New Country

I moved to America thirteen years ago. I barely spoke English. Every transaction — a coffee order, a phone call, having a conversation with the cashier at the supermarket, which wasn’t a thing where I’m from — required full concentration. Nothing was automatic. I went to bed exhausted in a way I couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t done it. It wasn’t physical. It was the weight of running every single moment through a processor that wasn’t built for it yet.

Your brain at a hundred percent capacity. Every day. All the new variables.

Thirteen years later, I had a baby.

The first week, I thought: I know this feeling. Not the specifics — not the bleeding or the milk or the way she fit in the crook of my arm like she’d always been there. But the feeling underneath all of it. The same overload. The same processor, running hot.

Nobody tells you that’s what it is. They give you lists. Sleep schedules, feeding windows, what color her stool should be. What they don’t tell you is that the exhaustion isn’t from any one thing. It’s from the sheer quantity of things that are new. Every hour is full of variables you haven’t learned to sort yet. Nothing filters to the background because your brain doesn’t know yet what’s background. It treats everything as urgent. It treats everything as foreign. Because it is.

By evening, there was nothing left over. Not for anything that wasn’t strictly necessary. You’d get through the day — all the small navigations, the adjustments, the things you had to figure out in real time — and then you’d sit down and there was just nothing. No bandwidth for anything extra. You weren’t sad. You weren’t failing. You were simply spent in a way that sleep could only partially fix, because tomorrow there would be more variables.

This is what immersion does. It takes everything you have while it makes you fluent. And when you finally speak the language, you can’t quite remember not speaking it. The before becomes hard to access. Not painful, just — distant. Like a country you can’t fully picture anymore.

I still have friends from Russia. The ones I was closest to — we find our way back to each other. The friendship was strong enough to survive translation. But others, the ones built from shared daily life, a shared context — there’s less and less to say. Not because anyone changed. Because we’re living in different countries now, and the overlap keeps shrinking.

Motherhood does the same sorting. The friendships that survive it were already built to last. The ones that don’t — it’s no one’s fault. You’re just living in different places.

And then there’s the person you moved with.

Immigrating with a partner is its own test. All the stress lands somewhere. All the unsaid things about who carries more, who adjusts faster, who still misses the before — it lands between you. You either hold together or you don’t.

So does this.

You make it or you break it. That’s not a threat. It’s just the geography of the thing. New country. New life. Everything costs more than it used to.

For a while.

And then one day, it doesn’t.