the quickening

I felt the baby move for the first time in the middle of my last Torts class of the semester. Prof. Torts was reviewing strict liability. We concentrated on him; the exam was approaching quickly.

Then there it was. A small leg, not even the size of my smallest finger at that point, deep inside. Poke, poke. Here I am. Then a somersault, performed deep inside my body by an independent little being, my womb the platform for his – and I know now it was his – watery acrobatics.

I stopped thinking about strict liability.

My husband, also logged into AIM, found out less than five seconds after I realized what had happened.

“I just felt the baby move!!!!!!”

“WOW!!!!”

Excessive exclamation points and capital letters, something I usually abhor, were warranted.

I IM’d my friend D., who turned and grinned broadly at me, and then my friends A. and J., who frantically IM’d me a series of smiley faces and electronic hugs. J. IM’d her neighbor. The word spread silently through the classroom.

They rushed up to me after Torts, a few of them giving me spontaneous hugs and peppering me with questions.

“What’s it feel like?”

“How do you feel?”

“You can tell it was a somersault?”

“Really?”

“Is it like Aliens?”

“That’s sooooo weird.”

One of the captivating aspects of the study of law is the history that lies behind every word, phrase and ponderous sentence. After years of working in a transient medium, endlessly tinkering with ephemeral code, the weightiness and permanence of the cases is a thing of beauty to me. I read a case, and there I am, joined by a piqued Mrs. Palsgraf or the stentorian Justice Cardozo. Law is nothing so much as an elaborate ghost story.

Yet in the face of the quickening, the crusty old law phantoms are but babies themselves. The quickening is primordial. One tiny kick and I am part of an ancient inheritance, immediately bound to my own progenitors by a silent and intensely intimate dance.

It is astounding.