As I’m reading my godson, Geronimo, his favorite book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I look above my bi-focals across a cozy apartment decorated with artwork collected from all around the globe. There, in the kitchen, stands the toddler’s barefoot mother, Emily Raboteau. Her second child is on its way. I can’t help but laugh at the image: pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen. This woman is one of my best friends. As roommates during graduate school at NYU, I’d sit on my side of the run-down apartment smoking cigarettes out the window, pacing and cussing a blank computer screen, while she’d