We waited for you. We waited when “baby” was a word that belonged to somebody else, a cute face passing by in a stroller on the street, the subject of a story told in staff rooms at work, a crying voice on a television screen.

“Baby” was an abstraction, but then, at the beginning, so were you. You were the subject of collections of facts in books, what to expect, when, and here’s how to survive pregnancy. The word “baby” meant gathering a collection of goods: a crib, a series of cute outfits, a stroller. We waited through those days- days of fear, of joy, days of “what ifs”, days made long by insomnia as we learned more and more about what it meant to “have a baby”.

In books, a baby in development in the womb is a quantity to be measured, a life compared to the size and weight of fruit or vegetables. Now he’s as big as a pea. But what kind of pea already is developing internal organs? Now he’s as big a sweet potato. But what kind of a potato has a beating heart? And could any sweet potato be a sweet as ours?

What does he look like, we wondered?

We gave you your name while we waited, consulting charts and graphs and books. We picked the 428th most popular name in the whole of Canada over the past decade. We knew your name before we knew your face, before you even had a face. A mother’s intuition that you were a boy.