Everyone Is Lying to You

by Jo Piazza

You’ll never see my bruises. No one ever sees me cry or hears me scream.

The single biggest complaint from my followers is that I make motherhood look too simple and easy and frictionless. But they don’t want friction. They don’t follow me for stress or for the lows of parenting and wifedom, or womanhood. They want the pretty shit and it’s why they keep coming back. I am, in many ways, Motherhood, Enhanced.

But I had a plan. I was going to work for a tech start-up and save all my money in order to do what I really loved. I wanted nothing more than to open my own pastry shop and bakery and then a chain of bakeries and finally a mail-order delivery service for artisanal baked goods, a monthly box delivered right to your door. I would be the CEO and the master baker. I was good in the kitchen. So fucking good.

And you know by now that I didn’t leave him. You can judge me for that all you want. I’ve already judged myself plenty. But when you’ve been raised like I was, without real love or affection, without any kind of safety net. When you were raised without hope for any kind of future and then all of a sudden something so much bigger and brighter seems within reach, you keep reaching. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I also believed that I was a magnet for bad behavior, that maybe I deserved it because there was something deeply wrong with me. I’d been a curse for my mother. She’d never let me forget it.

“It’s normal,” the midwife assured me. This was the pain of the sacrificial mother, the pain all women must go through in order to be purified for motherhood. But I had already been “purified.” I had Alice. I had been a mother for two years. In the midst of it all Gray filmed me as I screamed in horror. Then out came the baby. Everything went black.