We get in the car and make a quick stop at the Starbucks nearest our home to order the hot cocoa. (Making it himself would require too much effort.) We rush home from there, and he starts a fire in our living room fireplace. We sit on the area rug, watching the fire, and warm-up as we drink our Starbucks cocoa and eat Pepperidge Farms cookies he finds in the pantry of our kitchen.

This is repeated several times every winter. And later when I’m ten, eleven, even twelve years old... I pretend to whine and force him to use the promise of cocoa before I relent and leave the hill willingly. Even though I know by now that the cocoa is always a given. And he knows that I know, but he plays along anyway.

In front of the fire, I’ll tell him anything. He asks about my friends and school and whatever else is going on. He does this at other times too, but something about the fire makes it special. That and the black-and-white picture hanging above the mantle. It’s a candid close-up of him, my mom, and me. I’m six months old and bright-eyed in the picture, and they are both smiling. His smile is subtle, hers is huge and bright, and mine is toothless.

Sometimes I ask him about my mom, as my only connection to her is through him. For me, he is the key to her, and he is always willing to share stories about her.

“I wish we could go sledding every day,” I say with a sigh.

Without missing a beat, he replies, “If we could go sledding every day, it would become mundane and boring. Kind of like brushing your teeth or picking-up your room. And it wouldn’t be so special anymore, would it?”

I smile and relax my head into his shoulder.

******

I never wanted to have a kid. Never.

I wanted a singular existence. Ok, sharing life with a woman—fine, if she's the right woman. Sharing life with a kid—too much work.

Funny how life doesn't always give you what you want. But sometimes it gives you exactly what you need, even if it seems inconvenient at the time.

I was doing my fellowship in nephrology at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, and Maggie was in her last year of residency there. We were both busy and ambitious, and one day blurred into the next. But when we were home together, nothing else in the world existed. She was smart, witty, fun, and put up with me easily. She talked almost as much as I do, but she was far less self-centered than I am. I could never get enough of her body—she’d been a ballet dancer through college, so she had a nice ass, hard thighs, and small though perky breasts. And she didn’t starve herself like a lot of dancers, so she was healthily thin, not emaciated.

I hadn’t seen her in two days, and we tore each other’s clothes off as soon as she walked into the apartment. My eyes stopped at her breasts, but not for the usual lecherous reason.

They were swollen.

I touched one, and clearly it felt sore to her.

“You’re pregnant,” I said clinically. Like talking to a patient rather than to the woman I loved.

“I can’t be,” she protested. For a doctor-in-training and a former dancer, she was out of touch with her own body. Or just in denial. “I’m on the pill.”

“Yea, the pill never fails,” I mocked. “You’re pregnant.” I inadvertently said it more softly that time, as something in my heart fluttered. I suddenly had a romantic notion about a little tiny human being made of her and me. I smiled, which seemed to surprise her.

She was a little freaked, and the mood was killed. Guess I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth until after the sex. She couldn’t stand not knowing for absolute certain. So I went out and bought a urine stick test. Even though home-tests weren’t great back then, it came up clearly positive—no question about the result.

She was scared and happy—and surprised at my happiness. I told her “carpe diem,” and she was convinced of my sincerity. We talked a while about how things would change, and then I was able to get her back into the right mood for sex.

Both sets of our parents visited at the same time for Christmas, so we shared the news with them face to face. My parents were happy about the baby but pissed about the lack of a marriage. Her parents were pissed about everything. C’ést la vie and kiss my ass.

I came home from work late one night and found my Maggie’s sleeping form in our bed, on her side, breathing softly. I lay behind her on my side, my arm around her. I kissed her temple.

“I don’t care what our parents say,” I whispered. “We'll be good at this. Really good.” I needed to hear it more than she did, because I was afraid of becoming my own father.

I guess she was awake, because she reached back and stroked my face. She whispered sleepily, “Of course we will; I’m not worried.”

I sighed and smiled wistfully into her hair. “Still. The kid’s gonna need therapy someday.”

She spoke aloud now. “We’ll screw up this kid in our own way, but it won’t be like what our parents did to us. It’ll be more like ‘My parents provided boundaries, but they were way too understanding of me. I was never an eye-rolling, sarcastic teenager, because my parents were sarcastic, and I had to rebel against them somehow!’”

I laughed. We were like all first-time expectant parents, determined not to mess up our kid, determined to be an improvement upon our own parents. Maggie's certainty was infectious to me. In that moment, I was sure everything would be all right.

The pregnancy was healthy. The baby was born in July after a 29-hour labor. Maggie was quiet and strong throughout the unmedicated, natural birth she wanted so badly. She sat on a birthing stool to push Katie out, and the obstetrician moved over to let me catch my daughter—pink, warm, and covered in blood, amniotic fluid, and vernix caseosa. I’d caught babies before, during my obstetrics rotation in med school. But this was more intense and poignant than any of those experiences.

She was mine, she was the elephant in the room, nothing would be the same after that.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Katie. I handed her to Maggie, and neither of us could hold back tears. I was grateful we’d chosen to do this at University of Maryland Hospital rather than at work. Maggie didn’t want our co-workers to see her naked. I didn’t want our co-workers to catch me in an emotional moment.

The obstetrician did the initial exam on Katie as Maggie held her. About ten minutes later, Maggie birthed the placenta, and we waited for the cord to stop pulsing before I cut it. I told the nurse to leave the placenta in the room for now, as I wanted to examine it myself a little later. After the baby, the placenta is the coolest thing about this whole process. It's an organ made by the mother's body upon impregnation solely for the purposes of nourishing the baby, eliminating its waste, and providing it respiratory gases. Last time I'd had an opportunity to examine one was during med school. Maggie didn't mind that I took my eyes off the baby for a few minutes in favor of the placenta—especially since I waited until she and the baby were both asleep.

At home, Katie slept in the bed with us and nursed all night long. We were careful to practice safe co-sleeping, including no pillows and no soft bedding. We were well-versed on the benefits of co-sleeping, which is practiced safely in most of the world but very frowned-upon in the United States. It promotes bonding, many mothers sleep better, and babies nurse more frequently and pattern their breathing around the mother (hence reducing the risk of SIDS).

Katie was the clingiest sort of baby. I usually got home from work between 6:00 and 7:00 at night, and Maggie would look more exhausted than I’d ever seen her after working a 36-hour shift. Sometimes it was clear she hadn’t showered or gotten much to eat that day. I would take Katie from her tired arms, lounge on the recliner, and lay her on my legs, lifting my knees to angle her toward me. I let her little fists close around my thumbs, and I’d talk and smile at her. I was usually rewarded with coos and smiles. Sometimes I was punished with “I-want-mommy” cries or with a poopy diaper.

I talked to Katie mostly in English, but I peppered it with Spanish, Mandarin, and Latin. My usual nickname for her was Filia, Latin for “daughter.” Maggie loved my affinity with languages; she joked that Katie would be a multi-lingual, scientific genius with an artistic sensibility.

Occasionally Katie would wake in the middle of the night and refuse to nurse back to sleep, and I’d try getting her back to sleep by walking around with her upright, head on my shoulder. “Go back to sleep, Filia,”  as I rubbed her back softly. If that didn’t work, I sang in a hushed voice. Her favorite song was “Tiny Dancer,” a song I began singing to her only because her mom had been a dancer.

(Later at 8 years old, she went through a phase of nightmares and fear of going to sleep. I had to sing “Tiny Dancer” to her every night and lie with her until she fell asleep.)

The three of us had a happy—though tired—life together in our modest little apartment, living on my modest little fellowship salary.

So when Maggie died unexpectedly, it was like being hit with a ton of bricks.

She'd gone out that night with the only friend from her mommy-group whom she actually liked. They went to the movies to see Pretty Woman—a movie which did not interest me in the least. On their way back from the theater, they crossed paths with a drunk driver. 'Nuff said.

Katie was 22 months old and still nursing—once to get to sleep and sometimes once in the middle of the night. So we were still co-sleeping with her. The first night without Maggie was the toughest on both of us; it took hours for me to calm her and get her to sleep. Cow milk in a sippy cup didn’t do the trick, even when I warmed it to body temperature. She just wanted Maggie. So did I.

We cried together, and eventually she collapsed in exhaustion.

I felt like I was drowning in my grief, and Katie still needed so much and didn’t understand the first thing about what was happening. She had a really good vocabulary for her age, but for a long time she just kept asking for mommy. Every day I had to explain that mommy wouldn’t be coming back.

Eventually, she stopped asking.

I couldn’t get out of my own way, and then the practical realities of life crept up on me. I’d have to find a good daycare center before I could return to work. Maggie had wanted to stay home with Katie and avoid daycare, and now I had to screen daycares and pick one to entrust with Katie's safety and daily needs.

My mother stayed with us a while and cared for her so I could earn a paycheck in the interim until the daycare I chose had an opening. It was the daycare that a lot of doctors at work used, it had a good reputation, everything checked out, and I was comfortable with the women working there.

When my fellowship was over and Katie was 3, I got a job in Trenton, New Jersey. I had to move away from the apartment I’d shared with Maggie, away from the restaurants and coffeehouses and bars we’d liked. I found a nice two-bedroom apartment—which I would buy a year later—in a beautiful historic building in Princeton. I took advantage of this move to transition Katie into her own bed in her own room, a process which went more smoothly than I could have hoped.

I didn’t get along with my boss, so that job didn’t last long. I soon found a better one at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. They had an in-house daycare, which was not only of excellent quality but also convenient for employees. It was open from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm, which was great for a young doctor like me who was also a single parent. Sometimes I just couldn’t help it; I had to work late.

Life became more exhausting than ever. But Katie turned into a decent sleeper, and she was mostly easy-going. (Was that her way of rebelling against me?) She was an endless source of humor for me, often saying something funny in that naive, adorable way that children have. She started learning to read at 3 years old and was doing basic math at 4. She was eager to know things, so I often left age-appropriate books and educational kinds of toys lying around the apartment for her to stumble upon and explore. I found the process of teaching her and watching her learn to be fascinating.

—G.H.