“She’s only three weeks old,” I say. “You weren’t even supposed to go back to work until she was one month, that’s what we agreed. You have such a good team there now. You need to trust them more.” “But I have an even better team at home,” Leo says. “You guys are doing great!” Great? The sensitive, articulate, successful man I married . . . is he s

Leo has been encouraging me to pick up a writing job or two, to start freelancing again. He thinks I can do research during the days and the evenings while Emma sleeps, and then write during the mornings when he’s home, before he goes in to the restaurant. Before Emma, I had more work than I could manage. But Leo doesn’t seem to understand what’s h

Then they ate a water soup she made from dandelions and nettles.

Surely God would forgive a mother for that sort of tender brutality?

Emma begins to wail, and I begin to sweat. I need to pee. My incision throbs from carrying the car seat up the steps. But Emma’s hunger trumps all my would-be biological urgencies.

She’s beneath the window, and the sunlight glows down on her perfectly round head, her sloped nose, her full cheeks. How am I not going to ruin you? I think, and then we both begin to cry. My dad hears me sniffling.

I don’t want to become a woman who hangs up on her husband, but there are lots of things I didn’t want to become. I’ll just add this to the list.

When he’s home I don’t even remember the deserted panic of these empty afternoons. It’s like I have revolving brains, each one amnesiac of the other.

In fact she says this whenever I tell her that Emma is fussy. She says, “Well, she can probably sense how uptight you are, and that makes her uptight, too,” which is obviously a very helpful observation. But now