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…