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Early one morning when my daughter Rosie was a few weeks old, I packed her up in a baby carrier and took her to the drugstore, which felt at the time like an ambitious outing. It had been a rough night, and she was now happily sleeping off her bender. I got into line with my stain stick and baby wipes and let my eyes go out of focus.

"Can I see this little one?" said a smiling voice at my shoulder. I turned around so that the older woman behind me could peek at the tiny creature nestled against my poop-stained shirt. She sighed, looked deep into my bloodshot eyes, and asked, "Aren't you just on cloud nine?"

Actually, I was queasy with fatigue. I was sad about the way my husband and I had snapped at each other while Rosie was crying the night before, and fretful about when she would regain her birthweight, and slightly freaked out about how totally my life had been upended and whether it would ever be mine again. And I was more than a little worried about this cloud nine. What was this supposed to feel like?

For me, and for many other women, being a new mother is hard. It can be hard in a million different ways: painful physical recovery from a difficult birth, breast-feeding problems, colic, tensions with your partner, sleep problems. It's also just hard on its own, on top of and in between all these other challenges. As a friend of mine said, "I knew it would be hard, but I didn't know what 'hard' would feel like." We thought it would be sitcom-style hard—not necessarily with a feel-good resolution at the end of every episode, but at least punctuated by those frequent moments of uplift indicating that, in spite of everything, life really is beautiful, isn't it? I'm pretty sure it's like that for some people, but for many of us, it's not. For many of us, it's not good hard, as in a "good hard workout"; it's bad hard, as in, it sometimes feels like something bad is happening to you.

But does anyone really remember this? I don't. I only know it's true because I remember saying it out loud, and because I wrote the previous paragraph almost three years ago, with Rosie sleeping at my side, in a typo-filled document titled "Before I Forget." Since then, my body and mind have edited my memories of the newborn period into the parenting equivalent of a kung fu movie training montage. Fatigue, hormones, nostalgia, and hindsight have reshaped those long months into a series of wordless film clips, set to the inspiring music of the love I now feel for my daughter, spliced together to tell the story of how it all worked out in the end.