I climb into the back seat of our bluish purple Matrix. Pajama Anya is already there, sitting in her carseat, ready for adventure. It is dark, but for the apartment lobby lights this 4 am. I sit next to Anya and she looks at me surprised. Her surprise is followed by delight. Delight equals a gigantic smile from this jimjam girl. Anya thinks it is wonderful that mommy is in the back seat as she usually sits next to her sister, but not this 4 am morning. No not this morning. This morning I am a mommy in the backseat with a baby. And we are happy with the wonder of it all.

We walk through the parking garage, feeling our way around this dark campus. Tiny drip drops of rain smell like spring. Red brick under my feet, I am filled with this dejavu. You are ahead of me in a maze of buildings, trying to find the entrance and I ask you if this reminds you of Maryland. Yes, it does, you say. This is when you realize that we have missed our anniversary. The anniversary of our first date. I am trying to keep up with this labored breathing of mine. You with the baby, me with my counting. How many years has it been, I ask? 1994… 2006, 12 years. Back then we used to roam around college campuses looking for adventure, finding buildings to climb up to roofs. Today, we are taking the one daughter and the one mother to the emergency room. Funny how the situations change, but the you is still you.

We are on this little outing because Anya has had what we think is an asthma attack. At the same time, my cough won’t go away and I feel like I can’t breathe. I need a chest xray to tell me I have pneumonia, as I know this is how it feels. Anya and I both get chest xrays and blood drawn. They even attempt to give Anya an IV, but she isn’t having it. She kicks the nurse in the face, thus giving us a mean nurse for the next 8 hours of our emergency room stay. Anya screams what sounds like baby when she is in distress. There are Pandas painted on the wall and I say ‘panda bear, panda bear, panda bear’ over and over until she says, ‘bear” very clearly.

We try to have fun as we await the decisions from the white coats. But we are just too tired. We worry about who will have to stay and who will get to go home. We feel like this is jail. In the end, the white coats think both Anya and I should stay, but understand that there is another little lady at home with an over-tired grandma. So I drag my unhappy pneumonia lungs to the curb of the hospital and catch a cab home while you stay in with the whezzy girl.

This is our 12th year together. We take babies to the hospital now. We are parents. We are in charge. We are trying to get used to this. But we remain, as always, terrified.