Sweet

Spending all day with him used to seem like an endless hell of exhaustion and mania, like an all-nighter with several cups of coffee day after day, but now it’s different. Now I could drink him up with a straw. I get high on just the smell of him. On the way his face lights up and he kicks his legs and arms in sheer joy when he sees my face hovering over the crib after his nap. Now I feel love for him flooding my heart in an unstoppable tsunami wave. Now I can’t get enough of him and it reminds me, curiously, of the first few weeks of being in love with someone new, when an afternoon staring into his eyes and making faces at each other, or just smelling his neck, feels like time well spent.

It didn’t happen suddenly. It took months to build to this, but I’m finally beginning to see what the fuss is all about. I finally get, I think, what it means to love your child in that way mothers always say they do – fiercely, with abandon.

- Alexis, Madrid, Spain, teacher/writer

Sour

I’m amazed at the extremes I feel. Some days I feel like a fucking zombie, incapable of understanding how I’ll ever get my life back, how I’ll ever be able to read the newspaper leisurely with a hot cup of tea, how I’ll ever find time to soothe my soul with yoga or meditation or just curling up to a good book. Is that life over? I ask myself sometimes, terrified at discovering the answer. Should I mourn it and just move on? If so, it seems unfair, like I didn’t really know enough about it before having children. I didn’t know. I didn’t enjoy those lingering conversations at the dinner table with my husband, pouring that extra glass of wine just for fun. I didn’t savor the car ride alone, turning up the music and opening the sunroof. I squandered all the long showers, the cooking experiments, the window shopping, the ability to use my body for any kind of exercise I pleased. I wasted all the time going to the bathroom without worrying he was crying in the other room. I wasted the chance to really understand how much I lived for myself and no one else, and how unfuckingbelievably pleasurable that was – no shame in that. It was just lovely.

- Alexis, Madrid, Spain, teacher/writer