One afternoon, after a couple of weeks, when we had begun to achieve some faint semblance of normality, I considered that the time had come to return to my books and my growing card index of the language of the medieval love poetry of the Iberian Peninsula.
The baby was fed and changed and placed in his pram out in the backyard under the blue sky. He looked comfortable and drowsy in the warm afternoon air. I expected him to sleep for at least an hour. Stifling my own tendency to yawn, I crept upstairs to my books and cards in the attic and spread them out on the table. No sooner had I found my place than a raucous cry came from below. I hurried down to Robert, picked him up, fed him and changed his nappy again. He did not really appear to be very hungry. I laid him down gently in his carrycot-pram and went back upstairs, only to be followed by the same cry. This little scene was re-enacted many times that afternoon until finally I realized that this tiny baby was neither hungry nor sleepy: he just wanted to be sociable.
So at the age of one month he started work on a PhD thesis, helping me by wriggling on my knee and gurgling while I tried to write. That single afternoon completely destroyed whatever illusions I might have held about combining motherhood with some sort of intellectual occupation. Nor did I have any notion of the demands on the body of the birth process. I fully counted on being up and about my normal business within a week, little realizing that the nine-month gestation and the trauma of the long birth would take their toll of my strength. I had no idea that feeding the baby would be such an exhausting and time-consuming commitment which, combined with the topsy-turvy schedule of infant demands, day and night, would mean that I would often slip into a doze when eventually he went to sleep.
— Travelling to Infinity (Jane Hawking), Loc. 1539–51