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My baby surprised me the other day by reaching up and touching his head when I read the word “head” aloud from one of his books. I had not been trying to teach him body parts. He’s 15 months old, and to be honest, I haven’t been too worried about teaching him anything. We just do, and I assume he’ll learn. With so many different and conflicting strategies on how best to raise our children, it all feels a bit excessive. Much like religion, everyone is so certain their way is the right way and everyone else is wrong, and meanwhile, time passes and people live and people die regardless. My thoughts are that, as long as I interact with him and talk to him and show him around our little world, he’ll eventually learn what’s yellow and what’s a frog and what’s a foot and arm.

So it surprised me that he knew “head,” because I had never attempted to teach him. He also, to my delight, knew “belly” and “feet.” Seeing the little things he’s figuring out is the most magical thing I’ve ever experienced. I’ve tested him on some other things – legs, hands, ears – and he doesn’t have those figured out quite yet. Hands in particular might take him a while. For him to ever learn that word, I’ll have to make an effort to stop referring to them as his rat grabbers.

He has never grabbed a rat. I believe he would grab a rat if he had the opportunity, but there haven’t been any rats in our house since the day I found out I was pregnant, two years ago this week. I learned of his existence under a rat moon.

I had just gone to my little home gym to get in a workout before meeting a friend for the Mariners game when I saw a rat scurrying out from under my treadmill. He stopped midway through the room and stared at me. I stared at him. For a second neither of us moved, and then I screamed and he ran back to the treadmill. I was too horrified to move. I texted my husband “there’s a rat in here send help.”

I’m a sensible woman who knows better than to be afraid of a rat. It’s mice that terrify me. They’re the ones with all the diseases, and in the winter they fill up our sheds and cabins and RVs and then in the spring we try to sweep up the mess and their devious little diseases get into our lungs and we die. No, not a rat. But the thing about rats is there’s never just one. So if you see a rat, you’ve probably already got a huge fucking mess on your hands.

In our case it was our neighbors who had the mess. Our garage shares a wall with theirs, and I could see the little spot they’d chewed through to get into ours. And get into ours they did. There were little rat shits everywhere. All along all four walls of the garage. A variety of sizes – there had been rat babies. Rats is one of those messes where it feels impossible to even start. It’s such an insurmountable mess. There’s no right way to do it. It just feels, in that instance, like you will never have a garage without rats again.

Our garage is relatively sparse. We have shelves along one wall and “gear” along another – camping chairs, shovels and rakes, a lawnmower. Along a third wall is our washer and dryer and our chest freezer. The fourth wall is the garage door. It’s just a single-car garage, but we keep it empty enough to actually park our car inside it. Not a lot of other households in our neighborhood can say the same. A couple houses down, they use their garage as a workshop, with tools and parts everywhere. Another house stores a bunch of old kid gear in theirs. And our direct neighbors, they keep their garage full of rats.

So it could have been worse. We could have discovered a rat problem in a garage packed floor-to-ceiling with junk. All I had to do was drag everything into the middle to clean up the mess. I think I wore like six masks. I was lying earlier, and am at least a little afraid all critters are loaded up with diseases. Fortunately, I found no evidence of actual rats aside from the one I’d seen – it seemed the rats had come, had a monstrous shit party, realized we had nothing for them to consume, and gone back to the all-inclusive rat resort that is our neighbor’s garage.

The shelves in our garage house all kinds of things we don’t use often. One shelf holds outdoor things – sleeping bags, a tent, my beloved inner-tube. Another holds a lifetime supply of compostable utensils, bowls and plates leftover from our wedding reception and some seldom-used outdoor cooking items (I think somebody left a turkey fryer here at some point?). The third shelf holds my husband’s home-brewing supplies. These things get used even less than the rest. What I didn’t know at the time was that several of the bottles on that shelf were still full of years-old beer, something my husband had brewed and seemingly forgotten. These were the bottles that fell off the shelf and shattered.

The rat poop was one thing. Getting the smell of old beer out of a hot garage was infinitely worse.

After finishing that project – my husband was gone for most of it, conveniently lounging in a recliner at the blood bank giving platelets – there was little I wanted more than a strong drink. Fortunately, I had plans to meet a friend at a bar later before making our way to the game. Shortly before leaving to meet him, I took a pregnancy test “just in case.” We’d been trying, but I assumed it was much too early to get a positive test (8dpo, for those who speak the language). And of course, because he has always loved to dash my plans, my little buddy made his presence known with the faintest of double lines.

When I say there was little I wanted more than a strong drink, this baby was what I did want more. We were eight months removed from a particularly difficult miscarriage that had forced us to quit trying for several months while I went to the hospital for weekly blood tests. I was overjoyed to get that positive test, but it would take me many, many weeks to start allowing myself to believe a real baby was going to come of it.

I met my friend at that bar. I had a water. We went to the game, and the Mariners beat the Toronto Blue Jays 8-3. The Blue Jays were also born under a rat moon. I know it because every away series near the border is an excuse for their rabid fans to descend upon that poor city and piss and shit all over its garage floor and then desert it when there’s nothing left to consume, leaving the poor inhabitants of that city gazing around at the ruins, wondering how they’ll ever clean it up. I worked for seven years at a bar across the street from the stadium and I experienced it first hand. I’ve only ever seen a Blue Jays fan stand on his table and poor out his beer while singing “I’m a little teapot.” I’ve only ever seen a Blue Jays fan flash a children’s birthday party as the manager dragged him from the building.

I never again saw that rat who was under my treadmill, seemingly the last of his family to return to the garage next door. For a while I suspected he’d crawled inside the treadmill, but if he died in there it never smelled. It’s an unsettling thought, walking on a treadmill and wondering if the belt is slowly sanding down a rat corpse each time it loops through the machine.

My neighbors are still running their little rat motel, which I know because I see a new pest control truck outside their house every few months. I’m always a little afraid a few adventurous rats will wander back over to my garage. But I do know that if we do end up with rats again we’ve got an advantage because, where most babies have hands, my baby has little rat grabbers. And a head, a belly and feet. And so far, nothing else.

My sweet baby, on this day last year you were cut from my abdomen and the doctor still needed to use a vacuum because your enormous head wouldn’t even fit through the incision. For your first few days you had marks on your head from the suction. I liked to imagine you arrived via the claw machine at the grocery store. You really have grown into your head. Everyone’s been saying it.

I had never noticed Seattle had any cobblestone streets until Google managed to direct us home from the hospital using every single one of them. Your little head was jostling all over in your car seat and I was certain we’d already broken you, before even getting you home. I realized then that the classes we’d taken to prepare for your arrival had been a complete waste of time. They hadn’t told us anything about what to do with a baby – they had taught us only that you would spin your way through the birth canal like Kermit the frog, that dairy in the mother’s diet was never the problem, and that we shouldn’t shake you. They hadn’t even told us that the food in the hospital would be free. We may as well have been taking karate classes.

_{^{Normally I won’t post photos of my son here, but as a newborn he was literally a different creature. This looks nothing like him now.}}

I really only remember fragments from those first weeks, like the day after drinking too much and you can only come up with little Polaroid images in an otherwise dark and uncertain expanse of time. When we had to go back to the hospital two days later because I developed postpartum preeclampsia, I remember waking in the middle of the night. You and your dad were down the hall with the nurses and I was alone in the room, my head all fucked up from the magnesium drip, nobody there with me and I thought that maybe I’d imagined I had a baby, imagined I had a husband. I paged a nurse and frantically asked if I had a family there somewhere. All the drugs made me feel like I was melting into the mattress. It was hard to lift my tongue enough to speak to anyone. I felt too unsteady to nurse you on the hospital bed, like maybe I’d drop you, but the hospital staff wouldn’t let me sit on the floor. They acted like it was the craziest thing they’d ever heard.

I remember that the whole first week home with you was tense because my blood pressure didn’t go back down after we were discharged the second time. I was so worried I’d have to go back to the hospital again, that we’d never get to just be home. When I was eventually prescribed a blood pressure medication over the phone, and I was able to pick it up from the pharmacy, without having to return to the hospital, I finally felt like things might be okay. Like maybe I wasn’t going to die. It was a sunny day in late March, much like today. We wrapped you in a blanket and sat on the porch. It was the first moment any of it felt real.

_{^{I do not recommend Target’s blackout curtains}}

I remember sitting up all night with you, watching Below Deck on my iPad as you slept in my arms, eating an amount of chocolate that I later found out could have been making you sick secondhand, a thing they don’t tell you in any of the pamphlets because they evidently don’t think anyone’s going to be eating that much chocolate. I remember those nights sleeping in the recliner in your room as a very sweet time. After I was certain you were asleep I’d place you gently into your crib and I’d sleep in the chair, maybe 60 minutes here, maybe 90 minutes there. Then you’d wake for food and I’d rock you, your face illuminated in the soft Mediterranean glow of Captain Sandy’s disappointing seasons, until you went back to sleep. You never did cry much at night.

I remember when you were four weeks old, how discouraged I felt each morning when your dad left for work because I had another long day ahead of me of trying to figure out how to get you to stop crying. You hated the stroller, you hated the car seat, we had a handful of carriers and you hated them all. You cried when I rocked you and you cried when I didn’t. If you were awake, you were crying. In desperation I cut dairy from my diet and within 24 hours you had changed. You didn’t stop crying – you still haven’t stopped crying – but there began to be pauses. That first time I rocked you and sang to you like I had been doing for weeks and you actually looked up at me and watched my face, I burst into tears. I guess one of us had to be crying.

I remember the weeks we had to wrestle your arms down as you fell asleep, to keep you from pulling out the pacifier you couldn’t fall sleep without, simply because you had realized you had arms and could do it. In those weeks it sometimes took 90 minutes to get you to fall asleep for what would inevitably be a 34-minute nap. During the final week of my maternity leave we cut out the pacifier altogether, and then we all got sick. It was the hardest week of my life. For those first few nights I had to stand and bounce you until you literally passed out from exhaustion. I’m so, so glad those nights are over. But I would do all of it again, all of the hard times, over and over, just to get you.

I’m so grateful I get the opportunity to experience you growing. It was an experience I wasn’t sure I’d ever have, and it has been so much more challenging but so much more wonderful than I ever imagined. I had crude cartoon images in my mind of what it might be like to have a baby, and life with you has been a fully-animated feature-length film of a tornado ripping through a village and leaving trucks in trees and cows on roofs, and laughter in ears, and warmth in hearts. My shoulders are covered in bruises from your terrible little teeth clamping down on me when I carry you up the stairs. And my life is full of everything wonderful, from you being mine.