It is black outside. Soft pits and pats against the window ... rain ... and I pull the blanket closer, sinking back into the arm of the recliner. A hot cup of tea rests at my elbow. It is my favorite time of the day.

In the darkness, I think back to other special mornings, 20 years ago. Wrapped in my green plush robe, rocking back and forth, it was many a quiet dark morning when I would slowly sense the presence of another person. My son, a toddler of three, had padded into the living room, up next to my chair, with his small eyes fixed on me.

Wordlessly, in agreement that the peace of the morning was large enough for both of us, I would open my robe. Knowing what to do, he climbed onto my lap, and I pulled the robe around us, a snuggling of two. In many a dark early morning, so many years ago, we kept the peace together.

Snuggling ... it's hard to know the best part. Is it the dark, the quiet, the soft touch of a hand on the shoulder? Is it protection, comfort, acknowledgement, relationship? Safety? Is it the promised assurance between human beings that what happens to you will happen to me because I share your heartbeat?

I was jarred to attention last week. I was asked to consider the first time I ever snuggled, my earliest snuggle of life, and the question brought me up short.

Was it inside the warm white blanket wrapped around me as I was laid into the arms of my mother in the hospital? Or was it later ... close against her as she nursed me, her firstborn? Maybe my father was the first to snuggle me, peering intently, measuring the smallest eyes and lips of a baby ... his ... held in the crook of his arm.

Maybe ... but the magic of science has opened the window on snuggling, and I think it must surely have been weeks, even months before my birth, when I knew I was safe, a knowing of safety available to all living beings even before they can explain it in words.

Surely, weeks before birth, wrapped into a bundle of baby, between my bursts of pushing and kicking against the walls of the womb ... surely there were quiet moments shared with my mother where we snuggled and dreamt. Already at this stage I had fine hair, teeth, and eyelash fringes around eyelids that opened and closed ... and opened again ... for infant eyes that looked around. When she spoke, I knew my mother's voice ... outside ... serenading me as I waited my time.

Certainly, even weeks earlier, when the womb was large enough for me to swim and stretch and turn somersaults, I took time to rest and sleep and snuggle. Inside my mother's quiet belly, worn out from my infant gymnastics, curling my toes, I would have stuck my thumb into my mouth and felt the safety of darkness ... protected and safe.

One thing is certain. I know I snuggled long before I made my first appearance under bright hospital lights. No matter what some want to claim I was back then ... a blob, a mass of cells, an embryo, a fetus ... a product of conception ... I was, without a doubt, a flourishing child of my parents, thriving and growing.