What You Need to Know About New Moms

(Hint: we don’t just want to nuzzle our newborns.)

My father-in-law celebrated a milestone birthday in 2010. It was the same year I finished my MBA at Columbia University and embarked on a hard-charging job at a Wall Street investment bank. It was also the year my doctor told me, “It’s no longer a question of when you want to have children; it’s if you want to have children.”

When my father-in-law’s birthday party rolled around in December, I was a couple months into IVF. I arrived for cocktails clutching a tiny handbag containing my phone, a credit card, and a syringe of hormones. Two days later, I’d be put under anesthesia for egg retrieval, and I’d been instructed to inject myself exactly 36 hours before the procedure was scheduled. That meant I’d need to sneak away from the festivities precisely at 10:00pm, hike up my black-tie dress in a bathroom stall, and stick a needle into my thigh. I was terribly anxious about it, not just the looming shot in the bathroom stall, but the upcoming procedure and — to an extent — the pregnancy that might result from it. I was in a new job, in a challenging field, and I was still the new girl. In every respect, I was feeling vulnerable.

The party was a grand fete: some two hundred people in tuxes and gowns, with a seated dinner followed by a cabaret. I kept…