Increasingly, motherhood comes to seem to me not a condition but a job, the work of certain periods, which begin and end and outside of which I am free. My daughter is more and more a part of this freedom, something new that is being added, drop by daily drop, to the sum of what I am. We are an admixture, an experiment. I don’t yet know what effect her presence will have on my life, but its claim is more profound, more unnerving than was the mere work of looking after her.
