Two days before you were born, at your grandparents’ house in Palmer, it was baton twirling upstairs and terrorism downstairs. Your grandparents, my parents, had the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on the big TV in the living room as they ate cereal, mixed half and half into their drip coffee, and made general comments to the dogs. Me, your aunt, had the downstairs television tuned to CNN, which showed images of a burning hotel in Mumbai over and over again. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was on the computer, checking email or horoscopes, and thinking about your mom, Kim, my sister. She was due the next day, and I wondered for not the first time if she would go into labor after the Thanksgiving turkey like a wife in a Lifetime movie. Whenever it was to happen, I knew it would change all of our lives forever.

That Thanksgiving, your mom and dad had decided to make an 18-pound turkey and to let me, your grandmother, and your great-grandmother do the rest. We were all happy to do it and I took it seriously as I rarely cooked anything for anyone besides myself. I chose to make haricots verts with hazelnuts and glazed carrots. The carrots were nothing shocking, but the haricots verts were relatively exotic to our traditional meat-and-potatoes family. But I felt like trying something new, like offering. It was the least I could do compared to the unmatchable thing Kim was about to offer us.

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We had been talking about you for months. We didn’t know then you were a girl, and Kim, Mom, Gram, and I had all speculated in one-to-one conversations what you would be. We knew you would be beautiful. We knew you would be loved and special. But all of us at one point were convinced you’d be a boy. Maybe it was because Kim had been a bit of a tomboy or because your father, Kevin, is such a masculine man, maybe it was because when Kim chose a Cabbage Patch doll in 1985, it was a boy called Jordan Gerald versus my Bea Bridget and Julie Paulette. Maybe it was because we were all curious about a little boy; my parents had had two girls, my dad, a man amongst women for almost as long as he could remember. He had three sisters growing up. Dad was 43 when his father died; his mother, your great-grandma, is living to this day.  And then he married Grandma, and had your mom and me, not in that order. Only a couple of effete dogs picked out by Grandma had comprised the male members of his family since his father’s death in 1983. So maybe we thought a boy made some kind of sense. But I always wanted you to be a girl.

You didn’t come right after the turkey and the haricots verts. You waited, patiently, until Saturday. The haricots verts weren’t a hit. I didn’t even like them. But you, oh, you.