Several major life events have conspired to keep me away from printculture for so long and I've found it exceedingly difficult to get back into the writing game, despite telling myself that I should really just sit down and get started. So here I am. How to start?

The biggest game changer was the birth of our child last summer TWO summers ago. In fact, the printculture cohort has been having something of a baby boomlet, with two recent arrivals and one more scheduled to make an appearance very soon.

Anyway, my particular baby ignored his estimated due date and when my doctor tried to coax him out, he and my body refused, so he came squalling into the world via unscheduled C-section, all 10 pounds and 1 ounce of him, in the wee hours of the morning in the middle of July. No one had expected him to be that big. Maybe because of the surgery or the exhaustion, I didn't experience that fabled oxytocin rush or spontaneously cry tears of joy. My husband and I were in shock, as I'm sure was the baby. The three of us “roomed in” at the hospital for four days and when he wasn't asleep, our baby cried and cried because he was hungry and had been forcibly evicted. It didn't seem an auspicious beginning.

Given my “advanced maternal age,” I did everything in my power to ensure the success of this pregnancy and birth. Well-balanced diet? Check. Prenatal vitamins? Check. Moderate exercise? Check. Regular check-ups? Lamaze class? Pregnancy books? Yup, yup, yup. Armed with the right information, I felt physically and mentally prepared. Despite the higher-than-expected weight gain and swollen ankles in the third trimester, the pregnancy went smoothly, and I was convinced that I would be able to deliver without drugs. Surgery was not even in the equation. What's that saying about how babies have their own plans? Or their own schedules? Anyway . . .

The three of us came home and my husband and I got down to the business of trying to keep this new little being alive on our own. As prepared as you try to be, nothing truly prepares you for what is supposedly one of the most natural things in the world: raising your offspring. This was just one of the many truisms that ran through my head over the first several months.

It's easy, if you let yourself, to be bombarded with information, opinions, confessions, dissections, advice, judgments, hand-wringing, advertising, etc. from the Modern Parenting Media Machine (books, magazines, websites, blogs, discussion boards). I try to limit my consumption of said media, enough to pick up some info and stories and sometimes the comfort of other voices besides my own, but not enough to be driven insane by the minutiae of the various mommy war issues. What kept coming back to me were the truisms that I'd heard before, in my pre-baby days, but that now resonated in a way they hadn't before.

1) It DOES go by fast. Everyone agrees: They're only babies once; enjoy them while you can; they grow up so fast; before you know it, they'll be asking for the car keys. Besides the fact that babies grow like some time-lapse photography of an exotic plant and that the round-the-clock care makes it feel like you're squeezing three days into one, part of why time seems to accelerate is that the first few months are such a blur and memory-making is seriously compromised. The sleep deprivation, the sheer panic of having to keep another human being alive and the sheer repetition involved in that keeping alive process make a mockery of all our usual timekeeping rituals. When you've changed your 15th diaper and 4th outfit of the day and wiped another glob of spit-up from your shirt, does it really matter what time of day it is?

When we went to see the pediatrician for the first time, she said soothingly, “you're in survival mode for the first three months. Whatever gets you through the day!” So we pacified, we swaddled, we played womb sounds on the stereo, we brought the baby into our bed to try to coax a few more minutes of sleep out of him. We watched lots of TV while rocking and soothing and feeding and burping, even though we had vowed not to turn the TV on while the baby was awake. I drank my morning coffee and had sips of my husband's wine at dinner even though I was breastfeeding. And then one day we woke up and he could focus his eyes on us and seemed to acknowledge us. And soon he was busting out of his swaddle and swinging his feet in the air to flip himself over. And then when he outgrew the little hammock that clipped onto his baby bathtub, I thought with a pang, oh my god, this is it, he'll NEVER EVER use this hammock again. There's no going back, it's all fast forward from here on out.

Since I wrote that last paragraph, our kid has also left crawling behind and has picked up “bye-bye” (sounds like “ba-ba”), “ma-ma,” “nooooo,” and “more,” and such social gestures as hugging, blowing kisses, and giving high fives. Also, a gazillion gross and fine motor skills – things that you normally don't think about until you realize that none of us is born knowing how to pick things up with our thumb and forefinger (pincer grasp) or how to point (a prelude to pressing buttons and things) or how to rotate objects in our hands the better to inspect them.

And since that last paragraph, well, you get the picture.

2) Every baby IS an individual. When you sign up on BabyCenter.com, you get weekly updates about your baby's development and advice about how to handle the changes and every week there's the following caveat: “Remember, your baby is an individual. All babies are unique and meet milestones at their own pace. Developmental guidelines simply show what your baby has the potential to accomplish — if not right now, then soon.” This is, of course, meant to reassure all the nervous new parents that their kid is perfectly normal, but it also underscores the fact that because every baby is an individual, every baby is also unpredictable. Which means your greatest parenting skill is improvisation.

Wait, you mean I can't just program him to wake up and go to sleep at certain set times so that I can restore some sense of order and calm to my days? But the books said . . . OK, I admit it, when we decided it was time to sleep train our baby – around the 5-month mark – I approached the whole endeavor with the mindset that if we did it right, we would solve the sleep question, check it off our list, and move on to the next parenting challenge. I read Weissbluth and Ferber and consulted with friends. I actually kept sleep logs and made sleep charts (oh, yes I did) so I could see whether we were making progress. Luckily, sleep training the little guy turned out to be neither protracted nor too torturous, though there were some heart-piercing cries that made us cave a few times.

But somewhere in the middle of it all, it hit me that no two naps or nights of sleep would unfold in exactly the same way ever. Though it was important to establish good routines, how long he slept, how well he slept, when he fell asleep or woke up, etc. etc. would never be entirely predictable, and just when we thought we were settling into a routine, his needs would change or he would get a cold. I just needed to chill out and get used to being tired. This little epiphany helped me approach the other aspects of parenting with a little more equanimity and let me relax about needing to “solve” the sleep “issue.”

Beyond sleep, the little truism about every baby being different meant we had to just take the time to get to know our baby. Some things seemed obvious from the get-go: he is more lark than owl, much to our dismay; he was active in the womb and is active outside it (do his limbs ever stop moving?); he's a big eater. Other things took more time to reveal themselves—he's persistent about some things and easily frustrated by others—and of course, there's still so much more to come. When he learns to talk in sentences, what stories will he tell? I don't want to hurry any of it.

3) Children ARE innocent. On “Motherlode,” the parenting blog on The New York Times site, Lisa Belkin wrote, on the occasion of her older son's 18th birthday, a list of some of the things she's learned about being a parent. One of them was “that you can never watch the news, or hear about a hurting child, the same way ever again.” And I immediately understood what she meant. Talking to other new parents suggests that it's a common phenomenon.

It's not that stories of tragedy and trauma didn't affect me before or that I didn't care about the suffering of children. But it's hard to deny that news of such things hits me in a different way now. Because now I know what it's like to worry about a child, to want to protect him, to want to soothe him when he's in distress, and to experience that want as superceding everything else. And because I can now imagine in a newly visceral way not being able to protect him from the many many frightening things in the world.

But I think it's not just the new dimensions of fear that accompany parenthood that makes this difference; rather, if you let it, becoming a parent is a lesson in empathy, both how much more empathetic you can become and how self-centered that empathy ultimately is. When the utterly helpless and dependent human baby is your own and is wholly dependent on your desire and willingness and ability to provide for his needs, you're motivated to figure out what that baby wants. And in trying to figure why he's crying (is it hunger? wetness? cold? gas? boredom? existential confusion?), you try to understand things from the baby's point of view—how bewildering it must be to no longer be suspended in the comforts of the womb, to suddenly find oneself in a bright, fuzzy, too-loud environment, to feel hunger pangs and gas pains, to have limbs that flail frighteningly in random directions. That the baby is so innocent of its own vulnerability, conscious only of his need for comfort, only increases your own sense of responsibility. And this new perspective makes you more tolerant of other people's children, their crying and fussiness and tantrums. It's hard being a child.

You think about how much you love your child and about all the emotional and material support you want to provide for him, and then you hear about children who don't have anyone to think about their wellbeing in that way or who succumb to disease, suffer accidents, or become victims of violence or war, and you imagine, almost instinctively, your own child in that situation and it makes you feel lucky and grateful and humble and guilty and scared and sorry and sorrowful all at the same time.

I don't know why I needed to put all that in the second person, but there it is.

4) It DOES get easier. And harder. Everyone tells first-time parents, “don't worry, it gets easier.” And some things do: we eventually get more sleep, we get the hang of diapering, bathing, feeding and soothing, we learn never to leave the house without snacks, and so on. But while the newborn stage is over before you know it (though it might not feel like it in the middle of the night), the adolescent stage lasts much longer. In between are all these other milestones and stages and unknowns to navigate. And although there are more or less challenging stages (potty training and moving to a bed are next on our list), there's no such thing as coasting, it seems. Kids need your attention and they become more complicated beings with more complicated needs.

Probably because of the way my own parents approached their roles, I never quite understood those parents who thought of their jobs as complete once their kids reached 18 or 21 or whatever marker of adulthood represented the finish line for them. Do they really no longer feel responsible for how their kids' lives unfold? Is it just the financial obligation they're talking about being done with? I'm all for my child growing up to be an independent, self-sufficient, well-adjusted human being who can make his way in the world, but I know I will never feel like I'm done with my parental responsibilities. And I will always worry. Might as well own up to that now, right?

5) A baby DOES change everything. Kind of. It's a Johnson & Johnson baby oil commercial whose tagline is “a baby changes everything,” to which viewers are supposed to respond, “Awww, yes it does!” Yes, a baby does reorient your life inalterably, but part of me wants to resist and say “but it doesn't have to change absolutely everything.” And the blanket statement also makes me want to ask, “well, what DOES a baby change exactly beyond the obvious ways in which we reorganize our time, energies, and other resources?”

The “baby changes everything” line is, to me, a product of a communication gap that opens up when you have a baby. That gap isn't just between parents and non-parents, but with other parents and with ourselves. There really aren't words adequate to the task of describing what the connection to your child feels like, and yet shouldn't this experience be shareable with those who share the experience of having a child? Like birth, death, and love, the nearly universal and in some sense profoundly mundane fact of becoming a mother or a father still doesn't quite prepare you for the singularity of your own entry into parenthood. We resort to the available stock phrases—about how “in love” we are with our children, or how every child is a miracle—as a way to acknowledge the truths universally acknowledged without quite capturing what the experience feels like to us. Similarly, the truisms that serve as the organizing principle and impetus for this blog post say simultaneously so little and imply so much. At playgrounds and daycare, when I interact with other parents, it's usually to exchange stats about our kids' eating and sleeping habits or the new developmental quirks that challenge us; it's a kind of shorthand, I guess, for talking about the emotional, physical, psychological, and intellectual work of parenting that's both so taxing and so fascinating.

My most important interlocuter about all things parental is my husband . We share all the daily details of our son's care and fill each other in on all the things he did and said while the other one wasn't around. We track his development and delight in his milestones and talk about the best way to discipline him out of certain behaviors. We talk about the values we want to impart and speculate about what our son will be like in grade school, as a teen, as an adult. We gush unabashedly about his adorableness. And every night before we go to bed, we tiptoe into his room to check on him. When he's sick, we whisper to each other about how we think he's doing (Fever? No, he feels fine.). We laugh about the contorted positions we find him in and try to move him without waking him. We rearrange the blankets and the growing menagerie of stuffed animals that accompany him to sleep. And sometimes we just linger silently over his crib, marveling at this new being in our midst, beautiful and mysterious.