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

by Meaghan O'Connell

The fantasy is meeting another parent who does the exact same things you do so you don’t have to question or defend any of it.

I didn’t know before that when parents talked about “checking on” their children, they meant checking to make sure they weren’t dead. And when they talked about their love for their children, maybe that was what they meant too. It was love but keener, with sharper edges, softer undersides. It was love wrapped up with desperate terror, inextricable.

“Taking care of a baby is sort of like driving down the highway,” an old co-worker’s wife told me when I was pregnant as we sat at a picnic table in their upstate backyard. “It’s incredibly boring but you can’t look away.” I remember thinking, Oh, but it won’t be like that for me.

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?

One day he will grow up and move away from us and we will miss him constantly. I’m still mad when he wakes me up with his screaming each morning. I still need time and space away from him, to think and read and work and feel like a person, even though I know that one day I will long for nothing but to hold him again.