When I was pregnant, I was steadily nauseous for the first three months, and lay on the pilly corduroy couch of my apartment most of the day, feeling like a failure. The sense of failure began early in pregnancy, I was learning; already I was failing to exercise, to eat quinoa and lentils with every meal, to do my stretches, to glow. My face was rough with acne and I hadn’t washed my hair and I kept a bucket close to my feet so I could puke into it from time to time, and I didn’t even wash out the bucket between times. My mother had warned me that living alone had this effect of lowering your standards for living, and making you become feral. Well, here I was, arrived.

When I finally felt better, I ventured out onto the streets of Toronto timidly, walking on tiptoes, as though I might dislodge you, vibrate you loose from where you were latched onto the innermost walls of muscle and membrane. It was early autumn and the cool winds blew me down the long avenues toward the lake. One vigorous exercise session at the gym made me leak bloody goo for two days, something my doctor said was normal, but to try to avoid, so I didn’t work out again after that. But walking couldn’t hurt, so I walked for long hours every day the way I used to, moving without a sense of direction or purpose, just trying to carry you about, get the blood flowing, show you my world. When I got tired, I hopped on a streetcar. I had assumed that the world had a certain protective instinct around the pregnant, that we gave up seats and formed protective phalaxes around them in times of danger. But of course that only counted when you were visibly pregnant, a planet waddling around; people didn’t seem to think about the six or seven months when you were moving through the world with a loose shirt and a secret in your belly, when you were all anticipation. I stood on crowded streetcars and thought of announcing “I’m pregnant,” to the businessmen sitting and swiping through their phones or the bank teller who asked me to wait standing by his desk for ten minutes while he took a break. I wanted to get a reaction, to hear the words out loud. But it also felt indulgent, another way a privileged white woman demands to speak to the manager or asks the world to accommodate her. I wanted to be one of those cool, icy pregnant power suit women who worked right until the contractions were five minutes apart and then returned to work three days later, flat and lean and capable. Uncomplaining.

The adoption agency I was working with kept sending me profiles of families, but I didn’t really look through them. I put the files on my table next to the couch and when I made it home from work, copyediting at a publishing house, I leafed through them just long enough for a smiling couple’s face to jump out, and then I closed the folders. As long as they seemed loving, I told the case worker, as long as they passed all the tests, then I was okay with whomever they chose.

I talked to you, but only in my mind. Macaroni and cheese again? Let’s watch a rerun of that cozy mystery I like, I’d think, and realize the tenor of my thoughts had changed; I was speaking to you, the room did not only hold me anymore. I pictured the thoughts as chemical-electrical signals traveling their way around my brain and ricocheting around my bloodstream, crossing the porous wall of the placenta. On some level the thoughts were reaching you.

I thought you needed to know why I was giving you up. You deserved to know. I thought I’d wait to think that thought until your ears had migrated to the right spots on the sides of your head, until you had the grey matter and wherewithal to hear. You didn’t need the whole story. Babies shouldn’t need to know such things, but I knew children did, and adults even more. They needed to know the causes of things, and they needed to know their origins.

When my ex tried calling me, I blocked his number. I had to file a restraining order and get some other court documents in order to carry out the adoption without his signing off on it, and they were in the works, but I didn’t want to see him in the same room, so I let a lawyer that I had found online do the meetings and court appearances. I kept walking around Toronto, letting the winds buffet me down one avenue and then another, sometimes carrying me to the water, sometimes pushing me away.

In September, when the days were starting to get cooler, and you were the size of a mango, enough to push out my belly in a way that finally looked real, I walked to the lakeshore and stood close to the edge of the water in my raincoat and boots, watching the ferry come to and fro from the Toronto Islands. I remembered how with its high specific heat, the water would hold onto the summer’s heat far longer than the air. I dipped my hand in and was startled by the warmth of it. It felt like the Atlantic in the New England summers that I grew up in, but without the bite of salt. Gulls called and swooped and stole people’s hamburger buns in just the same way.

A man was wading into the lake in swim trunks nearby. “Come on in, the water’s fine,” he said to me, waving. He was large and bearded and looked bearlike, a real man of the North, which reminded me of my ex. I remembered the way my ex had looked on that last night when I let him in my apartment because he begged to talk, so sad, stumbling drunk, so lonely. I made the mistake I always made, of mistaking loneliness for something harmless, when in fact it can be very dangerous. I felt sorry for him, before and after, but for different reasons.

I shook my head at the man in the water. I didn’t have swim gear, and besides, I didn’t know if it was okay for you, swimming in a lake on the edge of the city. Who knew what was in that water. Who knew if it really was warm enough to keep you safe.

The man kept wading out. Then, right in front of me, he turned to face me and pulled his penis out from his swim trunks, all red and fat, and started pissing into the water, grinning at me all the time. He started rubbing himself and watching me, proud of how he could make this part of himself grow. I didn’t look away. I wanted to pull up my loose shirt and show him the dark stripe that had been growing on my belly, the firm round bell that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. But I wanted to protect you, too. I didn’t want you to know what was out here, in the world, and somehow you would know. I thought it was funny how you were swimming in a salty lake right then, in a bath made of water and your own urine, and you were probably laughing too, at peace. I turned and walked away, but felt his grin on my back for a long time afterward.

I thought the best way I could keep you safe was to keep you away from me. I was lonely those days, and loneliness can be a dangerous thing. It wasn’t about wanting or not wanting. Sometimes I prayed the way I had learned to pray in Catholic school, but I didn’t think the nuns were right about everything, or that it was anyone’s damn business what I did with my own goddamned body, least of all God’s. I didn’t think I was a holy martyr, someone made saintly by suffering. I was just me, and I was just trying to survive. I respected the way you latched on to whatever you could hold on to. I was willing to give you that chance.