And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready

by Meaghan O'Connell

Some days I couldn’t tell whether I wanted marriage or not. Were the parts of me that resisted just trained to construct elaborate rationalizations for why I didn’t want this thing I might not get anyway? And weren’t the hesitations all some version of It might not work out?

Sometimes it felt like I spent my whole life trying to tell the difference between fear and circumspection. I was always trying not to want things.

I knew I could convince Dustin to get married; he had told me as much: “You wanting it makes me want it too.” But did I want it enough for both of us? Did I want to be married enough to campaign f...

It was a way of checking in on your life, on what you’d be willing to lose if everything changed. Didn’t everything changing hold some appeal?

(pregnancy scare)

When he and I walked around the city and passed storefronts with baby clothes in the window, I held my breath, averted my eyes. I told him, in what I hoped was a neutral tone of voice, about cousins or old roommates getting pregnant. Just stating the facts. I handed him my phone in the dark of our bedroom with a daring “Look at this baby!” As if maybe if one of them was cute enough he’d sit up in bed, look into my eyes, and say, Let’s do it. Let’s have a child together.

These women, the dreaded mommy bloggers, at least knew what they wanted. They had a clear path, while my friends and I were looking at videos of their babies on our phones and handing them to our boyfriends, who rolled their eyes but—“I swear!”—cracked smiles. It would be all I thought about for a week, how he’d smiled at the video of a baby, and what did that mean?

If this was childish, it was a cultural childishness, that of the ambitious young woman too smart for her own good. We were city dwellers, and we were dating (if you could call it that) in a pool of men who always had other, better options. There was always someone younger, someone who expected less. We knew how to play it, how not to need anything. We could almost convince ourselves.

Wanting to have a baby was a desperate quality in a woman, like wanting a relationship multiplied by a thousand, and it got more desperate with age.

The problem was that with every year of being by ourselves, of moving forward with work, of getting used to our freedom, of learning how to be happy, we got closer to needing to have a baby (Time’s up!) and completely upending the lives and selves we’d been building.

It felt foolish to say, Let’s have a baby! Imagine the optimism.

I was ashamed to want a baby, to be that sort of woman. And, worse, to want to bring a child into our barely established lives.

It was funny, wasn’t it, to face something this big? To go through with something that was so clearly a bad idea?

All we had really imagined was a girl. We both had sisters only. Even the family dogs I had growing up were girls. What was a boy?

What I really want him to acknowledge, to feel with me, is that we are standing at the precipice of death now all the time. That it’s undeniable, part of the deal sooner or later, inextricable from life. We created a death. And how could he not take that seriously?

The best days—rare—are the days when my bigness feels like grandeur as I drag myself down the street.

Show me a boy’s name and I’ll show you a man who has ruined it.

Pregnancy makes me feel trapped sometimes, but other times I think, You’ll never be this free again.

Sanaz said this

Then the creeping revelation: If I let him, my son will be the reason I don’t do all sorts of things. I’m starting it already.

A willing suspension of disbelief

Every time someone says, “Your body is meant to do this,” I think of all the women who used to die in childbirth. All the women who still do.

The winning anesthesiologists came back—an Asian woman I wanted to be friends with entered the room clapping her hands and declaring that they would get me the pain coverage I deserved. I perked up at this. Finally someone was concerned with justice. I nodded yes and yes and yes. It was a feminist act, the pursuit of my pain coverage. Top me off, y’all. And they did. They topped me off.

What was nature, anyway? Nature was cruel; nature was indifferent to my pain. Nature was catastrophic. Nature needed man to intervene. Science, technology, medicine. This was what was called for. How had I ever thought otherwise?

We were in the middle of what felt like an ongoing emergency. Like someone was playing a practical joke on us. Endure the car crash of childbirth, then, without sleeping, use your broken body to keep your tiny, fragile, precious, heartbreaking, mortal child alive.

Imagine, this was how everyone came into the world. It seemed so extreme.

I should have known to be suspicious of the supposed inherent reward of unpaid labor that can be carried out exclusively by the female body (breastfeeding: an unpaid internship you don’t get to put on your résumé), but I kept hoping it would come true.

I couldn’t figure out whether motherhood was showing me how strong I was or how weak. And which one was preferable.

Breastfeeding was not the most incredible experience of my life, and my baby is still mortal. He still gets sick. I went to great lengths to do it, for reasons I can no longer relate to.

“I mean, equality is great and all in theory,” I told Anna, “but it just means we have to discuss everything. No one’s the authority. He has a temperature. What should we do? Should we give him Tylenol? Call the pediatrician? Who’s gonna call? Then he second-guesses me. As if I don’t do that enough on my own. I think with other people, the mom just pretends to know, and the dad gets to play the idiot in the background.”

Dustin had embraced fatherhood but I couldn’t bring myself to say mama out loud, not until my son did. It was embarrassing; it felt goofy or fake. Who wanted to be a mother, anyway? Mom called to mind a relationship with someone, not an individual. A mom was your servant. A mom picked up the wrong thing at the supermarket.

To me, this was what a mother was: someone who was one step ahead of everyone, who had her finger on the pulse of the household, who came in with groceries just when you wondered where she was. This was exactly what I wasn’t.

When someone commented on how cute he was, I caught myself pointing out how he didn’t have any hair. I was self-deprecating on behalf of my baby. Not yet four months old and he was already a victim of my insecurity.

I not only didn’t want to have sex, I would have preferred it not exist.

It’s the typical story: the hard parts of living in New York have eclipsed the magic, and once you lose sight of the magic, the whole project of living there becomes absurd.

It did not occur to me that we could simply muddle through. Learn as we go. Change things later. Forgive ourselves.

I wish these two things had happened in the other order: me learning what I needed and then becoming someone’s mother.

What if having a hard time adjusting to motherhood wasn’t some moral failure or a failure of imagination? What if we thought of the whole endeavor like we do work? Like how a career starts out with a lot of dues-paying, a lot of indignity, a lot of feeling unappreciated and complaining to your friends but then incrementally gets easier or more fulfilling. You get better at it. It becomes part of you. And you start to think, Well, what else would I do all day?

What if, instead of worrying about scaring pregnant women, people told them the truth? What if pregnant women were treated like thinking adults? What if everyone worried less about giving women a bad impression of motherhood?