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

by Meaghan O'Connell

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 possibility of ending up alone was always there, in the background. My friends and I all took turns being convinced it would be reality, with varying degrees of acceptance. Being alone in New York didn’t seem so bad—exhausting, maybe, but stimulating, always something to do, someone to see. But admitting you wanted a baby—and wanted the pancakes and the maternity clothes and the chubby spawn around a table—and then not getting it because it just didn’t pan out? That was too much, too cruel. Better to try for things more within your control: Better jobs, nicer apartments. Enviable vacations. Better to shrug and say, “Maybe someday.”

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 time after the baby feels like an oblivion, like anything could happen. I don’t even know who I will be after him. 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. 33.

I had wanted a “natural labor and birth” for reasons that, now that I was actually living through natural labor, I no longer related to. A different person had set this goal, someone who’d been attached to the idea of “being present” and “getting the full experience” before she’d known what the experience would be like. Someone who, when she made her precious little plan, was not imagining this.

As soon as I said, “Give me the C-section,” I got, for the first time, genuinely excited to meet my baby, as if this whole natural-childbirth thing, long ago thrown out the window, had been a sort of block. The smoke had cleared and we were finally going to do the thing we’d come here to do, people.

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.

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. Natural childbirth was another supposed “incredible experience,” but I had fucked that one up already so there was no way I would give up on breastfeeding (wonder! regret!). I kept waiting for the reward.

Dustin and I used to agree about everything. I used to feel like he saw me and knew me better than anyone. But now that we had a child together, I worried we actually didn’t know each other at all. We felt less like a couple than like co-workers, in service to the same human project.

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?