When Sofia becomes aware of her body again, she is wearing a thin cotton shift, not hers. The lights are so bright they hurt her eyes. She squints and tries to sit, only to feel a colossal unraveling inside herself. Movement will unspool her. Sofia sinks back into the crisp hospital pillows.

Soon a nurse brings a small bundle to her. Sofia tries again to sit up, but this time there is pain, immense, and a weakness that steals her breath, that collapses her. She doesn’t like lying down, surrounded by strangers. She wants a mirror. Instead the nurse wedges a pillow behind Sofia’s shoulders and hands her the smallest person Sofia has ever seen.

The baby is a real human the size of a winter squash. She has two eyes and two ears and a mouth with puckered lips. She has skin like clouds and thin soft fingernails. She weighs seven pounds, they tell Sofia. We’ll get your husband, they tell Sofia. Sofia is left in the empty white room staring at a small womb-shaped animal, surrounded by the smell of wet flesh.

Julia is the name that comes to Sofia’s mind; it is familiar but clean, like fresh sheets or an open window. “It’s just yours,” she says, voice croaking, the first thing Sofia says to her daughter.

When newborn babies make eye contact they use their whole bodies to open their eyes and look at you and this is what Julia does now, she flexes her fingers and her feet and she purses her lips so she can open her eyes and stare at Sofia. Sofia stares back and she wills herself to be courageous. “What are we going to do?” she asks Julia. Her voice is jarring to her own ears.

Here in front of Sofia is incontrovertible evidence of her own power. No one had ever told her motherhood would be like this.

Look, look. Look what you have made.

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