My husband and I went to bed in 2019 and woke up in 2017.

The first sign was the absence of our ten-week-old baby, the second was that our phones and TVs were smaller, the third was the shape of our bodies: less potato-like than when we'd gone to bed.

"There has to be a reason," my husband said. "Did we do something wrong the first time around?" We went over everything—arguments, purchases, career moves—but as far as we could tell, no choices we'd made required amending.

We agreed that if we'd gone back ten years, that would have been different. There were things we would change had we gone back ten years. But two years is hardly any time at all. The same mattress commercials were running on TV. The same box of baking soda was in the back of our fridge. There were more Q-tips in the jumbo-sized box beneath the sink.

In movies, time travel is purposeful and instructive. When it happened to us, it was mundane, too small, an opportunity we never asked for and didn't know how to seize.

It took us some time to get back into a baby-less life. How had we spent our time before all of the diapers and bottles? We tried board games, and educational podcasts, and cooking with cookbooks that we'd never opened before, but there was a sadness to it all, as if we'd come back to a party after everyone had left. 

Reality dating shows, local elections, disputes amongst our friends... we already knew all of the outcomes, which made us feel powerful at first, and then, very bored.

There were a few small benefits to our situation. When our daughter was born, my husband had wished he'd spent more time playing video games, so now, he spent more time playing video games. Another example, when I got bangs in 2017 (the first 2017), they had made my face look too round, so this time, I didn't get bangs.

Of course, we worried about messing with destiny. Would the world implode if we didn't do things exactly as we'd done them before? But the date of that haircut came and went, I didn't get bangs, and the world just kept on going.

One thing we agreed was not to be messed with: the birth of our daughter, whom we missed very much. She would have to be conceived on the same day to ensure that the baby born this time around would be the same baby we had grown to love more than anything. The trouble was that neither of us could remember exactly when she had been conceived. We did the math—her birthday minus nine months, but we'd been trying a lot that month, and who knew if I'd ovulate on the same day this time, et cetera.

All we could do was try. We had a lot of sex, bought a bunch of tests, and around the same time as last time, I peed on a stick and the little screen said YES. We both cried, ecstatic at the idea of being reunited with our daughter.

We bought onesies again. We painted the nursery again. We did less research on the internet.

Nine months went by and our baby was born, on the same day, a girl, half a pound lighter and twenty minutes later than the baby we'd had before. Of course, we wanted to think that this was the same baby—they looked identical, or at least, she looked exactly how we remembered the first baby looking—but what about her soul?

We wanted to believe that we would just know it was her, by, you know, her essence, but the intuitive confidence simply wasn't there. We thought maybe this baby would give us some sort of wave, or cry, some sign that we could interpret as, "yes, it's me," but no such sign ever came.

We gave this second baby a different name, just in case it wasn't her, and on her first birthday we lit two candles and cried, partially very happy, and partially very sad.

The new daughter is older than the first daughter ever was. She likes bananas and The Lego Movie and her stuffed animal moose named Moose. There is a chance that the first daughter would have had these same interests, but of course, we'll never know for sure.

When our mothers see their granddaughter, they always say they'd give anything for more time. In our case, more time either made all the difference, or it didn't matter at all.


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