On Friday afternoon we sat, just the two of us, in a train station, our final goodbyes delayed at least a half an hour by freight congestion, watching college kids waiting for Friday-afternoon Greyhounds, homeless men chomping at (or talking to) invisible shoulder parrots and pushing the limits of loitering laws, farm families who'd driven so many miles to put one of their kin on a train or a bus to Godknowswhere with nothing but his Axl-Rose hopes and a small 30-year-old suitcase that never saw much use till now. "Remember all the times we used to do this," she asked me, as if I wasn't already thinking about them. A lifetime ago we knew our share of suffering in airports, train stations, and bus depots, and we remembered them all watching the hipster college couple murmuring nose to nose in the corner, the nerdy kid down the bench fighting back tears while saying goodbye to his father before climbing aboard an Indian Trails bus to Owosso, Flint, Port Huron, Detroit. I used to always ask why we did it. Why do we do this if it feels so bad? But there were always other scenes made in airports, train stations, a weird symmetry: jumped leg-wrapping hugs in Dublin and tears of relief in Beijing. There were always arrivals that followed departures.

"How long's it been, since we did this, said goodbye like this?"

"Since you took that deposition in Minneapolis, over a year ago, I think."

"You'll only be in Chicago for a couple days."

She put her head on my shoulder. I still walked along her train like a guy in a corny movie.

For three mornings this week, I sat at my desk waiting for Dutch to give me the low down on the preschool drop-off. On Wednesday, nearly an hour after drop off, he called me:

"Yeah, it was pretty much the same as yesterday. I stayed around a bit longer. In between howls she told me she was tired so she sat down with her pillow and one of her classmates brought over a blanket and we all sat there with the teacher and kind of petted her and told her everything was okay while she whimpered."

"What happened next?"

"She ripped one. It was one of those awful smellers."

"Did anyone say anything?"

"No, two little girls kind of backed away holding their noses, but I think even they understood she was still too fragile to point it out. Her teacher stayed right there, though. She toughed it out."

"That's how you know you've lucked out as far as teachers go, I guess."

"Totally."

* * * * *

The good news is that every day at pick up time, Juniper was smiling and having fun with her new friends, though she did run to him and grab his leg at the end of the day, screaming, "Dada!" Not too traumatized yet. I'll save the real trauma for when she's a teenager and I can pull out that fart story.

I have just left Juniper screaming for me in a room somewhere. Today is her second day of preschool. After I spend a few minutes in the classroom trying to get her to calm down to a point where she could say something without all the mottled cheeks and snot bubbles and tears and tears and tears, I make my final, confident, I'm-so-proud-of-you goodbye, and one of her classmates says to me, "Where are you going?" and the waterworks start all over again. Her teacher shoos me away and intercepts a screaming Juniper, picking up the tangle of kicking legs and arms reaching for me and I rush out into the hallway, shutting the door behind me and standing against it with the relief of a horror movie heroine after a narrow escape, and as I stop to breathe the entire school echoes with her hollering. Dada. I want my dada. Dada don't leave me. Dada don't go outside. Hold me and keep me nice and safe. Dada hold me and keep me nice and safe. And then it's just screaming. Gargoyles up twenty stories all around downtown Detroit crane their necks away from it; stained-glass windows collapse in deadly, saintly shards; birds are rousted from their nests on Belle Isle, as far south as Canada, and Ohio; Aretha Franklin hears the High C and snaps a Z.

In this moment, all anger and frustration and that unfathomable parental longing to do what feels right even when it will only cause further harm, I bang the back of my head against the door and then scoot away in fear that Juniper might know it's me there, I'm just twisting the knife in deeper and deeper by being there, mere feet away, while she feels so abandoned and so alone. And then I'm crying too, and I'm angry while I'm crying, because she's made me so utterly helpless. Other teachers find me with mottled cheeks standing against the lockers and they say, "You must be the father of the screaming child," and I say, "That's right," with a mixture of shame and pride, shame that I'm crying and shame that I've coddled her and shame that she's not quiet and accepting of her fate like the other kids; and there is also pride, this strange defensive pride I can't explain, a mixture of "how dare someone else have any negative opinion about my kid, she's perfect just like she is," and the sick, selfish pride of being loved and needed so badly that she can hardly tolerate life without me, and perhaps also some pride in the knowledge that this is how I was, how I've always been, a pride at how she cries just like me, her face twisting up while she chokes on words just like I always did whenever I had to part with someone I loved for some reason I didn't understand, a pride that she is turning out to be just like me.

Anger and concern and frustration and helplessness and shame and a curious pride, all this in me as I grip the steering wheel and drive away. I remember some trite condolence: "It's harder on the parent than the kid." Of course she will be okay when I get back there. Of course she will hardly notice I've returned. This cleaving of apronstrings is necessary. This unwelcome helplessness, just another curse of parenthood. This was the first of many such partings, of a lifetime of parting. If I'm lucky, it may never be too easy for her.

Picture it: my little family eating ice cream and watching a troupe of chanting, yellow-shirted college students performing Capoeira, The Brazilian Art of Dance Fighting. They move very slow. Juniper is mesmerized. I keep trying to say something about it, but Wood just shakes her head at me with a stern look, interrupting me with a "Stop." A few minutes later we're walking away and I start talking about how I hope none of my kids ever come back from South America to join some group that performs Capoeira, The Brazilian Art of Dance Fighting. Wood says, "God, you waste so much energy worrying about what they'll be like in the future."

I say, "Yeah, but that's because you don't waste any. I have to do it for both of us."

"Well, there's nothing you can do. They are going to do what they like."

"Yeah. But that doesn't mean I have to pay for any lessons in Capoeira, The Brazilian Art of Dance Fighting."

"Remember when you used to play the banjo? Imagine how pissed you'd be if you'd really wanted to learn Capoeria, the Brazilian Art of Dance Fighting and your dad wouldn't pay for lessons, or, worse, he made fun of it."

"Yeah. I would want to bust a slow totally-pretend handplant-cum-cartwheel elbow chop on his ass."

Last week, I started to feel better and lost my excuse to not do almost everything. I am no longer too tired to leave the house after 7:00 p.m., or too nauseous to pick up the dog's shit, or too queasy to eat anything that wasn't fried. In lard.

I loved having pregnancy as an excuse to fall asleep after work while Juniper climbed all over me, telling me about her friend Luther the owl, or instructing me to "get my butt off" her bed and read her a book. Now if I fall asleep on Juniper's bed after work while she plays, it's just because I'm lazy. I haven't had a migraine in over a month, though I had exactly fifteen from weeks 6 to 12. Though those migraines were horrible, they gave me the perfect excuse to close the door to our bedroom and sleep for hours during the middle of the day. I'm going to have to start hanging my clothes up again.

Now that I'm looking at all that in the rearview mirror, I finally feel comfortable writing about how horrible the first trimester was. This one was way worse than Juniper's first trimester, unless it's just that I forgot how awful hers was because I never wrote about it. Just in case I ever forget how every morning during the past few months I felt like my stomach was swirling with the bloated corpses of a dozen diseased rats, let me record it here: the first trimester of this pregnancy was absolute hell. At work, I spent my days running to the office bathroom past unsuspecting coworkers while trying to look like I wasn't in a hurry at all so that I could discreetly puke, all the time praying that no one would come in and hear me. At home, I was sleeping or wishing that I was sleeping.

I am so glad to be over that.

Now I'm at that stage where I don't have a single thing to bitch about. I can't yet complain about being big and uncomfortable. My clothes are tight and many of them don't fit at all, but that just means I get to dip into my fat pants from 3 years ago. I lugged the bin of old maternity clothes from the basement last night, and I'm still sneezing from the smell and dust. At one point, I called Dutch into our bedroom to marvel at a pair of gigantic gray, elastic-waisted pants. I don't think he remembered that I was ever that big. He assumed they were the bottom half of an elephant costume.

A few days ago, I resolved myself to enjoy this pregnancy. It is probably the last one I'll get to experience, and now that I'm not puking or scraping at my brain in agony, I want to savor it. I'm going to stop skipping ahead in the pregnancy books, and I'm trying not to think about how desperately I want to meet this baby. During my pregnancy with Juniper, I was consumed with the desire to just get it over with so that I could finally hold her and see her and know that she was okay. This time, I'm going to try to relax.

Last night I finally realized that the fluttering I felt low in my stomach every so often wasn't my imagination: it's the baby. There really is one in there.

I figure I do have one excuse left. If Dutch catches me sleeping while Juniper draws all over my face in permanent marker, I'll just tell him my body is storing up sleep for the long hard slog ahead of us.

In San Francisco I occasionally heard a suspicious piece of conventional wisdom that because of the weather, it is particularly difficult for people who move there to remember when things happened to them. Someone said the brain associates events with the weather in which they take place, with the season. Changes in the weather and seasons in San Francisco are so nuanced: brown grass in the suburbs indicates summer; it may rain more in the spring; the fall, they say, is when it will finally be hot enough to leave your house without a coat. To minds accustomed to stark seasonal contrast, days blend into one another and you cannot remember what month something happened.

In that way, years are said to pass like weeks. Everything happens in the fog of a perpetual spring. One day you are 23 and single and poor and drunk most of the time and the next day you are 33 and single and a bit richer but still drunk most of the time. I have my doubts, but I heard this discussed by enough provincial refugees trying to figure out where the last five or ten years of their lives had gone that there must be something to it.

It is understandable why parenthood is so feared by those who've grown accustomed to partying and generally behaving like 23-year olds well into their thirties. There are plenty of reasons your childless friends will dislike your baby, but one is that your baby will be a goddamn touchstone that even an endless summer cannot obscure. There is no way to hide from the creaking of your own bones when there's a baby around to remind you of how long it's been since it was born. For two years its life will be measured in months, months that slip past you as they always have, and the baby serves as a perpetual reminder of just how quickly they've gone.

San Francisco is a city where, besides money, the preservation of youth is everything. Despite the marginal presence of old gays with their moisturizers, the aging, bitter hipsters, and those ancient Chinese on the buses, it is a city of young people, with new batches of them arriving all the time from universities on the east coast or the Midwest, many of them overpaid and willing to spend obscene amounts of money on food and drink. At 24, we'd read newspaper articles there about the city's continual loss of families, and say, "bah, who needs families?"At 26 we found out were were going to become one. It was one of the loneliest times of our lives, not knowing anyone who had already tread that path. For a city that treasured youth above all else, San Francisco seemed to have a Herod-like fear of diapered usurpers.

This is why we started writing here. For all its bizarre current manifestation as dull domestic performance art, "Sweet Juniper!" started out as a way to communicate and commiserate what we were going through with others who were similarly isolated. We actually met other parents in San Francisco through the site, and the loneliness ebbed. But not enough to keep us there.

I have never really written about why we left San Francisco for downtown Detroit, although I am asked why we did it almost every day. I have different answers. It is complicated. I have not written about it because I have so much to say it would be boring. The bottom line is that it was the right decision for our family, that San Francisco was a wonderful place to spend our twenties, and we loved it.

And yet I have not missed it once.

When we moved into our current home one year ago, hundreds of monarch butterflies converged on our neighborhood as they migrated to California and Mexico. This morning, exactly one year later, Juniper and I counted nearly three dozen in the tree outside our house. Strange, I considered, how they know to head out on the same days every year. Such a befuddling ritual, to go all that way for constancy in temperature, only to come back again in spring. On one of our first nights in this house, we spotted a mama opossum carrying all her babies across our backyard. The other day we saw one of her babies, now nearly fully grown, sniffing around our mature tomato plants at night.

This hasn't been just another year for me. Beyond where we now live, this year has been all about how we live. I haven't logged into Lexis Nexis for thirteen months. I've spent my days picking apples, tramping through snow, watching buds form on freshly-unfrozen branches, and burying my feet in the sands of Lake Michigan. More importantly, I've spent every day exploring the world with my little girl. I will remember this year always. Those friends we left in San Francisco might see her now and gasp at how much she's grown, how much she's changed in the past year. But there is no shock in it for me. I've been watching her grow, all day, every day of the best year of my life.