You are terrified you are doing it wrong. Look at your hands. Look at how you have arranged your whole body around the weight of something that barely registers on a scale, elbow braced, shoulders locked, breathing shallow like a loud exhale might tip the world.
You will not remember the fear. I promise you that. The fear evaporates. What stays is smaller and stranger: the heat of it. Nobody warns you how warm a newborn is, how they run hot as a fresh loaf, and how that heat soaks straight through your shirt and into a spot below your collarbone that will, for the rest of your life, go warm again for no reason.
You keep checking if they are breathing. You will do this for years. It never fully stops.
Right now you are counting the little sounds, the wet clicks, the surprised sighs, the way the whole face crumples and un-crumples deciding whether this world is acceptable. You think you should be feeling more. You think everyone else knew how to do this instinctively and you are faking it.
You were not faking it. That braced, careful, terrified body was love, before you had the nerve to call it that.
Sit down, would you. Your arm is going to ache and you will not want to move for hours and you will be right not to. Let the phone buzz. Let the dishes wait until they are fossils.
They will get so big. That is the good news and it is the only sad thing about today. So stay here a minute longer than you think you can. Memorize the weight.
From where I am sitting, it is the last time your whole life fits in the crook of one arm.