He arrived angry, which, in retrospect, I should have expected.
2:17 a.m., Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, a Tuesday in late spring when the city outside was doing its slow, reluctant thaw. Fourteen hours of labor, the last four of which I spent in a kind of focused, animal silence that the midwife later described to someone in the hall as the most controlled she had ever seen from a first-time mother. I didn’t feel controlled. I felt like I was surviving one minute at a time, which is a different thing, though perhaps from the outside they look the same.
And then he was there.
The sound he made when he entered the world was not a cry so much as a declaration, full-throated and indignant, the sound of someone who had been somewhere comfortable and taken profound exception to the change of
