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

by Meaghan O'Connell

8: Instead of actively trying to push away the sensation, we make friends with our pain. We get to know it better, get less tense and thus feel less pain. Be utterly curious about it…notice how it changes from moment to moment, notice exactly where it’s located, where it begins and ends, try to look into the pain and see what it looks like…imagine you’re seeing the feeling under a magnifying glass and slowly studying the edges of the pain…does the feeling have any colors or textures?

This baby was ours, yes, but it was also mine and then it was his in ways that our relationship couldn’t encapsulate. This baby was each of ours, privately.

I didn’t want them to lie in bed that night feeling grateful it was me and not them.

I resented anyone still on the other side, anyone who could still choose not to do it.

I developed a theory: Just like there’s always someone in a relationship who loves the other person more, there is always one person who is the better parent. By better, I mean more enthusiastic, more willing to get down on the rug and play with the blocks, more at home with a baby on his or her hip. I mean that there is one parent who asks the pediatrician questions and argues about sleep training, and there is one who sits there smiling and feeling a little embarrassed.

I didn’t want to tell Anna about the fantasy I entertained on days when I got really annoyed (when I was convinced, say, that Dustin was sweeping the floor only to make me feel bad): that if he weren’t there, I would rise to the occasion. I’d have to. I’d get a real job and put the baby in day care. Let him cry it out at night. Give him the pouches of baby food Dustin hates without anyone there to judge me. I’d do it alone and get all the credit.

That we were falling deeply in love, that the stakes were higher than they’d ever been before, and we would have to live with it, with loving like this—that was harder to take in than the possibility of a great tragedy.

To lose yourself in the way that good sex required felt dangerous or impossible when you were so inextricably entwined with someone else.

Either approach seemed like a betrayal of self at a time when I didn’t have much self to spare. I said no to sex because it was something I could still say no to, because how I felt was so new and complex, I needed to figure it out. I knew that if I didn’t, I would start layering obfuscations over it until I couldn’t go back. So I claimed my body for myself whenever I could. I guarded against all intruders, even if the intruder was the man I lived with, a man who loved me in all my complexity. I was all he wanted, he told me. And I just couldn’t give myself to him.

Wouldn’t he have noticed if he weren’t so stuck in his own fuckless story?

I wanted him to see that I was scared, too, that we wanted the same thing, real intimacy. But first I wanted him to leave me alone. I didn’t want to have to tell him.

If only I had the sort of spiritual stamina to stay in profundity longer, to not find it oppressive after ten minutes.

It occurs to me I had a baby just to feel this free when I’m away from him.