Some days, you want to hurry this part along.
The broken sleep. The planning it takes to leave the house. The way a perfectly ordinary afternoon can use up everything you had for the day.
And yet there are parts of this same life you already feel reluctant to lose. A small face you know will change. A smile you would like to keep exactly as it is, though you would also very much like an uninterrupted night.
It can be difficult to say both things without making one sound like a correction of the other. You name the exhaustion, then quickly mention how much you love your child. You describe something lovely, then wonder whether you have made the hard parts sound smaller than they are.
Neither account feels quite complete on its own.
The life that didn’t need so much arranging
Sometimes what you miss is sleep. Not anything more complicated than sleep. Sometimes it is the small, unremarkable freedom that used to sit around the edges of a day.
Imagine an evening like this: on the drive home, you notice that a new restaurant has opened on the corner. People are sitting at the window tables. You slow down for a look, glance at the person beside you, and turn at the next street to find a place to park.
Inside, coats go over chair backs. You lean toward the same menu. There is food in the fridge at home, but it will keep until tomorrow.
After dinner, neither of you gets up right away. Across the street, someone is locking a shop door. A bus pulls away, leaving the lighted windows in view again. For a little while, you sit there watching, your hands still around your glass. You could go home. You could stay a little longer.
Now, a restaurant can start a whole other conversation in your head. Would there be something your child could eat? How long would the wait be? What would a late dinner do to the rest of the evening? Is this going to be enjoyable, or one more thing to get through?
By the time you have thought it over, you have driven past.
It is how little used to happen between wanting to do something and doing it. Some days, you miss that lightly. Some days, you want it back so badly that the thought does not feel light at all.
What you love now is real, too
One mother, writing about her first seven months of motherhood, described both the difficulty and the beauty of that time. She adored her baby’s tiny features and smiles. The sleep deprivation was very real.
Her husband had been fully involved from the beginning. Watching him become a father had deepened her love for him. Still, she missed the quiet time they used to have as a couple. And she found something special in their mornings as a family of three.
The quiet of being two. The pleasure of being three. Both were there in what she wrote.
Loving a new life does not necessarily make you stop wanting things from the old one. The person who liked an unplanned evening has not vanished. There may simply be more to miss now, and more to love, without any more time in which to do either.
When a happy moment makes the guilt worse
For some parents, holding both feelings is harder than it sounds. One thought leads to another, and before long a little ordinary longing has become something you feel you have to answer for.
You miss your old life, and for a moment you genuinely want to go back. Not just arrange a break. Go back to when a weekend was yours to make plans for, or leave empty. Back to being able to change your mind.
Then the thought goes a little further. To go back would be to return to a life in which this particular child was not there. Suddenly, a longing for your own time starts to feel like something you have said against someone you love. You begin explaining yourself, even though nobody else heard.
Later, perhaps, your child laughs at something you would never have thought was funny. You laugh too. For a moment, there is no argument in your mind about any of it. You are simply glad to be there.
Then you remember the thought you had earlier. How could you have wanted to get away from this?
The happiness is genuine. So was the wish to get away. But now, instead of simply enjoying your child, you are looking back at your earlier self with less kindness. You had this in your life, and still you wanted to be somewhere else.
The next time you are tired, you may remember that lovely moment and feel you ought to be coping better. You have something so precious. Why can’t you be more grateful?
Even the good parts can get caught in the argument.
There is nowhere easy to put the hurt
Underneath the guilt, there can be a quieter feeling, one that is harder to admit because it sounds less generous. You have already given so much.
You have changed your plans, answered the call, gotten up again. You have thought ahead about things no one else noticed needed thinking about. Even on a day when you wished you could leave it all for a while, you kept doing what needed to be done.
Then, in whatever small space was left, you had a thought. And now that thought needs defending, too.
There can be something deeply unfair about that. Not only being tired, but having to make a case for why you are tired. Not only missing your freedom, but feeling that the loss is an unkind thing to notice.
You want to say: Look how much I am doing. Look how much of my life has changed.
But who would you be saying it to? Your child did not ask you to keep a ledger. Bringing up the cost can feel like presenting a bill to someone who has done nothing wrong. So you stop short. You do not want your love to sound like a debt. You do not want your child to carry the weight of what this has taken from you.
And still, it has taken something.
Your child is not at fault, and your tiredness is not made up. Neither fact gives you an obvious place to put the hurt. You are giving willingly in so many ordinary, practical ways, without feeling willing every minute of every day.
Meanwhile, the next thing needs doing. You get up to do it. The wish for a different afternoon has not stopped you from caring for this one.
The quiet evenings. The mornings of three.
The mother of the seven-month-old expected to look back fondly on those days. She could already imagine missing them while she was still living through them, short on sleep.
She missed their quiet life as a couple. She loved their mornings as three. A night of broken sleep was still a night of broken sleep; the things she treasured did not give those hours back.
Perhaps that is what can be so difficult about wanting these days to get easier. You are not wishing away every part of them. But neither are you merely pretending about the parts you wish would end.
Somewhere in the life you miss, there is an evening when dinner was over and you stayed a little longer, watching the street. Somewhere in the life you have now, there is a small face you keep looking at, trying to take it in.
You would like more of your time back. You would like this face to change a little more slowly.
Both wishes belong to the same day.
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