We can’t wait to meet you

“We can’t wait to meet you” is the welcome Apollo Kagwa and Emma Valentine repeat as Emma gives birth aboard a stalled A train. First devised in preparation for labor, the sentence becomes more than a reminder of their anticipation: repeated while Emma concentrates on breathing and Apollo attends to her body, it gives the couple a shared verbal focus on the child they are about to meet. Its changing speaker and imagined destination make the refrain intimate without making it belong to either parent alone.

Origin and Purpose

The expression comes from a Bradley Method class. Their teacher, Tonya, suggested that a father choose a saying to repeat to the mother when labor began, offering her a mantra to focus on rather than pain. Apollo and Emma changed the proposed direction of the exercise: instead of choosing words for Apollo to say to Emma, they decided to say something to the baby. The line expresses welcome and anticipation in simple terms, and its plural subject makes the expectation belong to both parents.

That choice shapes the phrase’s purpose. It is directed toward someone who cannot yet answer, rather than offered as instruction to Emma. During labor, Emma cannot acknowledge what Apollo says because she is concentrating on her breathing. The sentence therefore does not depend on a spoken reply or even on her ability to attend to it. Its function is to keep the approaching child present in the couple’s attention while Emma bears the immediate physical strain.

Repetition on the Train

On the train, Apollo whispers the words to Emma, then whispers them again. The narration next gives the sentence once more, but leaves its speaker uncertain: Emma cannot tell whether Apollo or she said it, and Apollo cannot tell either. The line is not presented as a perfectly controlled recitation. Its recurrence instead lets a shared intention persist even as the laboring couple lose track of which one voiced it.

The circumstances make that small uncertainty consequential. Emma works through a breathing pattern of two short breaths and one long exhalation, trying to reach a meditative state. Pain in her hips and lower back draws her close and pushes her away in alternating waves. Against that bodily rhythm, the sentence supplies a recurring verbal one: a welcome they can return to without needing to settle who speaks it. Its simple wording contrasts with the complexity and intensity of the moment, without pretending to remove the pain.

The train’s movement also gives the refrain a carefully divided setting. As the car pulls into 59th Street, the narration says that Apollo and Emma are physically on the A train but, in their minds, elsewhere: in their apartment, in the tub, with Kim Valentine at their side, already greeting their child. They imagine that they need only catch up to this future moment. The mantra thus links the actual journey through the city with an anticipated domestic scene, making their welcome feel both already begun and still ahead.

A Shared Voice and a Future Scene

The uncertainty over who speaks the third repetition fits the couple’s decision to address the child together. The words are first heard from Apollo, but their prior agreement gives them a shared history, and the narration refuses to assign the later utterance to either parent. That ambiguity does not erase individual voices; it marks how, in this moment, the phrase can carry their common anticipation without requiring a single owner.

The imagined scene in the apartment is not a change in the train’s destination so much as a temporary convergence between present labor and a future they have pictured together. Emma and Apollo are still on the train, yet their attention reaches toward the moment of greeting. The text holds both situations at once: the strain of the journey and the welcome they imagine. Because the child has not yet arrived, the sentence is at once an expression of what they feel and an address to the person they hope to meet.

Return at the Birth

Later, when Emma is bleeding and bearing down in the stalled train, Apollo says the line again. He has removed her shoes and tights and presses beside her hips and into her lower back to soothe her; as she pushes, he focuses on his wife and their child. In the immediate work of the birth, the earlier mantra returns as direct address to the baby. It sits beside Apollo’s practical instructions to Emma, “Slow down. Just breathe.” Those commands address the laboring mother, while the refrain keeps the expected child within the scene’s emotional focus.

When Apollo sees the baby’s head, still enclosed in the unbroken amniotic sac, he prepares to catch the child and feels both witness and participant. The narration places the baby between the mother and the world, and Apollo at a threshold as well. Read against that image, the repeated welcome points toward the crossing it has anticipated: the child is not yet fully in the world, but the parents have already begun speaking to them. The refrain’s significance lies in that interval—its repeated effort to meet, in words, a future that labor is bringing close.