I’m squatting with my right knee angled to prop the fridge door open, a human doorstop. One hand holds an opened carton of milk, the cap now clamped under the pinky finger, which reduces my control over the half-gallon container as I raise it. The other hand has a harder task. The fingers wrap around the plastic body of my daughter’s bottle and two of them also pinch the rubber nipple, while the heel and the wrist have to maintain the right degree of pressure on the toddler’s shoulder to keep her from tumbling off my left thigh, which I’m holding flat like a bench for her. Of course, I can’t press too hard, or she’ll fall back off the other side. The fridge door kind of bounces off my knee. I tip the carton and pour the milk when everything is poised just so, like a galaxy that seems immobile while it spins in clean, self-perpetuating arcs. But time pushes us forward, and, of course, some milk slops on the floor when the door bounces off me again, and I have to place the carton on the floor and screw the cap back on with a one-handed twist, then reach behind and above my head to find the paper towels in the dark. All before time runs out and the toddler lunges for the bottle, which would actually tip me and everything depending on me to the ground.

Left to my own devices over a million years of varying experience, I would probably not end up this crouching, one-man Rube Goldberg contraption. Only because the toddler woke up in the middle of the night and wanted milk and would cry if set down on her own, which would result in a longer delay before the resumption of sleep. So, here I am.

And this is what I call love. Perhaps that word has more exalted associations in your mind—roses, balconies, galas, gorgeous beaches. But since becoming a parent, I think of love as the force that rips my self-burrowing mind out of its routines. It’s a good thing, I think.

The question I’m left with is why love has to be so hard on my lower back.