THE BIGGER THE HOOP THE BIGGER THE [OR]: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO 27 YEARS OF NOT LOSING-YOUR-VIRGINITY
by KAT ECHEVARRÍA RICHTER
The Bigger the Hoop the Bigger the [or]:
A Step-by-Step Guide to 27 Years of Not Losing-Your-Virginity
[5400 Words]
Step 1: Don’t wear hoop earrings. The average American may “lose their virginity” at the age of 17— The Atlantic says this; Planned Parenthood says this; common sense says this, and so too does your high school boyfriend when you’re both 17 and he wants to get on with it— but you won’t lose your virginity at 17. Nor 18 when you head off to college. Nor 19 when he comes to visit and you spend the weekend “studying” on the quad for the dreaded anatomy exam required of all dance majors. “This is the gluteus maximus” he’ll whisper, tracing his fingers along your hip. “And this is the iliac crest.”
Because you’re a good girl, you won’t lose your virginity until you’re 27. Your mother has made sure of it. You don’t wear hoop earrings because your great grandparents—the ones from Puerto Rico—accepted a version of Jesus that granted them work in New York. From there, they clawed their way up: tenant to homeowner to landlord in three generations. But the women—the daughters, the granddaughters, the great granddaughters like you with your light skin and “good” hair—were always a liability, forever one unwanted pregnancy away from toppling the entire enterprise.
You’ve heard your mother’s stories: her classmates in The Bronx who really did have their lives ruined by premarital sex; the quinceñeras and Sweet Sixteens that were converted, out of necessity, into baby showers. For this reason, she’ll tell you things like, “Sex is a gift from God to married couples” and “Don’t even bother coming home if you wind up pregnant.”
As an adult, you’ll recognize the trappings respectability politics: the idea that someone— especially a woman of color— might “behave” her way up the ladder. But at 17? At 17, your only job is to finish high school and get into a good college. No distractions. No unwanted pregnancies. No STDs. No hoop earrings. Because you know what they say: the bigger the hoop, the bigger the whore.
Step 2: Give your father a pass, because it’s the 1990s. No one expects a father to talk to his daughter about sex. The official story is that he met your mother in high school. They dated for seven years. They got married. They waited until their wedding night. (You know this because your mother told you.) The only time your father is enlisted to talk about anything remotely corporeal is to teach your little brother how to pee standing up. Now, your husband does the same for your son, who will be seven next month. You’re attempting to raise him in a sex-positive, gender-neutral, queer-affirming household because you don’t want him to wait until he is 27 to have sex. But you’re the one to find the books, the YouTubes, the kid-friendly explanations of why it’s perfectly normal—not shameful— to get an erection.
Step 3: Take note when your 19-year old cousin gets pregnant. Ostensibly, this ought not to have been any of your grandfather’s business. Or your father’s. Or yours— you barely even know your cousin because she’s six years older than you and lives on the other side of the country— but your grandfather has sent your father a letter on the subject of the unplanned pregnancy, man to man, father to son. Because we’re back in the nineteenth century apparently, and the family’s honor is at stake.
If this crisis had occurred after you’d gone to college and talked your way into that senior seminar on the History of Modern Sexuality, you might have recognized the patriarchal bullshit for what it was. But at 13, committed as you are to the preservation of your virginity, you’ll want to chronicle your cousin’s fall from grace in your journal. Write nasty things about her and her drug-dealer boyfriend. Keep a copy of the birth announcement when it arrives and speculate as to why there was no photo: perhaps the baby was just too ugly?
You may, in time, come to realize that you were the ugly one. But for now, assure yourself (and your mother) that you’ll never do anything as stupid as your cousin.
Step 4: Find a friend who shares your beliefs. Preferably a Catholic. Preferably a high-minded and literarily-inclined Catholic, with whom you can exchange elaborate epistles during your teen years when her family ships her off to boarding school in Eastern Europe. Be sure to discuss Jane Austen. And boys. And the boys you’ll surely meet if only you manage to pull off the Regency-era ball that you’re forever scheming about.
You’re not going to have sex with any of these boys. You’re just going to meet them. Talk to them. Hold hands, maybe, in your historically accurate Regency-era gowns in which you will dance historically accurate Regency-era dances. And the boys will look just like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant, only a bit younger. Or better yet, Prince William. And because this is pre-Kate Middleton, he’ll still have a full head of hair.
Make a pact. Specify precisely when and where you and your Catholic friend—who doesn’t even have pierced ears!— will finally “give yourselves” to your respective husbands. As you type this phrase, some two and a half decades later, be sure to enclose it within quotation marks to convey to the reader that you recognize the batshit absurdity. But then, at 15, when Riverdance is all the rage, consult maps and tourism brochures and even the odd gothic novel to home in on the perfect location. Set your sights on a romantic Irish castle, in which you’ll spend your honeymoon and finally do the deed.
Call it the “Irish Castle Pact.”
Steps 5-10: Add some Fundamentalist Christians to the ranks. Two or three are good. Six are even better. You don’t identify with the Fundamentalists—they’re terrifying— but there are a lot of them, and they have a good drama club. Plus, they’ve all read the book that tells you to “kiss dating goodbye” in favor of courtship and chastity. Cross your fingers behind your back when the rehearsal director leads everyone in prayer for the Supreme Court, which she’s hoping will resolve the whole “hanging chads” situation in favor of George W. Bush. You know Al Gore ought to be president, but you don’t share this with any of the cute Evangelical boys because they might think you’re not “saved” and therefore not “saving yourself.”
Step 11: In high school, dye your hair black with blue tips. Never mind that your mother won’t let you bleach it first, leaving you with purple and green chunks that don’t look anything like the girl in the magazine. You’ve traded the Catholics and the Fundamentalist Christians for a motley crew of punks and baby goths, and none of them know how to dye their hair properly, except for this new boy who manages to give himself red tips for the spring formal.
Shortly after your 16th birthday, hold hands with this boy behind your mother’s back. Literally. She’ll be driving you both home from a weekend out of town, and he’ll be sitting in the front seat because he has long legs, and you’ll be sitting in the back seat because your long legs don’t matter. He’ll slip his hand back, behind the headrest, and your fingers will find each other, just as they did the night before on the front porch, just as they did when you went swimming in the bay and the moonlight danced something slow—maybe a rumba?—across the water. He’ll hold your hand again all the way home— from Maryland, to Delaware, to New Jersey— and your mother won’t even notice, which makes this transgression all the more delicious.
Hope against all hopes that this boy will be your first kiss. Plan your outfits accordingly: first the teal halter top, then the pink crocheted spaghetti strap with a pair of tasteful studs from the clearance rack at Claire’s. Try to impress him with your Bingo skills, which involve successfully playing four cards at the same time. Marvel, two decades later, at your naivete—Bingo? Really?
Slip away with some other girls at the next pool party. Strip down to your bikinis and take a casual stroll down the Garden State Parkway. What could possibly go wrong? Try not to worry what might happen if you get abducted by one of the truckers who stop to stare (because if they don’t kill you, your mother certainly will). You’re just trying to prove that you’re not such a good girl, not above being kissed. And when he with-whom-you-held-hands gets together with someone else, take comfort in the fact that she was a slut anyway, and you still have your Irish Castle Pact.
Step 12: Turn 17. Say hello to your first kiss, your first boyfriend, your first love. Your first—well, no. Not that. That’s still ten years off.
You’ll meet this first boyfriend at summer camp in West Virginia, but he’s not your average camper. No. He’s dark and brooding and hails from an exotic, foreign land: Canada. Nobody can pronounce his name properly, except you. On Day Two, you’ll “accidentally” partner up with him in the massage circle. On Day Three, you’ll commandeer his fleece hoodie. On Day Five, you’ll pair your very best peasant blouse with your green cargo pants and matching sequin earrings for dinner in the dining hall (because tight jeans with a crop top would be too much in your good-girl matrix), and when you find yourself alone together in the staff cabin where neither of you is meant to be, he’ll press his lips to yours.
His tongue will get involved, which you hadn’t been expecting and don’t like all that much. But you’re both very keen to keep things going after camp, despite the minor inconvenience of living in two different countries. You’ll write letters. Take the Amtrak. Coat your eyelashes in waterproof mascara for the inevitable goodbyes that punctuate the next two and a half years because it’s always cold, and it’s always snowing, and you’re always crying— like the heroine of some great Russian novel—whispering one last “I love you” before the train comes to whisk you away.
Meet up in France while you’re both 18 and backpacking through Europe. Blitz from Strasbourg to Interlaken to Vienna. Break up—almost—for reasons that feel embarrassing now (was it really because he wore stupid t-shirts “all the time” and didn’t “appreciate the arts?”) but decide to give it another go. Beneath the long-distance longing, you have very little in common, but you’re desperately in love and happy in small moments, and this is enough for you when you’re 17, 18, 19. But he wants more. Of course he does. You’re only vaguely away that there are degrees. Bases. Steps between making out and actually having sex. But you’re stuck in a Jane Austen fantasy of your own making. And you’re a good girl. Your mother has made sure of it.
Step 13: His mother is different, so allow yourself a moment to consider this divergence in parenting styles. His mother knows the depth of your longing for one another. She’s witnessed the tearful goodbyes and packed you strawberries for the long ride home. She wears tie dye and probably smokes pot and doesn’t mind when you both slip out of the separate bedrooms in which you’re meant to be sleeping and wind up on the futon together. She suggests to your mother that they rent the two of you a cabin for the weekend. Your mother is appalled. You will not be going to a cabin for the weekend.
And so you and the Canadian dance round and round the issue of sex. There is nothing new about it, nothing novel, nothing worth dissecting: you tell him if he loves you, he’ll wait. He tells you if you love him, you won’t make him wait any longer. And when you reach the inevitable impasse, he’ll do what was perhaps to be expected all along, given your mother, your grandfather, your cousin with the illegitimate baby and your Irish Castle Pact.
When he confesses that he’s cheated on you, you’ll hang your head over the toilet in the bathroom you share with three college roommates until there’s nothing left. One of them will knock gently on the door and hand you a spray bottle and some paper towels. As if this mess is your fault and not his.
Steps 14-19: Give in to your despair, even as your mother whisks you away to South Carolina for a weekend of “garden tours” to “get your mind off things.” Convince yourself that she’s ruined your life and that no one will ever love you again. But then, open your mail to a small miracle: a scholarship to Oxford University.
Go. Go for the duration of your junior year. Forget all about the Canadian. Find yourself in a flat full of co-eds and fall in love with at least 3.5 of them. Kiss boys who row crew. Kiss boys who do drama. Kiss boys who you meet at the foam party in the 14th-century monastery that now serves at the New College bar, which makes your nocturnal proceedings feel somehow less tawdry. Kiss boys who have girlfriends back home. Kiss boys who have girlfriends right there. Get it out all of your system, and then, just a few weeks before it’s time to return to the US, settle down, however briefly, with a red-headed communist who, after kissing you on the dance floor at a cast party, asks if he might, against his better judgement, give you a call.
Step 20: Say yes to the red-headed communist. Say yes to brunch the next morning. Say yes to a curry the following night. Say yes when he asks if you’d like to go to London, and yes to the Tate Modern, and yes to the pub afterwards because it’s the 2006 World Cup and he needs to get caught up on the score. Let him tease you about how you mispronounce “Manet” because you don’t often meet boys who are smarter than you, and sometimes—perhaps because you’ve always felt too tall?—you like to be made to feel small. Fall asleep on his shoulder on the bus back to Oxford, where your triangular earrings will leave a perfect geometric mark on his skin. Bake cookies and deliver them to his “pidge” in the St. Anne’s mailroom the week he sits his exams. And even though you know this relationship isn’t going to survive your return to the States, wax poetic in your diary about the neatness of it all: he was the stage manager and you were the choreographer for a student production of none other than Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
Leave out the fact that you’re going home in a matter of days. That he rarely offers to walk you home. That he seems to own but one pair of shoes and, these being clunky Vans with frayed laces, are not the short of shoes you imagined when you saw yourself dating an Oxford man. (Oxford boy?) And when the red-headed communist slides his hand up your skirt, say yes. But when he asks you to spend the night in his dorm, say no.
Step 21: Return to the US, where everything pales in comparison to Oxford. It’s your senior year of college, and everyone is stupid, but not you, because you’ve read Virginia Woolf now. You’ve read Edward Said too, which means that in addition to postmodernism and poststructuralism, you’ve added the vocabulary of postcolonialism to your toolkit: discursive practices and the Gordian knot and how said knot constructs the so-called Orient in the minds of Europeans, but also how it functions as a metaphor for sexual penetration. Admit that you’d like to have sex. That you’d like someone to penetrate your knot. But these college boys are dumb, even the one who gives you a pair of silver earrings. He says their double helix-shaped curves reminded him of your curls, but they get tangled in your hair. And if you’ve made it this far with your quote-unquote virginity intact, maybe you should keep going?
Try your hand at older men. They’re mature. They’re experienced. They’re willing to wait a while before getting to the knot. The 30-something year old-man you meet at a bar in Fells Point will do. And being 30-something, he’ll take you to a fancy restaurant on Valentines Day, accompany you to your senior formal, and give you a card filled with cash when you graduate, which, admittedly, feels a bit odd: he’s your boyfriend not your uncle! But he’s kind to you, and to your friends, and to your parents, even if his mother makes racist remarks over Thanksgiving dinner, even if she thinks the stereotypes about welfare queens and hoochie mamas are true.
Eventually, he’ll take you back to his place in the blue-collar Baltimore suburb where, being 30-something, he owns an actual house. When he gives you a tour, look past how orange everything is (perhaps it has something to do with the local baseball team?). The first of the three bedrooms is his, but he’ll be quick with a reminder: you don’t have to do anything you’re not ready to do. The second bedroom could be yours, “for your writing,” because he makes just enough to support the two of you. “You wouldn’t have to work,” he’ll say, leading you down the hall to the third bedroom, which he casually mentions would make the perfect nursery.
Spend the night. But don’t get naked. Not entirely, even when he goes down on you, because if you keep a hairband on your wrist, a few bobby pins in your hair, it doesn’t count. Keep saving yourself for your husband. And this man, the 30-something, won’t turn out to be him.
Step 22: Move back to the UK. London this time. Grad school. Date an older man there too. Preferably one who has an ex-wife somewhere back in Eastern Europe. Because you live in student housing and he has a roommate, you and your virginity will be safe a bit longer. When it turns out that the occasional blow job won’t be enough to keep him around, treat yourself to an iced latte from Starbucks and move on.
Step 23: Next is an Italian by way of Johannesburg. Ignore the fact that he works a dead end job and never finished his degree, that he blames his lot in life on having been a white South African at the end of Apartheid. London is romantic enough that you’re willing to overlook his casual claims of “reverse racism” because you’re 23 now and sick of tucking your virginity back into its cage at the end of the night, like some wild and winged creature that yearns to fly free. Make arrangements: sexy underwear from the H&M on Oxford Street. His-and-hers STD tests to make sure you’re both good to go. A bottle of wine (which you buy) and a picnic (which you pack) at Regent’s Park. But your student visa runs out before you can do the deed, and maybe it’s better this way.
Step 24: When you return to the US and move back in with your parents, make it your mission to date as many men as possible. 30 men in three months to be exact, which you know because you track it all in an Excel spreadsheet. Pretend you’re going to be the next Carrie Bradshaw. Pretend you’re an anthropologist doing fieldwork on the American male, except instead of hiking boots, you wear stilettos. You meet one man for coffee, then change your outfit and your earrings to meet another for dinner.
During this time, you’ll dole out hand jobs like they’re party favors. Like Oprah with her studio audience: you get a car! You get a car! Because being a virgin at 25 means something very different than being a virgin at 17. It’s starting to get weird. You’re an anomaly now. Maybe a freak of nature.
“I’ll bet you fuck like a rock star” says one man, who, after a few dates, takes you back to his tastefully appointed bachelor pad in Northern Liberties. He’ll say this while you straddle him atop the black leather couch, which looks quite chic against the exposed brick walls. But you don’t know how to respond to a comment like that, so you’ll say something like, “Well, actually I haven’t gotten too much feedback in that department yet.”
Try to say it sexy-like— you know this is foreplay— but he’ll give you a quizzical look. And when you spell it out for him—you’re a V-I-R-G-I-N— he’ll balk. He doesn’t want that much responsibility. And it’s too bad, because you’re starting to suspect that you would, in fact, fuck like a rockstar.
Step 25: You have dancer’s legs. You wear a size 2. Your body has yet to be assaulted by stretch marks and worry and the gray hairs that you—nearly 40 when you sit to write this all down— have resolved to accept with grace because you’re reading Melissa Febos and don’t want to perpetuate the patriarchy. Besides, the time it would take to dye your hair could be better spent writing an essay so that your kid won’t be screwed up about sex.
But at 25? At 25 there is no kid. At 25 you are hot and you finally know it. And so, when you spot a man who is tall, dark, and handsome on the dance floor at a family wedding, you summon your newfound confidence and cut in. He’s the date of your former babysitter’s best friend. But she can’t dance. And he can. When he takes you in his arms, he’ll cup your shoulder blade, not your waist, because he knows what he’s doing: this is how an experienced man can direct his partner without having to speak a single word.
He’s a few years older, but not too many. His parents are from South America and he speaks Spanish fluently;e works a desk job with a solid pension. All of this he’ll tell you over guacamole and croquetas at Cuba Libre a few weeks later. Two months in, you’ll need a wedding date and he’ll agree. The groom was the best-looking of all the boys from your Oxford flat but it doesn’t matter now because when you hit the dance floor with this new man at your side, wearing your Jackie O dress and rhinestone earrings, heads will turn.
You make electricity together: a current that passes through the circuit of his large hands to yours. You’ll balance on the balls of your feet as you’ve been trained to do. You’ll catch every signal, yield to each cross-body lead, and everyone will applaud when you finally return to your seats
You’ll go dancing in Old City. Go dancing in Jersey City. Go dancing in New York City. Before long, the electricity is love. You book yourselves a windowless but budget-friendly stateroom on the Enchantment of the Seas, which your travel agent calls “the boiler room special.” You book it with the express intent of finally consummating your relationship—one year and counting— because here is a man who knows his way around the dance floor. And the kitchen. And the bedroom, it turns out. Just ask either of his two sons, or either of their two mothers.
Steps 26 & 27: To his credit, he’ll have told you about them on your very first date. And you’ll have played it cool, even though you’re not sure if you’re cut out to play stepmom to a pair of adolescents (yes, you did the math, and no, the numbers weren’t good). But after impregnating not one but two teenaged girls within the span of six months, this boy became a man: graduated high school, earned a college degree, went on to grad school, paid his child support, and won custody every other weekend.
At 27, you find yourself very impressed by this particular brand of fatherhood and the convenience it carries: the two of you can do whatever you want while the boys are with their mothers. But what of those girls-become-women, the mothers of his children? Did they get to go to college? Did they get graduate degrees and jobs with good pensions?
Your mother will be skeptical of this man for these exact reasons but he’ll charm your abuela in her native Spanish. He’ll call you “Nena,” a special diminutive of the word for “girl,” which makes you feel like you’re “reclaiming your Puerto Rican roots” just by being with him. He’ll go down on you while you read books and grunt his approval whenever you’re getting into the shower, which is quite often because he lives in Jersey and you’re teaching in Jersey so it just makes sense to stay the night at his place. You’ll tell him about the whole virgin thing and he won’t mind. In fact, he’ll be quite keen on it. He’s Catholic. He’s Latino. He’s been with enough “bad girls” already and relishes the thought of being your first.
And so, for your 27th birthday, you treat yourself to three new bikinis, two gowns, and an obnoxiously oversized hat to wear while you lounge on the deck of the cruise ship. Plan it all out: you’ll wait until the last night, and you’ll wear your gown—the tropical print with the thigh-high slit that makes you feel like J. Lo—paired with simple silver earrings to tone it down. After dinner, you’ll change into the sexy-but-tasteful lingerie that you’ve purchased to mark the occasion of finally, irrevocably, losing what remains of your virginity.
But the first night of the cruise is Latin Night. And halfway through the second bachata—the sexiest of Latin dances—you’re tired of waiting.
“Are you sure?” he’ll ask as you lead him down the hall to your windowless stateroom. “We can hold off until Friday like you wanted—”
But in the end, you don’t even bother with the lingerie.
And it is good.
In the coming months, it will become great. Before long, you start talking about getting married. Looking at houses. And when you send him what passes for a witty text when you’re in your 20s (“I’m naked”) he’ll duck out of his kids’ soccer game and say he has to run to the grocery store.
Today, you would kill your husband if he ever left the Beginner Soccer Skills Clinic for 6-8 Year Olds to which he brings your son every Saturday morning. But then? Then you just want to be in the arms of this man who has revealed to you the capacities of the human body, who conjures tidal waves from shores you didn’t know existed every time you’re beneath him.
It doesn’t matter that you’ll break up a year later. Because that next summer, you’ll sleep with a friend from college. Rebound with an Austrian philosophy professor and his washboard abs. Buy a house of your own. Get the teaching gig you’ve always wanted. And just before Thanksgiving, meet the man who you’re going to marry.
Together, you’ll buy a bigger house. You’ll have a son. In considering how to raise this child, how to keep your baggage from infecting the next generation, you’ll interrogate your ideas about sex. You’ll confront your mother. She’ll admit that she went “a bit overboard, perhaps, in the sex department.” She’ll apologize. She’ll apologize several times, in fact and you’re not sure what to make of this. It complicates the narrative. Destabilizes the story you’ve always told yourself. Redirects, perhaps, a portion of the blame. But there it is in an old journal: when the Canadian broke your heart, she said she hadn’t meant to tell you, “Sex was a gift from God to married couples.” She had meant to tell you, “Waiting to have sex is a gift you give yourself.”
You’re not sure how she managed to conflate the two. Perhaps she really did “ruin” your life. But in your 30s, when you finally read “Once Upon a Quinceñera” by Julia Alvarez, you’ll recognize a certain “cultural context” among the young women Alvarez interviews for her bittersweet ethnography of Latinx teenagers: the machismo of the men in their lives, the hyper sexualization of their little sisters, the stereotypes that plague their mothers. You’ll remember your mother’s stories. And you’ll decide that if Julia Alvarez says it, it must be true: she was just trying to protect you. And now that you’re a mother— now that you understand how hard it is to get everything right— you can finally forgive her.
Sometimes, when you’re feeling generous, you might even go so far as to credit your mother with the fact that you’ve never had bad sex. No STDs. No pregnancy scares. No morning-after regrets. But before you can decide if this warrants an actual expression of gratitude, an email appears: Black Friday is coming and she needs to know what everyone wants for Christmas.
Legos, you tell her, for her grandson. And an over-the-door pullup bar for her son in law. You’re about to request an IKEA gift card for yourself—the dining room needs new curtains—but then you have a better idea. A self-indulgent idea. A fuck-the-patriarchy idea.
“Hoop earrings,” you tell her. And because you are done with respectability politics, you make sure to specify: big ones.
And because she’s your mother, she’ll buy you two pairs: one silver and one gold, to ensure that you’ll always be properly accessorized for whatever life throws as you.
HE COMES TO US BLUE
by KAT RICHTER
My baby and Kate Middleton’s baby are born within 24 hours of each other. But my baby, weighing an ounce more than hers, is the better baby. This is what I tell myself when I balance on one foot in the parking garage across the street from the hospital, hiding my swollen stomach behind the door of our car to slip an ice pack between my thighs because my baby— our baby— is in the NICU for the fourth consecutive day and still not allowed to come home.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
I had a textbook pregnancy. No morning sickness. Carried our baby full term. Lied, only a little, about my due date so that my boss wouldn’t fire me. Delivered “naturally,” without an epidural, to three repeats of the Hamilton soundtrack. We weren’t going to be a NICU family—
those sad-looking people with their sad-looking babies— because I had eaten vegetables. Gone for walks. Done pre-natal yoga. We were going to take our baby home, and the grandparents were going to pop pink champagne for a girl, blue for a boy—even though we intended gender neutral parenting, painted the nursery yellow— and we were going to introduce our baby to the dog slowly, just as the internet said we ought to.
But in the delivery room, he comes to us blue.
The umbilical cord is wrapped around his neck, a scarf that doesn’t belong, a noose that’s white and shriveled though he’s done nothing wrong. I only know this because my husband tells me later. Much later. In the moment, he doesn’t want to worry me. Doesn’t think I can handle it. Someone—the nurse? the midwife?—places our baby onto my chest but he doesn’t cry. Doesn’t make a sound. Doesn’t announce himself to the world in the way that a baby should. And because of this, he is whisked away, before I can even kiss him hello. Before I can introduce myself. Before I can assure him that he is a better baby than Kate Middleton’s baby.
None of the books, the prenatal classes, the internet forums tell you that you won’t be able to pee properly afterwards. That you’ll need stitches and ice packs and pads soaked in witch hazel. That you’ll still be fat. That well-meaning old ladies on the elevator will say, “Oh how lovely! When are you due?” And you’ll have to decide, on very little sleep, whether to simply smile and carry on to the NICU or to spit on their stupid handbags.
But you will not leave him. You will not go home until you can bring him with you.
His grandparents take the dog. His father shuffles back and forth between the hospital and the house to deliver clean underwear and another change of clothes because the books only said to pack enough for 48 hours.
You sleep in a closet four floors above the NICU. Being a closet, there are no windows. Just a small vinyl couch and a lamp. You get the couch. His father gets the floor. You’re allowed to stay in the closet because you’re breastfeeding. Attempting to breastfeed. But he won’t latch properly, so you have to pump. Together, you and his father take pitiful selfies so that someday, when your baby is an ungrateful teenager, you’ll have evidence to the contrary of whatever complaints he lodges against you:
See here, we lived in a closet for you.
See here, these are the tubes that kept you alive.
These are the bottles of donor milk, laced another mother’s love.
This is your abuela, who comes to visit you every day.
This is your other grandmother, who brings a frozen lasagna.
This is your grandfather, the one you’ll come to love the most, who will get in trouble for bringing your stuffed giraffe into the NICU.
This is the dog sniffing your hat.
This is the garden at the hospital; those are the tulips that held your mother together.
And here, finally, is the outfit in which she dresses you when the nurse finally says we can bring you home.
author pic here
Kat Echevarría Richter (she/her) writes about matrescence, Puerto Rican identity, and American historiographies, often with a side of humor. Her research has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and edited anthologies and her creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Glamour, Glassworks, Apiary, and Philadelphia Stories. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden and her essay “Becoming Boriqua” was selected by Brooke Champagne as the winner of the 2025 Patty Friedmann Writing Competition, co-sponsored by One Book One New Orleans and LMNL Arts. Kat lives in Philadelphia with her spouse, their child, and a neurotic but loveable rescue dog.
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