Look at them. All of them, in a warm dry room, gathered on purpose to celebrate that a child is coming and will most likely live.
Do you understand what we went through for a room like this? The lungfish gulping air in a drying pool, betting everything on lungs. The shrew who did not sleep for the fear of owls. The woman who gave birth in a lean-to with the wind screaming through it and lost the first two and kept going.
And here you sit, on a soft chair, eating small cakes shaped like storks, and the greatest danger in the room is a game where you guess the length of a person's waist with a length of yarn.
The gift table. We do not fully understand it and we are staring anyway. Look at all of it, folded and wrapped: cloths so the child will never once be cold, jars of food already ground soft, a device that watches the sleeping infant so the mother may sleep too.
Sleep. We buried seed corn and did not eat it so that someday one of ours could sleep while a small machine kept the watch. We could weep. We do not have eyes. We weep anyway.
Someone is crying now, the grandmother, and every mother in us leans forward, because we know that cry, that is the cry of a woman who was sure the line would break in her lifetime and it did not.
Four billion years. The fire kept, the ice crossed, the owls survived. And it ends here, today, with the whole relay quiet, watching one of ours press a palm to a rounded belly and feel a kick from the next one.
Go on, then. We are watching.
We could not be more proud.