Will it always be like this?

A winter meditation on family, time, and wanting

Written in bed, on a Monday night after New York’s Blizzard of 2026:

There’s a question that keeps projecting itself onto my brain and onto the insides of my eyelids when I close my eyes to sleep. Will it always be like this?

I just finished getting my baby to sleep. Every night, she puts on her own production of Cirque du Bébé. For at least forty-five minutes, she stands up, sits back down, scratches the bedding with her long nails that I can’t seem to trim short enough. She practices her balance, I recite one of her story books that I have memorized, because dad already read her a full book just before we turned out the lights. I sing her a song, usually “The Way You Look Tonight,” because I sang it one day and it stuck. My daughter said Mama for the first time yesterday and I never want to be called by any other name. It was even better than I imagined. Mama. Now, she won’t stop babbling and I wonder what she’s trying to tell me before bed — she has so much on her mind. Like mother, like daughter. I can always tell when she’s just about wiggled-out for the night. She lays down on my belly, stretches her arms wide like she’s giving her first home a giant hug and then rolls over to sleep under my arm. I lay with her for a little while making shushing noises until I sneak away for an hour of TV with my husband. I keep my eyes and ears on her, in case she needs me again so soon. I hope she knows that I’ll always appear when she needs me to. Will it always be like this? This bliss I feel sleeping next to my baby? Oh, how I wish it could stay like this forever.

New York experienced a blizzard today. I wasn’t living in the city during the storms of 1996 or 2016 but I’m told this one fell somewhere in between for comparison. My husband worked from home to help me with the dog. I needed the extra hands, especially after our pup woke us up at 4am with tummy issues, likely from eating too much snow. Today was a little bonus day of togetherness. We hardly have enough space to coexist on a weekday. His giant control center takes over our dining table and we dance around the cords all day. This morning, I found myself flustered without my usual routine, I forgot how to exist in my own kitchen. I was trying to feed the dog and baby while my husband was trying to feed us and keep my coffee warm. My frustration shifted to longing — longing for a little more space to slow down together, and longing for more hours spent in our home all together, even under the least ideal of circumstances like blizzards. He’ll go back to work tomorrow and I can’t help but wonder, will it always be like this? Will we always wish for more time in our cozy apartment but feel stuck between the cost of living and the desire to live the way we wish we could?

I never longed or yearned before motherhood. And nothing was ever fleeting. At least, not in the stories I narrated in my head. These words were not part of my mental language, not in a way that ever made sense until now.

I asked my husband a loaded question today: “Do you enjoy doing that thing you do? Staring at that screen all day?” I meant it genuinely. If he loves it, that’s good enough for me! I asked him with the utmost curiosity because I never felt good about staring at a screen all day, knowing my contributions to the world wouldn’t amount to anything deeply serious or impactful as long as I worked in Big Tech. My husband actually does have some impact on this crazy world we live in, but if all of those screens didn’t make him feel somewhat fulfilled, I’d trade this city for any other life we could afford with less. I’m personally not someone motivated by money, while my husband is. But it’s not so much money that motivates him as it is his desire to give us the world. With every heartfelt word in my vocabulary, I wish I knew the most convincing words to say — you’ve already given us the world. I watch him work harder and harder, week over week, and I wonder — will it always be like this?

Our daughter will turn one in April; I can’t believe how quickly a year went by. We’ve spent weeks agonizing over logistics, trying to figure out how we celebrate our baby and our first year as parents without an egregious cost. If we rent a venue, we’ll need to invite all of our friends and their kids and even if we put “no presents” on the invitation, there will be a corner of the “but we couldn’t resist!” lovely gifts. We hardly have room for another book, let alone more toys and things. Both of our families live far away. If I close my eyes and imagine my perfect memory of her first birthday, because our baby won’t remember a thing, it looks like this: A smash cake, balloons, my girl in a pretty dress, surrounded by her grandparents. My sister will come too, she’ll help activity-coordinate and ensure every stuffy gets their own party hat. This is what we’ve landed on. When we bought our dining table, we bought the extra leaf to make more room at the table. Well, here’s our chance to finally put it to use. Our families will fly from their respective corners and stay in hotels, sadly. We looked into options for everyone to stay under one roof and it just didn’t make sense to rent a brownstone for the weekend. We can still make memories in the home we’ve built for our girl and have it feel like our everyday reality, just a bit more special. I think about how far we are from grandparents every day and it breaks my heart. Distance is cruel when you have so much to gather for. Will it always be like this? Will everyone always be so far apart? Or will someone cave one day and propagate their own roots for the sake of the most important thing in the whole wide world: family.

Being a full-time mother, a change of scenery is good for my mental health. I’m still a photographer, as much as I can call myself one. My baby is my muse and is used to having a camera in her face. I’ve taken hundreds of photos of the city, and now in this chapter of motherhood, it’s mostly a backdrop to take more photos of my muse. I’d love a new backdrop instead of this brutal winter, perhaps something with a warmer hue and a palm tree or two. I ask for a vacation and become overwhelmed with the decision paralysis of where to go. We talk about the possibility of getting pregnant again next year so if this is our last year to enjoy holidays as a party of three and my last opportunity to travel without being pregnant, it better be somewhere good, right? Maybe the south of France or a side of Italy we’ve never explored, maybe somewhere serene like Norway or maybe somewhere closer to home like Mexico. We start to tally up the cost of luxurious rest these days and I burst my own bubbles as they appear, wondering if travel is even worth it while we’re a single income household. I miss when travel was easy and affordable. For new parents, I think we travel pretty light! I can make an easy argument for luxe holidays as parents, it’s arguably the only time we only have ourselves to worry about. The cleaning is part of the package, the cooking is outsourced, our needs are anticipated. And yet, I still can’t justify the cost of what it requires for us to travel the way we used to. And it’s only going to get more expensive! So I wonder, will it always be like this?

I finally started to exercise again. It took me ten months after having my baby to squeeze myself into my Lululemon sausage casings and step foot onto a treadmill. I don’t care to put pressure on myself to shrink back to the size I used to be. I feel okay in my skin today. I certainly don’t have the motivation to tone my body and feel amazing, only to grow another human again. I’m convinced each one of my abs is floating around inside of me like little life rafts from the Titanic, drifting in different directions, never to reach their partners again. If there is any possibility of a warm weather vacation, I guilt myself into exercising more because goodness forbid I’d put on a bikini, only to look back on photos and feel like I should have done more to look and feel like my old self. And then I think about what I hope to teach my daughter about body image, and how I’d never want her to exercise to look better than she feels. The way she sees her own body will start with how I see my body — her first home. I don’t want her earliest inheritance to be my self-criticism. I can’t protect her from the torment of body image forever but I can start with recovering from my own and loving the body that made her. I can’t take care of myself the way I used to, not yet anyway. Will it always be like this? Will I always be stretched too thin to put myself first and will exercise always become a noble philosophy on body love? Not if I can help it.

I met a new mom-friend in our playroom this afternoon. Making new friends as a mom is hard but it’s always nice to have some adult time. I struggle to make small talk that isn’t about my kid, I spent much of the playdate pep talking myself to talk about anything but the usual baby stuff. She asks if we plan to stay in the neighborhood for long. Well, we’d like to but there are no schools around. “I know! And can you believe private schools cost $70k on average now?” I’m reminded that we choose to live in a city where six figures makes you middle class. I wonder, will it always be like this? Yes. Yes it will be. It won’t get any cheaper and as long as we live here — as long as we love calling New York home— the hamster wheel comes with it.

Tomorrow, we’ll wake up at 6:00 a.m., I’ll roll over to feed my girl like I do every morning. We’ll wake slowly and enjoy her morning babbles before we pick out dad’s outfit for the day. After all, he’s the second best dressed in the office and I don’t take that lightly. He’ll take the baby off my hands so that I can brush my teeth, put in my contacts and shower quickly to feel a little more human. He kisses us all goodbye for the day and I don’t take for granted how lucky we are. All of us. I wonder, will it be like this forever? In one way or another, yes, it will be. We’ll have our routine days and slow mornings and we’ll hug and kiss each other when we move from room to room. We’ll “I love you” out the door for the simplest of errands and we’ll hello again with the warmest of embraces, whether we’ve been apart for twenty minutes, eight hours or days.

I looked up the definition of a blizzard. To my shock and dismay, it’s not a perfect swirl of soft serve ice cream decorated with m&m sprinkles. A blizzard is an onslaught of wind and snow. All of my thoughts and worries are buried in several inches of snow and they’re swirling around me while I rattle them all off in a monologue while changing one last diaper for the night.

There is joy and there is inconvenience and frustration and sadness and I can’t just cover it all in candy sprinkles. It’s a blizzard, one I’ve never had to stomp through before. They say it all goes quick because it really does, and here I am yearning for a catalogue, wishing I could choose which parts go quickly and which parts slow down or stay forever. There are hard parts I wouldn’t ever choose and there are parts of our life I’ve already started to mourn and long for, even while they’re happening before my eyes and in my own arms.

It’s Tuesday, we went about our morning routine, just as I predicted. The windchill stings today. I bundled our girl in three layers and wore her on my chest while we walked the dog to get our morning coffee. We were the first customers of the day. I stopped to chat with my favorite baristas. “She looks just like you!” They smile at my girl and say. I never tire of hearing this compliment, I wonder if she’ll always look just like me or will she change more and more as she grows. The wind bites us all in the face on our walk back home and I cross one arm over my chest to hold my baby closer to me, as if she might blow away. I tell her, “it won’t always be like this, it’ll be Spring time very soon, my sweet girl.”

Photo of the 1996 New York blizzard, by Nanine Hartzenbusch