So where was I?

Oh yes.

January, 2009. We’d been exterminated twice and were still getting bit. I had a row of bites along my extremely pregnant belly. It was pathetic. I was pathetic. One night I had to go out to the grocery store. It was sleeting, and the only parking spot was at the far corner of the lot. Feeling like the broad side of a bus, I exited past the bored gaze of the lot security guard, teetered unsteadily across the icy lot with my cart of groceries, and heaved them into the trunk. The misery! I was brimming with self-pity. What kind of world was I bringing this child into? A nursery filled with pesticides? A town riddled with pestilence? WHERE A PREGNANT LADY HAD TO RISK LIFE AND LIMB BRINGING DINNER HOME FROM THE GROCERY STORE?

When I turned to push the cart back to the store, the security guard was standing silently behind me in the sleet, waiting to take it from me.

Two weeks after the due date, my son was born. The bag I had packed in advance for the hospital had been sealed up in a garbage bag for the exterminations, so I put my toothbrush in my purse and wore my grandmother’s fur. It occurred to me, between contractions, that we might have brought bedbugs to the hospital, but then I got narcotics injected into my spine and hadn’t a care in the world. Afterward, awash in hormones, I wept over my newborn son and wished we could stay in the maternity ward forever, where the sheets were perpetually clean and my meals were brought to me on trays and a rotating cast of brisk Irish nurses helped me shower and had nicknames for my hemorrhoids.