I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

However tight the team of parents and family and community beyond that, supporting a child in utero, that baby is carried by one body alone.

Their body is not only one of creation, of labor, of internal mystery, but one of a singular emotional gravity.

During the spring months, I think of my mother's somberness,

typically around April, each year, she would drive the both of us to Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.

She parked the car on the banks of the Schoolkill River.

We sat in silence and watched Coxon's yell commands at rowers dipping

oar-blades into water. There was a placid calm to their synchronous power that

resulted in a forward glide across the river's surface.

Once I reached to turn the radio dial on, she gently guided my hand back to my lap.

After what felt like hours of staring out at the water,

eventually she cried.

Gentle tears and low audible sobs. Later, as a teenager, I learned of a pregnancy

that never went to term. I was too young before then to

understand the depth and source of her grief. After wiping her eyes, she announced that I was her best friend.

Then we drove to Bredenbeck's bakery for ice cream, which lifted her spirits.

Those memories returned when, as an expectant father, I sat nearby in the delivery room, staring,

as my wife pushed and breathed, pushed and breathed deep in her own

rhythmic power deep in her own waters. At the precipice of new life, the air in the room was electric. I was

nervous, yet I marveled at my wife's strength.

Then my son arrived slick and screaming into the world,

...