Emily Brisse

Emily, First of all, yes: that is still your name. In the past twelve months you have become mama and mother and mum, comfortable and soft and sing-songy and milk and bread. These are complex, intricate, beautiful things. They fit around your body like a winter blanket. But you are also still Em, still girl, still woman and partner and writer and dreamer and wanderer and springbud and bonfire and hawk. Sometimes it will surprise you, this speaking of your name, this connection to the you that was you before you became Mom. You will feel awe: that that you and this you can coexist. You will ask, How? Twelve months in, I will tell you: it doesn't matter. You can figure that out later, if you still want to. Think instead of the Why. Think instead of how wide and deep and expansive you are. Second, it will be okay: all of it. You will be scared of so many things. The labor and delivery, the tending of this helpless human being, the moment when the food prepared by family and fr

In the weeks before you were born, the temperatures dipped colder than they had in 1400 days or nights. Wind chills barreled in at -35'. People did not move about much. But you. Warm inside me, more perfectly comfortable than perhaps you will ever be again, you shifted and rolled and trembled and swayed. I sat on a Saturday morning with my feet up and my hands pressed against the sides of my stomach, contemplating the millimeters of skin, space, and time that separated us, for now. You were coming soon, any day or night. Barefoot and short sleeved, I did not care about the cold, thought only of the way I would come to know your familiar weight in a different place, hot and milky in my arms. Now you are a year old. This has been the coldest winter in twenty years, let alone 1400 days: wind chills at -45', school called off en masse, the outside world a frozen pane of white and gray and blue. I am not wearing short-sleeve shirts or going barefoot. The rings on my fingers sl