No one had warned me! Or had they? At 4 a.m. one morning, between shifts of bouncing my colicky daughter, a line from the writer Nora Johnson returned to me. Being a parent, Johnson insisted, isn’t about nobility or beauty, pride or pleasure. Rather, it is “the simple, nerve-wracking, mindless, battering-ram process of trying to teach a savage to use a fork.” I remembered this line the way Julius Caesar, his blood pooling on the senatorial marble, must have remembered, “Beware the ides of March.”