I remember everything about my two pregnancies, even the parts I didn’t know how to enjoy at the time. I’ll be honest: there were heavy days, no air, no real sleep, not recognizing myself in the mirror, not able to live my life the way I used to. You think pregnancy is going to be that magazine postcard, and the reality is a good deal less glamorous. But today, with my daughters grown, what I’d most want is to have savored it a little more, because right there, without my realizing it, my relationship with them was already beginning.

And then comes the birth, and with it those first months that knock the floor out from under you. You wonder how something so tiny can be so demanding, how that much need fits inside someone who weighs nothing at all. They’re born utterly and completely dependent on you: they need you to eat, to sleep, to calm down, for everything. There’s no fully preparing yourself for that exhaustion, or for the tenderness that comes stuck to it. Both at once, all the time.

In those months I was obsessed with giving them the perfect environment, and it took me a while to understand that environment doesn’t exist. What does exist is a home full of love, even when it’s upside down, even when you’re a mess and running on no sleep. If you’re okay and they feel loved, you’re doing fine; nothing more is needed. I wish someone had spelled it out for me back when I felt guilty for not having everything under control.

One thing I don’t regret is the time. With a baby, that line about “a little time but quality time” doesn’t apply; here it’s a lot of time, and quality when you can manage it, because there will be stretches when you’re tired, fed up, even crying from exhaustion, and that’s okay. What they register, even before they can speak, is that you’re there. I had the privilege of help at home and even so I chose to be all over it; over time my social life all but disappeared and my family became my whole world, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Something else I learned early is that, even when you think they’re too little to notice, they’re not: they’re sponges, they take in everything, absolutely everything. You end up teaching more by what you are than by what you say; you can’t yell at a child to stop yelling. So in those first months, without meaning to, you’re already showing them the world.

My daughters were very small when life kept moving us from city to city from Monterrey to McAllen with the second one newly born, and from there to Dallas and even though the whole backdrop changed, those years as the mother of two little girls were some of the fullest I’ve lived. I see them from a distance now and understand what I couldn’t at the time: that this exhausting, luminous stage goes by in a flash and doesn’t come back. If I could, I’d live every sleepless night again. So if you’re in it right now, falling apart and in love at the same time, I’d tell you just one thing: don’t be in a hurry for it to pass.