ABSTRACT
The first words that greeted my first child as he emerged from the warm womb were also the first that had once greeted me. But that standard identification of an infant by its genitals presupposes that other unspoken questions have already been answered. After all, most humans are born headfirst-“coming out of my mother upside down,” as Tori Amos sings-so the genitalia arrive late. One of our best friends had given birth to a dead baby; without breath, sex is irrelevant. So my own first thought was “It’s alive!” And that is what I remembered most vividly when, later, I tried to describe for Isaac the night of his birth.
