It’s like magic: having a baby. I don’t just mean the obvious: bump one day and baby the next. I mean what happens to the parents, the mom especially. One day she is a woman and the next day she is a mother. That act of becoming a mother represents the largest life change, and the most sudden, that most people will ever experience. One day you are free to stay up late drinking wine, forget your sunhat, and pass judgment at the woman with screaming toddlers, impertinent teenagers, or breast milk stains on their silk blouses. Then, seemingly overnight, you are part of a secret tribe of women giving each other the thumbs up when passing with sleeping babies in strollers or sharing tips on favorite slings and you oh-so-sympathetically-and-without-ANY-judgment smile at the frazzled mother trying to pry her child’s booger-filled hands out of the bulkfood bins in the aisle of the grocery store.