Was this frolicking—being with the baby all day? It rearranged my soul, sure, but it didn’t exactly feel like frolicking. I wondered if the only way to make the labor of my day legible to C would be to frame it as entirely exhausting. But I did not want to create a home where the main measures of love were hardship, expenditure, and burden; where these were the only dialects in which the act of parenting was spoken. I wanted language that could hold the wonder and the numbing exhaustion of the day at once. Sometimes it seemed like parenting was only visible to him as sacrifice.

His eyes got teary whenever he recalled the moment he’d seen me wince as the baby’s gums clamped down on my nipple. “You love her so much,” he’d said, as if my love was most visible to him then—in my willingness to hurt, this proof of my devotion.