They say the hormones make you emotional, that people expecting babies and new parents are weepy. But I’m not much of a crier. When C was born M’s face was slick with tears, enough for both of us. Four days later my milk came in and the “baby blues” manifested in my body as white-hot rage, ferocious and spiking as the temperatures that would later bother his blood. When I did cry, it was because I was exhausted or frustrated or baffled by it all. My emotional world took up more space now, like a blanket shaken out, but I didn’t fill it with salt.

Certain children’s books, though, get me every time. A kind local bookseller passed on Julie Fogliano’s Just In Case You Want to Fly. It’s a picture book, the kind of soft, chewable beauty that I only crack out when the baby is particularly docile lest his determined little hands crunch the pages. In a matter of sentences - mere clutches of words, really - Fogliano manages to encompass the enormity of what it is to want to give everything to a person unaware of the world. I am done by the time she mentions toothbrushes.

It took us months to get even halfway through PEEPO!, the Janet and Allan Ahlberg classic. I started reading it to the baby when he was easily exasperated by sitting still. He would squawk and hit the pages shut around the time the baby reached the pond, where his sisters are fishing with their dresses tucked into their knickers, their legs shiny wet.

In recent months we’ve managed to finish it. It had been so long since I read it that I had forgotten the ending, was ill-prepared for the emotional heft of it. For those unfamiliar with the story, nothing tragic happens: the baby has a bath, is carried upstairs to bed and goes to sleep. We are left wondering what he sees in his dreams. ...