“Did I like the car when I was a baby?” my daughter recently asked, eyes wide and bright. 

I paused. 

I could tell her she hadn’t been a big fan of the car when she was a baby. That my work commute was long, that my time off was meager between giving birth and going back, that my body struggled to make enough milk to feed my baby, that everything felt hard, hard, hard, so hard. That I used to enjoy my commute, would listen to music, had hoped to introduce my sweet girl to the tunes I loved to sing along with. Iron & Wine, Tegan and Sara, Jesca Hoop, Emily Jane White, Imogen Heap, all of them voices I would mingle my own with.

What I told her instead was the truth: she hated the car.

“You hated it!”

Maybe hated isn’t the right word. Despised. Abhorred. Was absolutely miserable in the car. While other people’s babies were lulled to sleep by its gentle purring motor, my commute was one long drawn-out wail. At first it was just my baby wailing, and soon, it became the two of us, buckled into a small yellow car like a bug bound for a long journey, our faces wet and streaked with tears. 

There were no gentle lullabies, no sound of my voice instilling a love of Imogen Heap, no commute spent in song. 

There was only crying, crying, crying.

Everything was terrible, I would think. I couldn’t sleep, I wasn’t eating right, my body hurt, I struggled to pump enough, and every day began and ended with screaming. 

One night, as the wailing intensified, I pulled off to a Target parking lot, choking back my own sobs as I unbuckled myself and leaned into the back, got my baby out, and rocked her. I rocked her beneath a tall parking lot light, late summer heat cooling as the sky grew from pink to purple to night, and I rocked her, knowing that as soon as I buckled her back into her car seat, she would start crying again, and I would start crying again, but that at least for this moment, the two of us could have a reprieve and breathe.

People passed me, but if they wondered why I simply stood by my car rocking my tiny baby, they didn’t care enough to ask if I was all right. 

And that was all right.

Nothing about that stop changed anything, and yet, as I got back in the car, I thought to myself for the first time, “Someday things will not be like this anymore.” The days would not always start and end with screaming. My daughter would grow. We would have different commutes, a different car, a different car seat, everything would change, because nothing stays the same, not ever, not even the worst, terrible things, the things that cause us to cry with our children as we drive. Not most things, anyway. Most things that are awful pass. The ones that don’t are awful in different ways, but this, I was certain, was not one of those things.

And I was right.

It didn’t pass that week, or even that month. To be honest, I don’t remember when my daughter stopped crying in the car.

But she did.

“I hated the car?!” my daughter asked at the table in response to my honest answer. 

And she laughed.

And I laughed.

And we lived.