Back to creating a tiny human. From a tiny speck of cells. I spent the better part of nine months mostly miserable. I hated pregnancy. I hated the nausea that lasted 6 months. I hated the carpal tunnel for which I needed two rounds of cortisone shots in each wrist. I hated the way my body changed and didn’t fit into any of my clothes. I didn’t recognize myself physically or emotionally. The nightly insulin injections. The way I felt like I didn’t have dominion over my body. The fear and worry and anxiety that plagued me with every google that ended in “If you do this thing, your baby will die.”

I referred to poor little Stormy as a parasite (I stand firm by this, though now that he’s, like, real, it seems crazy). I watch this tiny little guy, barely two weeks old, and can’t help but think about how he was literally inside my body, just as he is with all of the limbs and organs and bodily functions that he has now. Every hiccup he makes in the outside world, I’m thrown back to when he had them inside my body, making me giggle uncontrollably. With every movement, I am reminded of the strange feeling of him moving inside me. Even when it didn’t seem real. He was real. Is real.

Even now, it seems too good to be true. Now that the tiny body that took over my body is not there. The empty, squishy feeling in my abdomen — and the scar and the 27 different rashes and other fun side effects of my seven-day hospital stay and surgery — the only remaining physical reminders that he grew from a tiny seed into an entire person all inside my body.

And so I hold him and stare at him and think to myself, “hello little person. I made you.”