A year and three days ago, almost to the hour, I stood in the kitchen of our New York City apartment and thought about lunch. It was sunny outside, but cold, and I didn’t want to try and stretch the zipper of my down jacket over my very pregnant stomach. My husband typed away at his hastily built standing desk on the marble island. He’d been planning to start two weeks of paternity leave once I gave birth, but of course life loves a good PLOT TWIST, and here’s a good one for you: Five days earlier, he came home from work complaining of a stomachache that increased rapidly in severity, until he swore he had to go to the ER. I stayed home, heavily pregnant and silently (okay not so silently) cursing him for taking the risk of walking into a hospital waiting room with this confusing, nebulous threat of a virus hanging over us. People were just starting to throw around the words pandemic and quarantine.
“Wait it out!” I said. “It’s probably something you ate!” I said.
Nine hours in the ER waiting room and one emergency appendectomy later, I was slightly apologetic for being wrong. (But between you and me, I was still low-key annoyed that he went even though he turned out to be right. Look, I never claimed to be reasonable all of the time!)
So there he is, at home all day, surgery recovery kicking his paternity leave into an early start—headphones in and a steady stream of engineering-related jargon swirling loudly around the air. I am increasingly ill at ease, escaping the noise to sit in the just-finished nursery—the room quiet and dark. I rock in the white linen armchair and look at the tiny clothes. The miniature rain boots. The stacks of diapers piled neatly on the shelves.
I’m a little bit nervous about the state of the world, but mostly I’m thinking about my own immediate situation. And anyway, people seem to be tossing around the phrase “two weeks” a lot. As in, two weeks of staying home from work and we’ll be back. Two weeks of keeping our distance on the street and we can hug again.
One friend tells me two weeks is the amount of time I should expect to do nothing after giving birth. In an email to me she writes, “Plan on resting for 2 weeks after childbirth—like hardcore down time. I suggest not even leaving the house for 2 weeks.”
That works out nicely, I think. Yet regardless of my attempts to remain calm, I still succumb to panic purchasing a miniature chest freezer on Amazon while lying in bed wide-awake at 2 AM.
So on that particular Friday, as I debated what to have for lunch, it happened to be my birthday. The world had entered a hazy half-state of function ahead of the impending lockdown so there wasn’t much to do by way of celebrating. I decided to order a Sweetgreen salad, even though I cringed at the thought of how many salads I plan to eat over the next month. (I don’t need to meal prep much! I said to friends. I’ll just pop out to Sweetgreen every day with the baby! — a sentiment which now strikes me as almost painfully, sweetly innocent. I want to reach out to my year-ago-self and stroke my hair and tell me that a very bad storm is approaching but I’ll be okay.)
Me (top) and my little sister (left) with our favorite birthday cake growing up.
So, a celebratory birthday Sweetgreen it was. We both order salads and walk around the block before picking them up. I’m swaying side to side a little with every step, my body off kilter from the steep swell of my bump, which lies so low that strangers stop me constantly on the street to say I must be having a boy.
Salads in hand, we climb the four flights of stairs back up to the apartment. I'm slow and breathless and by the time we get to the top, I pause to lean against the doorjamb for a moment.
I walk inside, where he’s already back on the phone, rapidly arguing with someone about investment strategies and risk calculations. At the kitchen sink, I reach up quickly to turn on the faucet when I pause, confused and a little bit panicked.
He must sense something has happened because he holds the phone away from his ear and gestures at me, as if to say what’s wrong? and I point to my stomach. “Hang on, hang on,” he says to someone in the meeting, mouthing questions at me, but I’m too busy trying to simultaneously pull off my leggings and dial my mom’s number.
I stand half undressed in the middle of the kitchen and tell her I think my water broke, and from there everything happens sl-o-o-o-wly. My doctor tells us to head to the hospital, sounding remarkably unconcerned and unconvinced that anything is happening. I take a long, slow shower—dubious myself that this could be the day. It’s my birthday! I feel fine! I’m fairly certain I am going to be pregnant forever!
An hour later, we stand awkwardly in the hallway outside the reception desk at the labor and delivery ward. “You can sit down honey,” the nurse calls to me after we’ve been waiting for 15 minutes.
I don’t want to sit down, partly because I’m irrationally afraid of touching any surfaces right now and partly because I want someone to please come tell me if I’m about to have a baby or not.
Another two hours pass—time has started to feel meaningless and free-floating, like I’ve detached from the world at large—as I sit in a hospital bed and watch the drip-drip-drip of an IV and wait for my contractions to start. It feels a bit like sitting on a sunny beach and watching the sky for signs of a promised hurricane. Sensing any little shift in the air for breezes.
The night nurses make a sign to hang on the cinderblock wall that reads Happy Birthday Posie! —I’m told I can’t eat anything but liquid so I spoon pale pink Jell-o into my mouth with a plastic spoon and watch half of a movie, the light from the small laptop screen bathing my hospital gown in a neon glow, the windows in the buildings lining the streets beyond in tidy rows, all luminescent and honeyed.
And then time goes soft and strange—minutes feel like hours, some hours feel like seconds. One moment my husband is sleeping in a crooked angle in the chair nearby and the next, there are whispers from nurses—three of them, I think, but the pain is so blinding I can’t absorb my surroundings, so white-hot and unrelenting that I feel suspended in it, like a room with no walls and no ceiling and no end. There is the dark room, and the smooth pretty face of the resident and her bouncy ponytail and deep blue scrubs, and so much time that I’m swimming in it. And then, as if someone flipped the videotape to fast-forward, the doctor rushes in with more people behind her, flipping on all the switches and flooding the room with fluorescent light.
He’s born within the hour once everything goes bright: the music loud on the speakers because I keep yelling for someone to turn it up louder please, an oxygen mask held at intervals over my nose and mouth, the steady and firm set line of the OB’s mouth as she coaches me, the surreal sensation of feeling the baby’s head slick under my fingers when she tells me to reach down to see how much more I have to push.
Was that really a year ago now? It’s vivid enough in my sense memory that I think it must have just happened.
I’ve said over again and again that I can’t believe I ever didn’t know this tiny human—he’s so like me, in so many ways already, that it feels partly like a little piece of my long-existing heart is just toddling around outside of my body.
But of course, I do remember life before him—it was me before and it’s me still after. I haven’t changed, but rather life seems to have suddenly gained a huge amount of new depth, as if I looked down and surprise! the ground below me was twice as deep and the sky above me twice as high. Like the world didn’t change, but expanded. Like everything was colorful before, but now it’s deeper and richer and more varied in hue; like my sense of self is amplified by a thousand degrees.
(That being said, there’s nothing like having a baby to make you feel two opposite yet strangely complementary sensations: as though you finally found a missing puzzle piece of yourself and as though you’re completely alone in unknown, brand new territory. The truth is, I think, that we often become much more keenly aware of ourselves only when we’re confronted with the unfamiliar.)
And yet here we are: a year later. My birthday, then a mere few hours later, his. Instead of making a cake myself this year, I ask a friend with her own custom cake business to surprise us — she delivers the most gorgeous cake I’ve ever seen with layers of pink blackberry mousse sandwiched between moist rounds of Chez Panisse almond cake.
(I know this because I begged her for the recipe—the crumb of the cake so impossibly plush, the flavor so delicate and subtly sweet, that I knew I’d try making it myself. But today is not that day so you’ll have to ogle the photo for now!)
After this year, I’ll go back to making my own for both of us. When I was little, my mom always made the same cake: 1-2-3-4 cake (classic yellow) with fluffy seven-minute frosting. And today, I’ve written down that cake recipe, should you want to make your own tradition of it, but here I’ve topped with raspberry buttercream. If you want to try my tried-and-true birthday favorite, you can find the seven-minute frosting recipe here.
1-2-3-4 Cake with Fresh Raspberry Buttercream
Makes one 8” layer cake
For the cake
1 cup (226g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups (396g) sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
3 cups (339g) sifted cake flour*
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup (227g) milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
For the frosting
4 egg whites, at room temperature
3/4 cup (148g) sugar
1 cup (226g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup (120g) fresh raspberries
*Be sure to sift your flour first and then measure it.
Preheat the oven to 350° F.
Butter and flour the bottom and sides of three 8” cake pans and tap out the excess flour.
In the bowl of a stand mixer or beating vigorously with a wooden spoon, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Continue to beat on medium speed, adding eggs one at a time until each is incorporated.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the salt, flour, and baking powder. Mix together the milk and vanilla and set aside. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the butter/sugar/egg mixture, alternating with the milk/extract. Mix until just combined.
Divide the batter equally among prepared pans. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
Let the cakes cool for 20 minutes on a rack before inverting them. Once fully cooled, stick them in the freezer while you make the frosting (this is optional but makes them easier to frost).
For the frosting: Pour the egg whites and sugar into a bowl of a double boiler. Use a whisk to beat the mixture over the heat until the sugar has entirely dissolved. Remove from the heat and either transfer to a stand mixer or get out an electric hand mixer. Beat until the egg whites form stiff peaks. Slowly add the butter in tiny pieces. If the frosting starts to separate or curdle, keep beating! It should smooth out. Really, do not panic. Lots of times it will curdle but just carry on and have faith. With enough beating, it will come back together.
Purée the raspberries in a blender until smooth. Press the mixture through a strainer to remove the seeds and mix the purée into the frosting to tint it pink. (Note: I used plain buttercream in my filling, then added the raspberries to the frosting just for the outside so it would look extra pink. You can do the same; you can use plain buttercream and skip the raspberries; or you can add the raspberries in the beginning, as these recipes instruct, for a pale pink frosting to use on both the inside and the outside of the cake.)
Remove the cake from the freezer. Place one layer on a cake stand or serving plate and spread a thin layer of frosting on top. Top with the second layer (it doesn't matter whether you stack them right side up or upside down as long as you add enough frosting in between each layer to make the cake sit evenly; you shouldn't need to trim the cake layers unless yours came out of the oven very domed), add another layer of frosting, and top with the final layer. My cake looks a little different because I sliced one of my layers in half to get four uneven layers. I'd suggest sticking with the original three even layers.
Next, make a very thin layer of frosting over the cake (this is called a crumb coat). Refrigerate for about 20 minutes. Remove from the refrigerator and add the final thick layer of frosting over the entire cake. To make my design, use an offset spatula to make small smudges all over the surface and sides of the frosting. Top with fresh flowers, fresh fruit, or candles!