I tried to sit down and do another of my intermittent daily routine check-ins, but everything I wrote was more or less about Rufus’s schedule. We’ve heard from friends that for the first year you have a new-parental brain fog – from lack of sleep, stress, hormonal changes, etc. It takes that long, they said, to feel like yourself again.

Other parents have said two years. Or longer. But I have been noticing expansions, lately, in my attentional bandwidth. One way I can describe it is self-awarenes...