1. This is the road.

A milestone means that someone has been there before you and left a marker: on this road you've come so far. A winding road and a stone placed deliberately, so as not to be confused with nature's random hand - is that how it goes? Maybe for somebody else's life. I'm thirty-three years old and until recently never imagined myself on a road - certainly not one with markers to indicate the distance I was from a given point. Until recently I would've said no road, just a tangle of woods through which I'm wandering, like Gretel and Hansel, strewing breadcrumbs. I would have insisted I didn't know where I was going.

Then I had a baby. Life indeed may have been a stumble through the woods, but have a baby and you feel beneath your feet the trodden path. It's like the moment in a fairy tale when the child who has been lost in the forest sees a light burning in a house, or the smoke of a chimney. You're not alone. Someone has walked this route before. Plenty of people.

She was wanted, this baby, wanted in a slow steadily building way and delayed until my husband and I each had done some things we'd both wanted to do. Then we planned. We consulted our calendars and made an X on the week that would be the best time to get pregnant. "Things don't work out that way," my mother warned. "A lot of people spend years trying to get pregnant; it's one of those things you just can't plan." She was right, but the road happened to be going our way.

I read feminist theory all through college and I don't want to claim that I read it thoroughly or well, but I carved out of Adrienne Rich's essays, in particular, was the obligation to take myself seriously. Which meant intellectually. I was to claim my education. I was not to get sidetracked by babies or love affairs. I was to put myself at the center of my life. If I didn't put myself there, somebody else would slide into that space.

And then, this longing for a baby. "Do you remember," my mother said recently, "when you used to say you would never have children?" I don't remember, although I don't remember ever wanting a child, or wanting to get married either.

When my friend Anne got pregnant - four years before I did, and rather suddenly, it seemed to me then - she said, with a kind of fevered intensity, "It's not about me now. It's all about the baby." This was her reply to many things, but in particular to the cultural pressures that required her to look pretty, look thin, dress well. She put on a stretchy jumper and didn't take it off for nine months. "It's all about the baby," she said. So much of this was simply a wish - get the world's focus off of me, she seemed to say, or an injunction to herself - I am sick and tired of thinking of myself. I am ready to think about somebody else for a change).

2. And this is the river. You didn't hear it before.

So I had a baby and what was I going to say? The river seemed to switch direction, reverse its flow. One thing that happened is that I began to feel old. That's not quite it. But I look at my daughter, her hummocky fat feet, like loaves of bread rising, her chunky hands which she plants on the bathtub's edge, in order to pull herself up and gaze at her bath running; I look at her and I think one day she will be walking; one day her feet will grow bigger and not have that rise; her hair, now soft and silky, baby hair, will thicken into what the nineteenth century novels called a lustrous crop. And it startles me to realize that while she will grow for the next twenty years - grow stronger, taller, more adept, becoming the woman she is meant to be - I will change, but not grow. No, that lovely beanstalk of a verb is not for me! Why did it take so long to paint myself into the landscape? The road was there; I just didn't know it was under my feet. The river, too - I didn't notice it till it changed direction. And now I see the hill, the one people joke about when they say they're over it. I didn't feel the climb, I just turned around, looking for my daughter, and realized I was looking down.

3. She is headed for the hills.

Before my daughter, I could easily swerve from the knowledge that I was aging, I could tilt my head so that I saw it only out of the corner of my eye. Whereas now I see the fact of my death plainly. Mortality looking me in the face not like some screaming death's head, a gorgon's face, but in the shape of a tiny dress, a t-shirt the size of a handkerchief. How to explain the softness of the information, which nevertheless can clutch one's organs and squeeze? She has her own milestones. They are spelled out in the books we try not to look at too often. (Sitting up by six months, crawling by seven, walking by fourteen, etc.) But the changes that excite me most are not the ones listed in the books, or listed only in passing. The first time she played a joke: pulling her diaper off in her crib and then coughing until I discovered her, naked, laughing uproariously as she peered at me through the bars. Or when she learned to grip a toy, because through this she could express a will. Finally! Not simply to play with whatever we dangled in front of her, but to insist: I shall pick up that pen, that rattle, that saucer, that ginsu steak knife you should never have left on the counter.

Becoming a mother is a milestone because it means the end of a petty narcissism, or perhaps more truthfully, the immersion of this narcissism in something else. You throw a stone into a river, and it doesn't disappear. Maybe over time its edges soften. I used to stage my life as a struggle between me and the world: do not oppress me, do not let me fail to realize my potential, o world! This world seemed monolithic, embodied by certain people (a Russian Studies professor, let's say, or an older brother who mocked my slender talents) and certain institutions. But now that I have a child, I no longer tell myself the battle is between me and some big awful force outside. I have ambitions apart from motherhood, but I can't put myself at the center of my life - not just now. These days, my daughter with her reasonable and arduous needs, keeps me from realizing certain intellectual ambitions. This frustrates me but I know that she enriches my life in ways I can't even fathom. I don't mean to suggest I had a child as a self-improvement project. God help the child, if the desire was for that! But since I became a mother, I've felt more clearly than ever the trouble of thinking in oppositions. My world has contracted at the same time that it has expanded. Some days, the small repetitive tasks of child care mean that life doesn't even feel like a walk on a road; one suspects one has sunken into sleep, like some enchanted traveler at the roadside. Other days the amplification of vision makes me gasp at the narrowness of my previous life. I don't offer this as an argument for having children, only as evidence of my own poor character. Sometimes I still feel myself in the forest but my daughter gives me a glimpse of where the forest lies on the map.

For about eighteen years I have been old enough to be somebody's mother, and now I am somebody's mother. I'm responsible to one person in a way I'm not responsible to anyone else on the planet, not even my husband. She grew in my body. Milestone, I thought to call her. But how to speak of a daughter and also speak of stones? When her coming has taken me out of the quarry and made me a woman of wax, who melts at the sight of her and melts at the thought of her, thirty years from now, reading this tangled thicket of a thought, which I wrote between her naps when she was nine months old.

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