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

by Meaghan O'Connell

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?

She should tell people what she needs and they should do it for her. If she needs something and she’s pregnant she should get it. That’s what I think. She has a kind of authority as a pregnant person that she should learn to use because the minute the baby arrives, she will a) fall in love, like she’d never been in love before, but b) she will have a new and impetuous

boss.

By the time I am twenty-eight weeks pregnant, my baby is the size of an eggplant and I’ve learned that heartburn is the perfect name for heartburn—it feels like burping fire.

The teacher opens class by asking us to go around the room and share what we are most afraid of. I make a joke about my mother coming to stay with us but what I’m really thinking about are the bones of the baby’s head being squeezed together, the way I’d seen it in the YouTube videos, the plates of his skull overlapping, forming a sickening cone.

pressure, the baby’s heart rate, and my contractions. Being tethered to a machine like this had been presented in childbirth class as a nuisance, but once the nurse came back in and hooked it up, I found the whole thing hugely reassuring, concrete evidence of my subjective experience: This is happening but you’re fine, the baby’s fine. The machine was behind me a bit, over my left shoulder, and I lay in the bed and gazed up at it reverently, craning my neck to see the numbers, flashing in digital green. At this point I didn’t believe, really, that either of us, me or the baby, would make it out alive, but the numbers argued otherwise. As long as I kept watching them, I felt like we would be okay.

I contained multitudes. Of amniotic fluid.

They can measure the thickness of my baby’s neural tube eleven weeks after he was conceived, but they can’t tell me if his head will fit through my pelvis? What is science even for?

I wanted the C-section so badly. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger’s house but feel like you should demur for some reason. I wanted it the way you want someone to stick a finger in your butt during sex but would never ask for it. I was thinking like a woman. I was in the most essentially oppressed, essentially female situation I’ve ever been in and I was mentally oppressing myself on top of it.

They said they didn’t want Dad to see the prep. They wanted everything all set up and covered up and hidden before he came in. Must be nice, I thought, but also: Why spare him?

Doing things the hard way used to be fun, used to be our thing—bake a cake from scratch, bike instead of taking a cab, grow vegetables in the backyard, make zines for everyone for Christmas. But that was when we had ample leisure time and existential angst. Now we were just trying to get through the day.

For the first few weeks I was always expecting to catch the baby, somehow, mid-death. If Dustin wasn’t watching me, I sat on the edge of our bed staring, my breath stopping when the baby’s did, my mind counting the seconds until he gasped, his tummy like a small balloon, filling up. I hovered over him, vigilant, while he slept, watching the reassuring rise and fall of his chest. During the day I puttered around the apartment, inventing reasons to walk by his bassinet and confirm he was still alive. It felt like this was what I was born to do: save my son just as he was slipping away forever, shake him awake before he left us and fell back to wherever it was he came from.

You think this is all elephant onesies and hooded towels, but it’s a matter of life and death!

It was knowing that I would feel culpable forever, no matter what, that took my breath away. I tried playing out the worst-case scenario in my mind, hoping that confronting it would sap some of its power (nope).

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? Of course, it’s not the same at all. But you can understand why someone wouldn’t want to have a job. And you can understand why someone would.

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?

It was once so important to me to make it to a year of breastfeeding, and now that I’ve done it, it feels like having really good SAT scores—no one cares once you get into college.