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

by Meaghan O'Connell

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.

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?

I was twenty-six then; thirty still felt far enough away that I could say something like that.

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.

Ignoring the possibility entirely feels like a way to keep it from happening.

“So,” I said, pivoting to gossip, now that it was just us. “What’s the latest with Jamie—is she gonna have a baby or what?” Here I was, already wishing my fate on someone else. “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Halle. “Not yet, anyway.” “Huh,” I said, visibly annoyed. I resented anyone still on the other side, anyone who could still choose not to do it. “I wonder why,” I said without a hint of irony.

I’d been afraid that having a baby would quell whatever ambition I had, but now the opposite was happening. I’d spent the past month or so rolling around in the human condition, writing essays in my head, and now I was manic, brimming with things to say. Writing was no longer the most important thing in my life, and that made me love it even more. It was dumb enough to tackle, suddenly; small enough to embolden me. This was it.

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

I knew I was—we were—so lucky, but when I watched them together, I felt more relieved than grateful. It made me want to slip away, go do something I was good at.

Motherhood made me so vulnerable. He had taken care of me and the baby like I knew he would. Of course he had. But part of me felt like I’d never catch up.

Who wanted to be a mother, anyway? Mom called to mind a relationship with someone, not an individual.

I felt as hungry for the minutiae of their circumscribed days as they were but I was also filled with self-loathing for caring at all. We sounded so desperate, we moms. So boring. Can you believe this is what our lives have been reduced to? I wanted to say. Remember when we were real people? Remember feeling in charge of your life?

He laughed, admitted he had no idea what I was talking about. I envied him that. No one suggested he make dad friends. He got to demolish low expectations of fatherhood while I got defensive. I feared being eaten alive by motherhood, being completely subsumed. He seemed light-years away from me right then. Even his love for me was confusing. I didn’t feel worthy of that either.

Maybe all it takes is distraction. For you and the baby, for everyone. Think about other things. Stop thinking about all the bad things that could happen. Not because they can’t happen but because it’s the only way to calm down.

I kept walking away from him, shaking my head. This is a move I managed only on occasion but always found invigorating. A failure of maturity, even character, yes. A result of my inability to say how I feel, of stuffing it down and down until I couldn’t keep it in anymore and off I went, moving purposefully, finally, and without looking back.

When all your thoughts are shitty and even you don’t trust them, why communicate them to the person you are supposed to love the most? Or so went the argument in my head. My feelings felt dangerous. Potentially destructive.

Knowing what I am capable of, what I need in order to be a good parent, a good person—it occurs to me that I had to have a baby to figure all of this out. I had to get more than desperate; I had to get low down before I could learn to see and then say out loud what it was I needed. I had to move away from New York. Get a therapist. Meet Danielle.

With stuff this big, almost any way of looking at it can be true. We all talked like we were going to eventually reach some grand conclusion, some correct stance, but in fact it was different for everybody, impossible to pin down. Was childbirth traumatic or transcendent? Was pregnancy a time of wonder and awe or a kind of temporary disability? Were we supposed to fit our lives around our children or fit our children into our lives? My feelings changed every minute, depending on my mood and on the company I kept. It felt essential, though, to keep asking the questions.