Like most parents, I’ll never forget the day – or in our case, night – we took the baby home from the hospital. How small he looked, in his car seat. How I worried that the hat they had given him was too big, and might slip down. How, in the rush of my premature labour, we hadn’t thought to bring a blanket from the little pile of soft, woollen ones we had been given by friends and family, so I wrapped him in my cardigan instead. How blindsided I was by the revelation that it was now we who were tasked with keeping him warm and alive.
The house was dark – it was late. Most of all, I remember thinking that it was cold. We had worried about the cold, it being a Victorian building that is prone to damp. We were instructed to keep the temperature at 18-20C. How we were supposed to do this, we were unsure. That first, unmoored, night we sat up, together, reeling in a living room that felt, like the rest of our flat, transfigured. We did not yet know how to live peacefully alongside this new being, and so we kept a vigil. An electric oil radiator and a hot-water bottle to warm the crib were deployed (it was removed before we put the baby in). It was early March.
