will be woven into the fabric of who they are. There is nothing as terrifying and wondrous.

On the screen, other anatomical parts take shape. Forehead, fingers, elbows and knees, a small foot. Nose and lips. A spine like train tracks. The doctor calls my husband in and tells us, to our immense relief, that everything looks good. It’s a girl, she says. We meet each other’s eyes: it’s a girl! Our beautiful baby girl, bursting into this mad, magical world with us by her side, for better or worse. There is nothing as terrifying and wondrous.

Outside the ultrasound room my eyes take some time to adjust to the light. My changing body, this growing belly, feels strange and familiar at once. We step into the sun together, three of us now, the rest of our lives shining down upon us.