A couple of days after we brought Goldie home from the hospital, I was sitting on the couch feeding her and my son announced that he wanted to go kick a soccer ball outside. "Why don't we wait for Mommy?" Kendrick asked him. "She wants to come too."

"Mommy doesn't like to go outside," Indy said, and my heart broke.

That quickly - in just days - I had gone from being my son's primary playmate and general partner in crime to the "un-fun" parent, the one who "didn't want" to run and kick balls, or go swimming, or play hide-and-go-seek.

There's a scene in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, a story of a woman returning time and again to live different versions of the same life, in which the heroine is just a baby, laying in a bassinet and looking up at the sky, comfortable and dozing. When I read the book I thought that was such a lovely image, and the kind of sense memory that I think we all have of our own childhoods: a hazy recollection that's really more of a feeling - light on your face, carpet under your feet, the sound of someone singing - that seems like something you might have read in a book once, but that you're pretty certain you actually lived, months or years before you could put words to it.

Yesterday afternoon, I was laying in the shade next to the pool with my daughter in a seat next to me, sort of halfheartedly reading and mostly watching Kendrick and Indy playing in the water. Goldie was so quiet I thought she was asleep, but then I looked down and saw that she wasn't; she was just sitting there peacefully, looking up at the scarf that I'd draped over the seat to give her some extra shade and moving her fingers in little circles.

I watched her watch her world, and I hoped so much that that moment she was living might tuck itself away somewhere deep her mind, maybe come back to her in her dreams: sunlight filtering through a square of rainbow mesh, leaves rustling way up above, the sound of her mother turning pages next to her and her father and brother laughing and splashing further off in the distance.