News at Eleven: I was still exhausted; I still craved sleep;

but I didn't crave oblivion. Life wasn't the same as it had been before we had a child. But I was able to begin to discern how life with a kid wasn't a diminished version of our old life--it was a new life, enriched in unfathomable ways by the presence and the growth of the new human being in our care.

Maybe most importantly for me as a soon-to-be-rabbi: God, Who had seemed absent during the darkest weeks of that winter, with Whom I had become uncertain how to speak, re-entered the frame. In that week's poem, I was able to reference Ani ma'amin, "I believe with a perfect faith": not in the coming of Moshiach, necessarily, but in the possibility of progress, the dream that things will get better than they are.

from Zeek: The Bitter & the Sweet: Reflections on Motherhood

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