And then, somewhere in that first night, I stopped crying.

Because a question had arrived, unbidden, and it changed everything.

The question was this: why was I approaching these four days as a sentence to be survived, rather than as a problem to be solved?

It is a strange thing, what motherhood, and love, and a certain kind of marriage, can do to a capable woman.

Because I was capable.

Before I became a mother, before I disappeared into the fog of feedings and laundry and quiet endurance, I had been a person of considerable competence in the world, a person who solved exactly this kind of problem, resource allocation, logistics, the structuring of impossible demands into manageable systems, every single day, for a living, at a very high level.