We named him Elliott; I can’t remember why.

It was a strange period that began then. When we took him home and Stephen held him, I watched them together and cried out when Stephen shifted him, afraid he would drop the baby or wouldn’t recognize one of his needs. I knew. I knew everything about Elliott, when he was wet or hungry or had gas or needed just to be held. I didn’t think Stephen noticed enough, he didn’t know the baby well enough, didn’t watch carefully. Neither of us could let the baby cry, rushing to the bedroom when we heard him, each eager to pick him up, but Stephen deferred to me, convinced of the mystique of mother and child, and almost always I won and comforted Elliott; but sometimes, if I were susceptible to the pleading in Stephen’s face, I would hand the baby to him, very carefully and gingerly, and watch them with worried eyes until I suppose Stephen became uncomfortable, or weary of not being trusted with his son, and handed him back to me.

Much worse, though, were visitors. I was tortured by people who wanted to hold him, jiggle him, try to make him smile or make sounds, and they didn’t notice, or didn’t care, that I was in agony. Our parents visited, and I was barely allowed to touch Elliott, they took over, assumed I knew nothing about him, tried to teach me, when it was I, only I, who knew exactly what to do, because I knew this baby as if he were myself, and they couldn’t know. I was his mother, and I was full of rage.

They told me how to feed him and when, and suggested it wasn’t a bad thing to let him cry for a while sometimes, and I hated them for wanting me to hurt this little human being, mine, when he was helpless, and I was all he had to defend him. They must have seen something of my crazy anger, because before she left my mother took me aside.

“Let him breathe, dear,” she said. “They’re not as fragile as you might think, or they wouldn’t get this far, so do try to relax a little. I know it’s hard, especially when it’s the first one, but remember that nobody can be a perfect mother and nobody can have a perfect child.”

She smiled at me as if we shared some knowledge. “I thought when you were born that we could both be perfect, but of course it didn’t work out that way, and I thought I was a failure. But we both got over it, didn’t we? I made mistakes with you, you’ll make mistakes with him, you can’t help it. None of us can.”