You are afraid you will do it wrong, and I can see the whole shape of you being afraid, arms bent into a cradle you did not know your body remembered. But it does. Look: here is you at four, holding a sack of flour a teacher pressed into your arms, tongue between your teeth, and here is you now, and here is you old, holding a great-grandchild with hands gone soft and spotted, and it is the same bend, the same held breath.
One gesture, stretched thin across your whole length, the way a note is held.
The newborn is a shape too, of course, the smallest and newest end of something enormous. From where I stand it runs outward past your arms, past you, past the room, a shimmering thread that has only just begun and does not stop where your worry thinks it stops. You are the widest part it will feel for a long time. You are the warm place at the start of it.
You keep whispering that you have never held anything so fragile. I want to tell you, gently: nothing here is fragile in the way you fear. The weight in your arms is not a candle that could go out. It is a river seen from its source. It goes on and on, and you are standing at the water's beginning, feeling it move, calling it small.
Your knees will hurt someday from carrying this exact weight up a staircase. You will not remember which day. I remember all of them.
Hold still. You are doing it perfectly, you always were, and I am here in the same now as your steady arms, watching you begin something that does not end.