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Mutha Magazine is the only place I’ve ever seen that acknowledges this duality without trying to fix it. It doesn’t say, “Here are five ways to get your sparkle back!” It says, “Your sparkle is currently in the laundry with a juice box explosion. It’s fine. Have a glass of wine.”

My daughter is two years old, which means she has recently discovered the power of the emphatic “No.” But more importantly, she has discovered my camera roll. The other day, while waiting for her oatmeal to cool, she grabbed my phone. I braced for the inevitable butt-dial to my editor or a rogue FaceTime to my ex-husband. Instead, she went quiet. She was scrolling through photos of herself.

There is a specific grief in that realization. Not a tragedy, but a low-grade mourning for the woman you used to be—the one who could read a novel for three hours on a Sunday, the one whose body belonged only to her, the one who didn’t know the precise texture of vomit at 2:00 AM versus 4:00 AM. We don’t talk about that grief enough. We talk about postpartum depression and anxiety (thank god, finally), but we don’t talk about the mundane melancholy of missing your old self while simultaneously holding the new self you would die for.