I looked around and saw eye bags everywhere. When I got together with my girlfriends, fun seemed not to come into the picture. Forget about going out drinking or dancing; we seldom met for coffee anymore—nothing for the baby to do. Instead, day in and day out, we met at the flat, weed-choked lake that lay in the center of northwest Seattle. A little shy of three miles around, Green Lake's paved path made a just-right walk. You'd meet your friend there, and after a while, you got so sleepy and worn out, it hardly made a difference which friend. We were all merging into one woman, and sometimes I felt I couldn't tell my friends apart. They were all new moms. They were all part-time workers with interesting, creative, exhausting jobs. They all had haircuts that were once really good but were now growing unpruned and wayward. They were all married, and they would complain about their husbands in slightly ironic voices, voices that said they knew how good they had it, after all, he loaded the dishwasher every night, after all, he still played in a band, after all, he was just plain someone else, someone not a baby, in the house.