The Newborn Fog

“I will refresh the weary and satisfy the faint.”

—Jeremiah 31:25

It’s possible for motherhood, especially new motherhood, to be so entirely isolating. You live in the rarified world of your house with a tiny darling who doesn’t talk, and you stumble through the days, one blending into the next, in yoga pants smeared with diaper cream, nursing and rocking, nursing and rocking. Your world changes utterly, but your friends’ lives don’t, necessarily. They love your new little one, but they either have older children and remember this season well, and are a little glad they’re finished with it, or they don’t have their own children and can’t imagine it. In any case, you’re the only one in the newborn fog. But for a weekend Henry and I spent in California with my college girlfriends and their babies, we weren’t alone at all.

Because we had the time, because we could let conversations wind and unwind, because we could start them at dawn and pick them up again in the afternoon and add a few more thoughts in the evening, we circled down to the places you never get to when you just see one another at weddings, giving out funny sound bites over bites of cake.